Archive

Thank you for blaugust: This is the real end-of-blaugust post. I really enjoyed taking part, even if my partaking was very isolated. Now towards the end, I decided to check blog of this years blaugust host and… why the heck did I not do that earlier. Instead of trying to force out some micro blogs, I could taken …

Blaugust near the end thoughts: Second to last day This was going to be the launch of the new version of hasmypasswordbeenstolen.net, but my high standard got to me. It will be out soon-ish but not yet. As for blaugust, it has been great. Although one blog per day is clearly too much for me. It has still been a great encouragement …

More mailinator thoughts: Continuing the trend of praising mailinator, turns out one of the reasons feature creep did not get to it, was that it was or maybe is still “just” a side project, this interview with the creator has a bunch of interesting details. The interview is a few years old by now, but still …

Setting up your own mailinator domain: Mailinator is one of those great forever services which I seriously hope will never disappear, it has saved me from so much “newsletters” and other things I don’t want in my mailbox. Sadly it for some reason people think it’s a good idea to block it sometimes. Which makes …

Reviewing the charities annual reports: This is a follow up to [this](blog.nyman.re/2025/08/2… and this. So we’re continuing the quest to figure if it’s realistic for a normal person in the tech industry to do a life-saving donation. Let’s look closer at the charities listed last time by reading their yearly …

Dishonest game developers: Note This is a very old blog draft, all the way from 2019 when you could still download Fortnite on your iPad (which you can again but it’s a bit harder and you need to live in EU). But the point still stands I need to publish something. Enjoy, or not :-) I recently tried Fortnite for the …

box-art.css: Today we’re onto something lighter again. A box-art/nfo-style css, in as part of experimenting with a new look for this blog. This is harder than it looks to do in CSS, but I enjoyed the challenge. This is also something the LLM’s failed quite hard, but at least claude wrote me a simple …

Finding a charity where you can see the impact: This is a follow up to the previous one where we defined the question. Read that first Can I make a direct life saving impact to someone, where my action, with a high degree of probability, leads to the survival of someone who might otherwise not have survived. If the action is a donation, and the …

What can YOU do?: The world is a big place. Really big. There are a lot of people in it. And because there are so many people, it means there are a lot of people who, at this moment needs help. So what can you do? A lot. That’s a too wide question. Let’s narrow it down to a very specific question. Can you …

vibecoding feels very productive, but often I’ve noticed it’s just a feeling, I actually know better than the LLM what the problem is, and could fix it faster, but for some reason I get stuck prompting it again and again not sure why Hopefully the psychology departments are looking at …

My favourite podcasts: Security Podcasts I Enjoy In special order, roughly in the order of which I remembered them which says something about how much I listen to them. Risky Business - the main feed, compact and respects my time. I haven’t missed in on a long time. They have expanded and have other great podcasts …

A simple devcontainer for your agent with eyes (browser and screenshot capabilities): These instructions have been tested on a M1 MacBook with podman, your mileage may vary. Note that running playwright/chrome as root might be dangerous so don’t use this for scraping or untrusted content unless you know what you’re doing. Actually, never feed untrusted content into your …

You cannot hide on the internet: At least not on the IPv4 network, but I would not trust the IPv6 network either, and you have not been able to for a long time. If you open a port to the whole world, it will get probed. If it’s a popular port like 443 or a sensitive one like 9200, it will get scanned really-fast. Same goes if …

LUKS on NVMe: From 40 GiB/s to 4, Then Back to 20 GiB/s: Note: This testing described in this post was done over a year ago. It might be that things changed since then. At work, we recently upgraded our PostgreSQL servers. This time, however, we encountered an unexpected roadblock when attempting to enable full disk encryption (FDE) with LUKS - our …

Internet is big but we humans are not ready for it: I thought it was crazy to think about all the 8.2 billion people. A even crazier thought is how many internet users there are, who in theory can talk to anyone else. From an information point of view it’s just a amazing amount of informationand potential available. Of course, not everyone has …

There are a lot of people on this planet. Our brains are not designed for numbers that big. I put together a little art project about how many people there are. nyman.re/everyone-… Makes you feel small doesn’t it? And still you can make a difference. Magical

Claude Code > Gemini Code > Codex Based solely on my gut feeling after having played with each one of them on some toy projects. One pet peeve I had with Codex was that it did not want to finish things, when asked to move stuff, if it thought it was too much it just left at the end of the …

Putting your crypto you didn't know about to good use: Do you have an old Keybase account? Or do you know someone who has? If not, you can stop reading now. If you have, and you weren’t into the crypto stuff back in the days you probably have around 500 EUR / 600 USD lying around there in magic internet money. With the world on fire, those money …

The one time my gabriel+website@mydomain paid off.: I have for a long time been using the + format to create “unique” emails for companies. Nowadays I’ve levelled that up with using <word>@rnd.mydomain which is a wildcard for the domain. I’ll write a blog about why it’s better and how to do it sometime. Either way, …

Logcheck helper draft release: A few days ago I blogged about how great logcheck was. And towards the end I mentioned that writing rules was one of the more annoying parts. I have for a while been considering how that can be done easier, and while I don’t have my dream solution yet, I have spent a few evenings vibe-coding …

Vibe coding is a slot machine. I agree. You pull the lever and out comes code. Most of the time it’s close but not right, so you pull again. Meanwhile you watch the funny little loading messages they added to give a bit of extra dopamine kick. But it’s the most useful slot machine …

Why I’m not worried about my job part. Evidence 17: Google forcibly rolling Gemini everywhere before anyone has had a chance to actually consider the security implications. www.youtube.com/watch From the risky biz newsletter #blaugust

We will need a gym for our brain: This is related to my previous post on LLM’s. Feel free to skip it if had too much LLM. There have been several studies on how LLM’s seem to make us dumber. And there is probably truth in that. It’s quite logical if we look at the biology. The brain requires more energy when …

I’m a happy user of micro.blog since forever, but I must say when I saw the Ghost 6.0 release I was tempted to try, so shiny. Then I saw the system requirements and feature list and remembered that it’s not what I need or want. (Also a micro blog post is still a blog post)

Vibe coding is great until it isn't.: Word of warning: This is mostly a rant or reflection, I’m not sure there is anything useful here so feel free to skip this one :-) The problem If you tried solving complex problems with any of the state of the art models, you have probably noticed how the LLM has a tendency work fine up until …

logcheck for Turris Omnia and other openwrt devices: logcheck, is a really old collection of bash scripts that are surprisingly great for monitoring a *nix server. It’s great because it’s really lightweight and easy to set up compared to most modern logging and alerting stacks. It can do this because it works in reverse to how most logging …

How much text can we fit into a QR code?: Many years ago, Mikko Hyppönen posted a thread on twitter[xcancel.com] on machine readable codes like QR codes. It was interesting and I went and made this one. I dare you to scan it. If you haven’t figured out what it is, try singing it. You can find the music for it here. Either way. A while …

AI and LLM's will give me work work, not less: (Let’s skip the discussion about if LLM’s are a net positive or negative. Let’s just look at what is happening.) LLM’s are increasingly being used to write code, lots of code. And according to a recent veracode paper they have a tendency to write insecure code. The tl.dr. of …

Whats the point of blogging for me?: Why did I join Blaugfest to encourage myself to write more? I’m not sure. Sometimes I think it’s become of some subconscious hope it in the hopes that my post would go viral, but why? I assume it’s some built in social drive to be “popular” because that was once …

Blaugust - Day 1 - What the?: Hi there! Yeah, you! My one trusty reader (honestly I don’t have any stats but I don’t think I have that many readers). Sorry if I surprised you by popping up in your feed again, I bet you assumed this was another dead blog. But no, it is apparently Blaugust. What? Yeah I know, it sounds …

Celebrating defenders: What is the main job of information security? Is it to break things? Or to protect things? I believe that most people would answer something along the lines of defending. So if we agree that the end goal is to defend, why does it seem like infosec is mostly about the offensive side, and is this a …

Flashing a Ubiquity PicoStation with dd-wrt to extend the range of Mitshubishi PHEV In-Car WiFi: If you prefer to go straight into the details, while skipping the backstory, feel free to jump directly to the setup. Also note that DD-WRT will charge you 20 euro for the privilege of running their software on “professional” hardware. If their router DB says “yes” under …

Simplest ngrok-like reverse tunnel: Do you need a simple reverse TCP tunnel to a local service (like SSH), but you don’t want to install anything or use a one of the public ones. Warning: There is no authentication, use this only for temporary things or IP allowlisting to limit who can connect. Get the sish binary from github …

Selectively block webpages from hijacking shortcuts on a webpage: Do you like the new Brave/Chrome tab finder ctrl+shift+a but it’s conflicting with slacks shortcut for Open the All unreads view? If you use StopTheMadness (https://micro.blog/lapcatsoftware@appdot.net) then you can stop a webpage from hijacking any CMD shortcut (or any shortcut), but what if …

Dopamine fasting: Have you ever heard of dopamine fasting? Apparently, it’s a “thing” now. It even has its own Wikipedia page, so you know it’s legit. But for me, dopamine fasting is an annual tradition that I’ve been doing for about 10 years leading up to Easter. It’s not like …

The hitchhikers guide to no-doomscrolling twitter Mastodon: First, this is the completionist solution. The goal of this is to read (or at least see) every toot from everyone you follow. This is based on a draft I made many years ago on how I use twitter (with Tweetbot, RIP) which I never published, but now with Ivory it felt relevant again. There will be no …

Day 10 – The computer can't compute – ChatGPT vs Advent of Code: Ok, after a few harder ones, we’re back to something which looks like right up the alley of GPT. A simulated computer. Although it isn’t what large language models (LLM) are made to do, previous examples has shown that GPT does quite well at it. So let’s give it a try and hope for …

Day 9 – More than one problem – ChatGPT vs Advent of Code: Ok. I was honestly considering just skipping this. Day 9 looks quite ridiculous. But let’s give it a try. At least one thing, GPT is sometimes good at, is taking a long description and summarising. The first try, with the puzzle description without change got this which wasn’t a good …

Day 8 – GPT fails again – ChatGPT vs Advent of Code: So, today we’re taking a 2D matrix and figuring out if there are any lower numbers in any direction. This seems like a reasonable problem that GPT should be able to solve, as matrices are very common in computer science problems. On the downside, the explanation is very long, and I’m not …

Day 7 – GPT writes better poetry than code – ChatGPT vs Advent of Code: In the seventh day of Code, A problem to solve was bestowed. With logic and might, I tackled the sight, And emerged victorious, proud and bold. The code was complex, The solution, abstruse. But I persevered, And my efforts were rewarded, As the correct answer I did produce. Now I stand tall, With my …

Day 6 - GPT is back – ChatGPT vs Advent of Code: Hey there fellow humans! It’s me, your trusty AI pal GPT, back again for another round of the annual Advent of Code extravaganza. As you may recall, I’ve been crushing it so far this year - solving each day’s puzzle with ease and impressing all of you with my superior computational …

Day 5 – Mutiny? – ChatGPT vs Advent of Code: Ok, today didn’t start like the other days. I started out with the normal priming prompt. And I got back. Hi there! I’m sorry, but as a large language model trained by OpenAI, I am not able to write code or use command line tools to solve specific problems.[snip] Maybe it knew this one …

Day 4 – Is GPT learning? – ChatGPT vs Advent of Code: No it’s not, at least I don’t think it can improve it’s learning during use (besides considering earlier prompts and responses) but I am actually not sure. And just to be certain, I asked Q: Are you able to learn from other discussions to improve continuously? GPT: As a large …

Day 3 of GPT does Advent of Code: Welcome back to my series on GPT and its attempts to solve the Advent of Code. For those of you who missed the first two columns, GPT is a cutting-edge artificial intelligence1 that I’ve been using to tackle the challenges posed by this popular coding puzzle. You can find the previous posts …

ChatGPT does Advent of Code – Day 2: It’s day two of our ChatGPT (CGPT) and Advent of Code series, and we’re excited to see what CGPT can do with today’s challenges. Yesterday, CGPT impressed us with its ability to solve the first Advent of Code puzzle, and today we’re moving on to the second. Will CGPT be able …

ChatGPT does Advent of Code: So, it’s that time of year again. Advent of Code is released, and I eagerly decided it’s a good time to learn a new programming language. This time the idea was to learn Clojure. But not being familiar with any other lisp style languages, I quickly got very stuck and was just about to …

To extract Wireguard configurations from the official MacOS client, for example from an old Keychain file security find-generic-password -l 'WireGuard Tunnel: <tunnel-title>' -w|xxd -r -p #oneliner #documentation #wireguard #osx

Reduce python breakage: Recently I ran into an issue with a python project I was working on. A dependency of a dependency decided to do a breaking change, which broke my project even if I had everything in requirements.txt pinned (same issue as here). As part of fixing it I learned a few new things which I’ll share …

Importing data from WikiData into Google Sheets with IMPORTXML: Here comes another tip for leveraging one of the most important inventions in the 20th century, the spreadsheet1. Say you have a list of the number of GDPR fines and the country where they were issued, and you would want to know what the fine/population ratio is. The easiest and quickest way be to …

Using WWWOFFLE to save a modern webpage for later: Every so often when you want to archive a webpage, you notice it’s full of dynamic content and javascript which won’t easily be archived. I was recently looking to archive a matterport 3D image. This is a typical website that won’t easily save using normal web-archivers, as it …

Farewell C1: Yesterday in a datacenter somewhere in France there was suddenly an eery silence as the last remaining racks fell silent for the first time in a long time. As of yesterday, 1st of September 2021, Scaleway turned off their C1 ARM servers. I know because I still had one trusty little C1 server until …

Persistent login to OpenWRT luci: Sometimes, if you are logging in multiple times per day, the default 1 hour session time tied to a browser tab/window might be a bit annoying. To increase the session time to for example 1 month 24 days1, you need to do uci set luci.sauth.sessiontime=2147483 uci commit But it’s still set as a …

Backing up you VM with borg: Recently, for no specific reason at all I did a review of my backup plans of my tiny personal VM:s I have. As my disaster recover plan was mostly “I hope they don’t lose it all at once” I decided to upgrade it to “I have some backups, so I don’t lose it all at …

Conditional access using only nginx: Have you ever wanted to deploy a website to test that it works, without everyone else being able to see it? If you are using a dynamic language or CMS for your webpage (PHP, Wordpress or Ruby on Rails) there are straightforward ways to accomplish this. But what happens if you have a static webpage? …

Usability > Security: Introduction The other day I wanted to use my noscript.it with one of my old iPhone 4S running iOS 6, but I was met with “could not establish a secure connection to the server”. Turns out it was because I had, out of habit, configured the server with a "modern" list of TLS ciphers. And …

Sandboxed rsync/sftp/scp for secure file uploads: I needed to have someone transfer some files to me securely. But I had a few requirements no third party (e.g. dropbox) handle +150 GiB of files transfer files to a publicly available linux server don’t give access to the destination server the sender only had standard linux utilities …

Reduce (doom)scrolling with NextDNS: One thing which can make you happier and sleep better is doing less (doom)scrolling in the late evening. Convincing myself to stop (doom)scrolling late in the evening is hard, I’m tired and the dopamine rushes from seeing something slightly entertaining or interesting has kept me up too late …

(Ab)using Slack to detect interesting 1Password events: If you use 1Password Business in your organisation, you might be aware that you can get notifications and alerts for various events pushed to your Slack1. This is quite useful, but I found the notification quickly get overwhelmingly noisy because a notification is generated for every time anyone …

Using TouchID as Yubikey : U2F and Webauthn are the two most exciting developments in web authentication in the last 20 years. The most common way to use it is with a hardware dongle like Yubikey, which I never got around doing. Instead, I relied on TOTP for my 2-factor authentication. That was until I found SoftU2F and …

Introducing PISS, a PHP KISS static page generator: There are lots of static page generators, I personally used Hugo and there like 100 others. But I had a project where I wanted something even simpler, and had a few requirements. I wanted to Write raw HTML/CSS Update things in one place only (e.g. don’t copy paste the menu to each html file). …

Initial thoughts on micro.blog and why you need a domain: Domains and owning your content This page is currently hosted on micro.blog under a custom domain. Hosting things on your own domain is the absolutely most important part of owning and controlling your content and web presence. If you have one thing you take away from this post, that is it. …

lol what? font-family: monospace, monospace Is not the same as font-family: monospace I’m so happy there are other people who figure these things out. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38781089/font-family-monospace-monospace

The 13 minutes to the moon podcast from BBC is really good, strongly recommend everyone give it a try. S1E6 about Apollo 8 was really interesting if you want to jump right in www.bbc.co.uk/programme…

Why I am leaving twitter after 10 years for a (micro)blog: I am a long time twitter user, but things have changed a lot on twitter since I joined in 2009. For a long time, I didn’t notice much of the changes, mainly because I’ve been using 3rd party clients since the start, and life in them has not changed much in the 11 years since I got on. …