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.

If you’re like me (and, in this regard, if you’re not then you should be), you use Google Authenticator or a similar application to generate Multiple Factor Authentication tokens — six digit codes that add an extra step of identity verification to sites you log into. These codes rotate every thirty seconds and must match the one the server is expecting (kinda like nuclear launch codes, but to log into Twitter/Google/banking/etc.).

Well, after four and a half wonderful years with my magnet, I bid it farewell.

After a particularly firm snag and a subsequent major loss of sensitivity, I was concerned the magnet was fractured or the coating had failed so I did an emergency removal which went very smoothly and I’m now all healed up.

I’ll miss it dearly; after that long, it became an instinct — just the other day I was doing PC maintenance and confidently reached for a screw with my finger that disappointingly didn’t jump onto it for safekeeping… This will take some getting used to :(

I’ve been diving quite a bit (just finished my 26th dive today)!

Here are some videos from last weekend, when two buddies and I camped in Monterey and dove (literally) sunup to sundown, and from this weekend when I dove a marine preserve called Point Lobos with another friend of mine.

A couple weekends ago, I install PiHole, a software package that provides DNS blackholing for your local network, and I was shocked.

Some background: DNS (domain name server) is essentially the internet’s phone book. When you type google.com,  your computer first asks a DNS server (run by your internet service provider, Google, Cloudflare, or any other of hundreds of DNS providers) for the website’s IP address. The IP address is how the infrastructure of the web actually knows how to route your request — if google.com is like saying “Dave Smith’s House”, the IP address 216.58.192.14 that corresponds to it is like knowing “123 Main Street, Greenville, South Carolina.

…I’m becoming one of those blogs with 6 month intervals between posts.

Life’s been great lately! I’m chugging along at work, taking on more responsibility for IT needs. Outside of work, I’ve jumped feet first into scuba diving! I’ve got my certification and am shooting for 20-25 dives under my belt before I hit Hawaii in September. I’m getting plugged in with some local clubs as well as wildlife teams that do volunteer fish/kelp/urchin/etc. survey dives for reports to the Dept. of Fish and Wildlife.