It’s 2020, and by now everyone should know the basics of password hygiene: use strong passwords, don’t reuse them across sites, etc. A password manager such as Keepass is an essential tool for keeping track of all the passwords you inevitably end up with under this set of rules. Unfortunately, no matter how good your passwords are, there’s always a chance that they’ll get compromised. For example, a website might have a breach and someone can obtain your password regardless of how hard it would have been to guess. In cases like these, services like Have I Been Pwned can let you know this has happened. However, if your password is leaked in something like a large credential-stuffing dump, it might not be obvious which sites you may need to change your password on. [Read More]

I recently decided that I needed to add some color to my workspace, but didn’t want to just use any off-the-shelf RGB controller. My first thought was to use an Arduino to control some RGB strips, but I didn’t want to have to to open the Arduino IDE and modify the firmware every time I wanted to change the program. This desire eventually escalated to implementing a virtual machine on top of the Arduino with an application-specific instruction set designed to easily manipulate LEDs. [Read More]

I thought it would be cool to extend the scripts I posted about yesterday with the ability to create a timelapse. [Read More]

One extension I had been planning for my previous project involving terrain meshes was the addition of satellite imagery to add color to the models. Landsat, in addition to enabling important climatology research and other science missions, turned out to be a great source of open data to use for this. [Read More]

The idea that my blog has been running on Wordpress for all these years has been haunting me. In the back of my head, I’ve been thinking about how not only is the CMS itself known for being full of vulnerabilities, but it’s also built with PHP, which itself isn’t really the most secure. The platform also has too many moving parts for me to be comfortable with – maintaining a VPS with Apache, PHP, and MySQL installations is relatively straightforward, but still has its moments of suffering. [Read More]