I was pleased with my last post on getting TinyLibrary up and running on an ESP32 (and WOOOO got a PR accepted to the ESP-IDF codebase for the standard ESP32 firmware for DHCP option 114), but really wanted something with some more RF and speed oomph. I worked on an off for a while to get a captive portal + DNS + DHCP working on Ubuntu 24 on a RasPi Zero 2W but kept getting blocked by random issues. I finally decided to abandon my NetworkManager approach (turns out the dnsmasq-base plugin that it uses won’t read my DHCP configs even when they’re in the right place >.>) and finally went with the tried and tested combo of hostapd and full-scale dnsmasq and things went real smooth.

I’ve been on a big ebook kick lately (currently rereading the first scifi I ever consumed as a little kid, Contact by Carl Sagan). The concept of written words that have been a major part of my development (or recreation) being subject to the same resilience, shareability, and indexing as other digital goods delights me, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort to get every book I’ve ever read (and some I haven’t read yet) into a well-tagged digital library that’s coming up on 800 books.

Last week, I implanted a SmartMX3 P71D321 secure element chip in an ultra-thin, biosafe-polymer-enclosed form factor as provided by the Dangerous Things flexSecure implant in my left arm. This microprocessor + radio provides onboard compute and a 13.56Mhz NFC radio, with the chip accepting 200kB worth of Java Card applets (extremely feature-restrictive/resource-minimal Java). While this technology is not new (Java Card SmartCards have been around since the late 90’s), this body-safe form factor is impressive even when compared with newer implantable NFC chips thanks to Amal Grafstra’s research into biocompatible polymer-encased planar antenna technology.

This weekend I implanted an xSIID, an implant that is essentially a copy of my first xNT implanted chip, except that this one lights up when you scan it. I am now not just a cyborg, but a disco cyborg 😎

Implant was very smooth; you can see in the mid-implant photo all the topography I charted to keep track of vasculature and tendon boundaries. The sweet spot was VERY tight; I had about +/2mm tolerance on where I needed it to land, but preliminary healing looks like I nailed the placement spot on.

What an awesome review of a side project I’ve been really passionate about. And he couldn’t have described the site better.

Super, super proud of seeing this in print.

For years, I’ve had an abiding love of machine code, the fundamental binary instructions that the CPU of a computer understands, ever since I took my first embedded systems course at Santa Clara University. Below all the user interfaces and flashiness of modern computers, there is a hunk of silicon which is reading ones and zeroes from memory and performing the fundamentals of computer operation — store a byte in memory, retrieve a byte from memory, add one to the byte, subtract something from the bytes, etc. The fact that such a powerful force multiplier of humanity’s power all came down to a rock we trapped lightning in and forced to do math billions of times a second will forever be amazing to me.

At any given time on https://twitch.tv, the livestreaming capital of the internet, there are thousands and thousands of streamers playing games, making music, or just hanging out with an audience, talking and relaxing with friends. However, there are also thousands of streamers with nobody watching them – they are, in effect, screaming into the digital void; some are hoping for viewers to watch and like what they see, becoming regular subscribers while others just broadcast out of boredom.

My pet hisser Julian on the prowl, with some dubbed Jurassic Park for atmosphere.

I recently stumbled upon a site I wanted to save a video from, so I went to open devtools and check the Network tab for the video source when suddenly the page redirected me to an error page! After a couple tries it was clear this was detecting devtools being opened and directing me away from the page — how curious (and annoying).

A quick google indicated that there are some hacks to detect sudden screen width changes as indicator of the devtools pane sliding open, but an undocked pane gave the same result. After some hunting via the initiator, this was the code responsible:

Zork is one of the very first interactive fiction games and was released in 1977 for the PDP-10. Interactive fiction is a gameplay style now (sadly) mostly lost to the sands of time where on-screen text describes your environment to you and you interact via basic text commands (e.g. go north, take sword, hit troll with sword).

Zork (or Zork I, to differentiate it from the subsequent releases), is a timeless classic with a rich and challenging story. Zork has been open sourced by its creator Infocom, so I set out to learn a bit about it and make some unique ways to interact with it.