Reverse engineering Bluetooth LE LED light controllers, or How I Bricked My Christmas Lights If a device communicates via Bluetooth LE and has an app, it deserves to be integrated into my home automation system. I’ve spent a significant amount of time reverse engineering various budget-friendly LED light strips to...
A teacher friend of mine told me that this year students were different. If she asked to see a hall pass from a freshman, they'd give her the finger. They swore at her and were gen...
The most plausible explanation for teenage unhappiness.
A huge stream of information and FOMO
I'm sharing my experience dealing with what might be the most underdiagnosed and under-treated health disorder today.
[This is one of the finalists in the SMTM Mysteries Contest, by a reader writing under the pseudonym Cennfaeladh. We’ll be posting about one of these a week until we have gotten through all th…
Five more months until freshies...
Or: What happens when Newton’s laws are violated (Note in case you see ads here: This post is also available at my newer blog.) Recently, I read a book called Newton and the Counterfeiter, su…
"Only in Los Angeles" has never rung more true
So… I’ve had the most unreal week of coding. Zero exaggeration, I’ve halved the RAM requirements of the search engine, removed the need to take the system offline during an upgrade, removed hard limits on how many documents can be indexed, and quadrupled soft limits on how many keywords can be in the corpus. It’s been…
Hi, I’m Varun. I have a server in my room. Actually, I have two of them. And I write a ton of my own code for them. And I love it. This is a story documenting my homelab’s quiet beginnings, its spiralling evolution, and its uncertain future.
A plea for us to get back to building websites that can do normal website things.
When I was 8 years old I started making websites with my friend. His grandmother had purchased him a domain name and web hosting. It was 2003 and the world was whispering of Web 2.0. Books I checked out of the library talked about DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today). There was no mobile app…
Becoming the worst best chess player in the world
The hidden costs of air quality monitoring, including subscriptions, locked data, proprietary modules, and the long-term price of closed ecosystems.
It's easy to use the hyphen, em dash and en dash to make your writing flow better. Let's look at some examples of the en dash...
In this post I will hopefully detail my entire home network. Some of this has been in separate posts explaining single items, but nowhere do I have all of the network in one post with all the changes since last year. Here is a full shot of the rack in
It's not the crime, it's the coverup.
“To flash conviction on the mind.”
Allow me to introduce you to one of the largest population groups in India, as recognized by the constitution of India: Other Backward Classes ( OBC Category ). OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population, therefore, about 500 million people belong to OBC category. In other words, 1 in 16 people in the…
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
A tribute to the book by Oliver Burkeman, an exploration of time management in the face of human finitude, and addressing the anxiety of “getting everything done.”
