Got my new workstation.
Isn't it a beauty?

Rocking a Pentium II 366 MHz processor.
6 GB HDD.
64 MB SDRAM.
1 minute of battery life.
Resolution up to SXGA (1280x1024)
Removable CD-Rom drive.
1 USB port (we like to use dongles, right?)

Also it has state of the art security:
- No webcam
- No Mic
- Removable WiFi
- I forgot the password

And best of all:
It as a nipple to play with!!

My dad put parental controls on the wifi password, programmed a key logger to get the password.

Hooked ever since

(6 years ago)

Navy story time again. Grab that coffee and fire up Kali, the theme is security.
So, when I got promoted to Lieutenant Jr. I had to attend a 1-year school inside my nostalgic Naval Academy... BUT! I was wiser, I was older... and I was bored. Like, really bored. What could go wrong? Well, all my fellow officers were bored too, so they started downloading/streaming/torrenting like crazy, and I had to wait for hours for the Kali updates to download, so...
mdk3 wlan0mon -d
I had this external wifi atheros card with two antennae and kicked all of them off the wifi. Some slightly smarter ones plugged cables on the net, and kept going, enjoying much faster speeds. I had to go to the bathroom, and once I returned they had unplugged the card. That kind of pissed me off, since they also thought it would be funny to hide it, along with the mouse.
But, oh boy, they had no idea what supreme asshole I can be when I am irked.
So, arpspoof it is. Turns out, there were no subnetworks, and the broadcast domain was ALL of the academy. That means I shut EVERYONE off, except me. Hardware was returned in 1 minute with the requested apologies, but fuck it, I kept the whole academy off the net for 6 hours. The sysadmin ran around like crazy, because nothing was working. Not even the servers.
I finally took pity on the guy (he had gotten the duties of sysadmin when the previous sysad died, so think about that) and he almost assaulted me when I told him. As it turned out, the guy never had any training or knowledge on security, so I had to show him a few things, and point him to where he could study about the rest. But still, some selective arp poison on select douchebags was in order...
Needless to say, people were VERY polite to me after that. And the net speed was up again, so I got bored. Again. So I started scanning the net.
To be continued...

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

Things that still feel like they were yesterday:
- Microsoft buying Skype
- WiFi 802.11n
- USB 3.0
- Android 5.0, Material design
- Microsoft buying Nokia
- “Grid layout is an experimental technology”

Nobody even uses Skype anymore. I’m still looking for “is it support that WiFi n-word” when choosing a router. Yes it supports it. Everything that happened since 2009 supports it. Usb 3.0 was released in 2008, 12 years ago, and I’m still happy when it’s a blue connector instead of white. Android 5.0 was released 6 years ago.

I don’t understand HOW can I know that the newest but not exactly bleeding edge web specs like clamp function aren’t the newest and use them but still believe that grid layout is an experimental technology despite using it in production and FUCKING LOOKING AT CANIUSE TABLE and FUCKING THINKING THAT USB 3.0 WAS RELEASED JUST NOW while working on the laptop that FUCKING HAS TYPE C as its only port

It looks like somebody should go have his time perception module checked

0-headphones
1-coffee
2-Laptop
3-npm
4-IDE
5-wifi
6-devRant

F*ck all that out-of-date people who are like "You can not get a living out of IT" and the "You work on that application 6 months now, it should be already done." My parents do that shit aaaaall the time. Like they know so much about this when they can't even turn on wifi on their phones. You're enthusiastic and all and they come and start bullying you because they don't understand shit about what you do.

Fuck the brains of circular dependency.

On a fresh install of OS X on my hackintosh.
1) Let me install HomeBrew
2) I need Command Line Tools to install HomeBrew
3) Xcode dmg is on my Android. Opens Android File Transfer tool.
4) Error: File is larger than 4GB. Need to use adb.
5) Need to install android-platform-tools, which contains adb.
6) android-platform-tools is available in brew. Goto 1).

Note: Networking is limited to tethering mobile data as Wifi chip hasn't arrived yet.

Time: 0600 hrs.
Mental State: Almost falling asleep on my laptop

I get a call from my "random cousin" with whom I haven't spoken in a looooong time, and he says "Hey, Good Morning ! I can't connect to my WiFi from my Windows laptop running Windows 7. Can you help ?.."

That moment when you TRULY believe in the person who developed the "Network Diagnostics" utility on Windows and ask the "random cousin" who calls you up at 6 AM to try it...

And he sends you this screenshot after some time ...

And then you have to wake up and pinch yourself to see if you are in a dream...

Long sleepless day ahead...

After using linux as the main os for the last two weeks, here are the biggest drawbacks of linux in my opinion.

1. AMD hybird apus are not supported by linux kernal and it's very lousy.

2. Cannot do any graphics related work without having my screen going black several times.

3. Using dual screen is not reliable, and black screen occurs in one or both screens.

4. The computer goes crazy after waking up from suspend mode and gets overheated!

5. Kernal updates! Is much worse than Windows updates. At least after the painful windows update restart you know everything will be ok, but with linux good luck!!!

6. Realtek Wifi dongles still suffering since 2010.

In my opinion, if you are going to use linux for the first time make sure your hardware is compatible with linux, else be ready for a fight of unstable hardware problems.

my first day with Linux.

1. downloaded the Ubuntu 16. 04 LTS and made bootable.
2. install it on my system.
3. after installing wifi is not working.
4. searched on internet with my phone and connected my PC with USB thetering.
5. now installed wifi driver.
6. now my Nvidia card is not working installed its driver too.
6.finally i look at my desktop and its looking really ancient and old.
7. installed gnome desktop and switch to it.
8. now gnome is not much functional so added some extensions like dash to dock, dynamic transparency.
9. now setup java and android studio.
10. after that android studio font is looking blurry. finally stackoverflow made my life easy and i fixed it.

now after all this my system is working crazy fast.. Android studio is opening in just 5-6 seconds.
really happy.. 😍 😍

When your minipc finally arrives, you're all excited to finally get your hands on pfsense/bsd, and you find out bsd is still struggling with wifi5, not to mention wifi6 which you've bought to have high-end networking at home..

Bummer

I just realized that out of the eleven 2.4 GHz WiFi networks in my vicinity, seven operate on Channel 1, two on Ch.6 and mine is the only one on Ch.13.

I am also the only one with 5Ghz WiFi.

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

Ok, first rant, about my struggles getting reliable internet over the past 6 years. It's not too interesting of a topic, but here we go:

I'm living in a more rural part of Germany and internet here is shit. I pay more than 50 bucks a month for 700kb/s downstream (let's just not talk about upstream...), which is meh by itself but it gets worse. Before this I had roughly 230kb/s downstream using DSL. My provider came out with a new oh-so-fucking-fancy solution for giving people faster internet without upgrading their lame ass fucking backbone and POS infrastructure from 70 years ago: they sell you hybrid internet which combines your shit DSL and an LTE connection using TCP Multicast. Not only do I get only 6 of my promised (and payed for) 50 Mbit, no, It's also a fucking piece of nonworking shit!!!

Let me illustrate:
You constantly have problems with web content (or any remote content) not loading because the host server does not support TCP Multicast. It either refuses connection altogether or it takes about 30-50 seconds to establish a connection. Think about your live when it takes two or three fucking minutes to load 5 YouTube thumbnails or load new tweets at the bottom of the Twitter page! Also, you never know if you a) have an error in your implementation of a new API or if b) the remote host doesn't support TCPMC (there's never an error for that! Fuck you!), your SSH sessions ALWAYS drop in the most inopportune fucking moments because the LTE thing lost connection, you always have to turn on a VPN if you want to visit specific websites (for example your school's website) and so on....

Oh and also, my provider started throttling specific services again these days with Netflix and YouTube struggling to display 240p, fucking 240p video without buffering when I get 600kbit down on steam (ofc the steam download is paused when watching videos). When using a VPN, YouTube 720p and Netflix HD work like a charm again. Fucking Telekom bastards

Then there is the problem with VPNs. The good thing about them is that they solve all the TCP Multicast problems. Yay. Now for the bad things:
First of all, as soon as I use a VPN, access times to remote go up by like fucking 500%. A fucking DNS lookup takes 8-15 seconds!!! The bandwidth is there but it takes forever.. because reasons I guess. Then the speed drops to DSL speeds after a while because the router turns off my LTE connection when it is unused and it does not detect VPN traffic as traffic (again because... Reasons?) And also, the VPN just dies after an hour and you have to manually reconnect (with every VPN provider so far)

And as if that wasn't enough, now the lan is dying on me, too, with the router (the fucking expensive hybrid piece of shit, 230 bucks..) not providing DHCP service anymore or completely refusing all wifi connections or randomly dropping 5Ghz devices, or.....

You get the point.

The worst thing is, they recently layed down 400mbit fiber in my neighborhood. Guess where the FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT CABLE ENDS??? YEAH, RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY NEIGHBORS HOUSE. STREET NUMBER 19 IS SERVED WITH 400MBIT AND MY HOME, THE 20, IS NOT IN THEIR FUCKING SERVICE REGION. Even though there is a fucking cable with the cable companies name on it on my property, even leading up to my house! They still refuse to acknowledge it! FUCK YOU!!!!

Well anyways thanks for reading. Any of you got the same problems? :/

Bought a new toy drone to play with at home, Ryze Yello. It boasts an Open SDK on the box and claims to be programmable. Awesome, I think, I end up buying and going home to get to work.

All is great using the app, I can fly the drone and the video feed is mostly usable. Now let's get in to the SDK and see what we have.

Docs say I've got a few basic commands, 8 directional flips, 6 directions of movement, rotate, takeoff, and land. Plus a config option to set the speed. After a bit of tinkering I discovered that only 3 commands actually work: takeoff, flip, land. The rest error out with no (currently) useful message.

A bit more searching online tells me that they borked the commands with a recent firmware update and are working on it as of 3 months ago.

I wish I knew more about firmware or deconstructing the wifi packets from the app so I could try to do something useful.

So many stupid things I wanted to do with an automated drone and I'm stuck waiting for them to fix their firmware to put functionality back into the device.

Had a task of service discovery, went through following phases:
1. UDP broadcast
2. Wait why not Bonjour?
3. JmDNS for desktop works great
4. Android NSD on Lollipop, this is easy
5. Kitkat WTF..!! Why did you put it there when it's so buggy.
6. Replaced Android NSD with JmDNS and it's great
7. Network switching on Android... done
8. Wait how are others doing it.. JmmDNS.. awesome.. fuck not working...
9. Read mDNSJava is much faster... replace JmDNS.. why haven't they uploaded parent pom on repo
10. mDNSJava freezing my Android device... revert to JmDNS
11. Let's see if it works with Wifi Direct.... Come on why aren't you working...
12. UDP broadcast it is 😢

Don't call is ECMAScript 6 — call it JS 2015.
Don't call it iPhone 16 — call it iPhone 2024. Or Apple Phone 2024.
Don't call it Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole — call it Ubuntu 2024.
Don't call it WiFi 802.11 b/g/n/ac/ax — call it WiFi 1 gb/s.
Don't call it SDXC II 3 10 — call it SD 300 mb/s.
Don't call it USB 3.2 gen 2x2 — call it USB 20 gb/s.
Don't call it Google Pixel 6A — call it Google Phone 2022 Lite.

STOP. Giving. Bullshit. Names! Make it SIMPLER for once.

I MISS TIGERDIRECT! a haiku&rant

Tiger, so direct
Hardware haven, my tech friend
Killed, by poor Insight

I thought I had found ways to cope with it all... became a cert'd refurbisher at enough lesser operations to rebuild some semblance of my hardware connects. I even resorted to newegg to fill small voids... why is it so hard to find a quickly shipping, scriptable, 2 WAN in 6+ channels out, non WiFi noob crap, router... or even an L3 managed switch for <250$ not tied to some bullshit excuse for network management like a "cloud management platform" with some rando 'security' bloat?!?! Not even trying to force the PoE functionality (realistically i know I'll just wire that up myself after procrastinating too long)... i even tried newegg and damn amazon, neither seem to realise that real routers and switches arent interchangeable terms.

I even tried tolerating supporting the murderous, treasonous, obfuscating high prices and insisting you register as your business and let them trap you in the equivalent of a 'free' ski trip, with "short" timeshare presentation.

All bullshit and overpriced af trying to force some bloat down your throat so you "feel" like you're properly managing a network.

Anyone have an ace up their sleeve? For quick delivery (USA) minus bloat, pandering and ass-to-mouth rape???

I even tried stooping to a current Cisco OEM!

I mean, if it was *only* a bit of ass rape, I'm fine with that... but the bloat, pandering and shit-stained lollipop...

I'd rather just disappear from valid business obligations, get somewhat intoxicated, and hyperfocus tear apart my tech graveyards, go ghetto apocalyptic tech macgyver on that shit and emerge days later low on solder, in dire need of a flintstones size whetstone, more arduinos, a tetanus shot and a shower.

So.. my MacBook Pro 61 Watt C-Type Adapter sparked and stopped working... and my mac is left with just 6% charge. I have a placement exam on the 7th and a certification exam on the 8th. And also, there's no WiFi provider (or I must say a good one) in my area. The one that provides the service is a known fraudulent company.

Don't know if I should be really sad about the problems or be a bit happy because now I don't have to stare at my screen for hours.. life really sucks sometimes.

I wasted 470 rupees ($5.6 USD) recharging on the wrong WiFi account, today.

😭 How's your Friday going? 😭

(I did ask Customer support if it can be refunded but they said No, it's not in the policy to refund these transactions).

It's a good thing I always chose 1 month recharge over 3, 6 or 12 months recharge, otherwise I'd have killed myself today.

So today was going to be the Sunday when I finally connected my smart TV though my raspberry pi to access my network and have it connect to the internet.
My TV is 6 years old, so it doesn't have built in wireless, it does not recognize normal Wifi dongles so you have to buy a LG special one for ~120$ to get hat to work, so my previos solution: screw that, one chromecast + 1 osmc raspberry pi3 and I can do more than what the software build in the TV could do.

But my wife really wanted to be able to play netflix directly on the TV without using her phone so I thought:
If I connect my TV via LAN cable to my raspberry pi it should be able to forward traffic via the built in wireless on the raspberry and be able to have internet connection.
OK, its Sunday, my wife it out, I haven't done anything with iptables in the last 5+ years but I have google and should be able to figure it out eventually:) time to start this home improvement project!!!
OK, lets just check online if there is someone else who had similar idea as a place to start.
... quick google search:

Hmm, in your OSMC, go to teathering, "wifi to ethernet" and enable.
I try it and it works!
5 min and one short ethernet cable was all that were required.

It feels like I cheated and won the game without any effort, and what should I now do with the rest of the day?

I just learned some features of wifi 6, OFDMA vs OFDM, MIMO, WPA3, etc. and I just want it!!!