blaugust
Sunday, August 31, 2025
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 inspiration from the massive amount of material available there.
As none of my posts are ready to be posted, I’ll take the opportunity to wrap it up with the suggested “Lessons Learned” topics from the blaugust calendar.
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Saturday, August 30, 2025
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 to get a few old ones out, and some new ones also.
I will try to keep up the posting, but without a specific deadline to hit (midnight) there is a high risk that I just go back to perfecting things forever.
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Friday, August 29, 2025
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 interesting.
nathanlatkathetop.libsyn.com/703-the-a…
Also this presentation from a few years later is also interesting, also old. Things have probably changed since then.
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Thursday, August 28, 2025
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 absolutely no sense to me. I mean, I am clearly indicating that I do not want email from you. If you force me to give my own email, and send me emails (which we know you will) I will put them into spam.
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Wednesday, August 27, 2025
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 reports.
Medeor’s report for 2024
Overall a very good report. Very transparent. From this we can read that they have received, around 34 million in funding.
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Tuesday, August 26, 2025
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 first time, thinking I would check out what the fuzz was about. So I install it on the iPad and get started.
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Monday, August 25, 2025
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 javascript page where I could tweak the parameters until it worked.
Also.. I just found this, it’s just beautiful int10h.
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Sunday, August 24, 2025
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 answer is Yes, and I have the means. Then I want to do it.
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Saturday, August 23, 2025
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 save the life of someone in need?
Again, yes, there are lots of ways you could, but also a lot of ways which won’t work.
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Friday, August 22, 2025 →
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 this
Thursday, August 21, 2025
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 now, including a news bulletin. I listen to those sometimes.
Three Buddy Problem - Quite new podcast, entertaining listen but the opposite of Risky Biz when it comes to being compact.
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Wednesday, August 20, 2025
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 LLM and always sandbox it as much as possible. Otherwise you will sooner or later be a sad panda.
Instruction Put this into .devcontainer/devcontainer.json
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Tuesday, August 19, 2025
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 you announce it by creating a TLS certificate with a ACME service like Let’s Encrypt.
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Monday, August 18, 2025
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 standard deployment. In past benchmarks, enabling LUKS full-disk encryption cost us ~10%. This time, it left us with only 10% of our throughput - a 90% drop.
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Sunday, August 17, 2025
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 something to say to every other user. But the fact that people who are interested in a subject can “easily” talk to so many likeminded people should allow for humanity to develop at a never-before seen pace.
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Saturday, August 16, 2025 →
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
Thursday, August 14, 2025 →
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 file.
Gemini Pro worked fine the little I tried it but I dislike on principle because it’s not possible to deactivate the history when it’s part of the Google Suite/Workspace/Apps. I’m actually not sure if that affects Gemini Code.
Claude Code seems to be a good balance.
At some point I will try to compare by giving them the same instructions on the same project and see what actually happens.
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
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 is not doing any good locked into some internet wallet. So I’d recommend getting them out of there and spend them on either yourself, someone you care about, or something good like charity.
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Tuesday, August 12, 2025
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, this is a repost of an old twitter thread.
Back in 2020, I was been repeatedly called by a bitcoin/CFD company who refused to accept a “I’m not interested”.
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Monday, August 11, 2025
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 something that I believe will be helpful.
Logcheck regex helper You can try it out at nyman.
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Sunday, August 10, 2025 →
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 I’ve ever seen.
Saturday, August 9, 2025 →
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
Friday, August 8, 2025
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 it’s working, and probably even more when forming new memories.
So if there is an easier way, it will prefer that way, as for most of humanity’s existence wasted energy was not good for survival.
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Thursday, August 7, 2025 →
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)
Wednesday, August 6, 2025
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 a point, and then they break down completely. And after that, they don’t seem to be able to recover.
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Tuesday, August 5, 2025
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 tools work. Instead of trying to find the important stuff and alert on that, it just filters out everything “standard” and alert on everything else.
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Monday, August 4, 2025
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 later while reading the chapter on machine-readable codes in If it’s secure it’s vulnerable by the same Mikko, I went down the machine-readable code rabbit hole again.
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Sunday, August 3, 2025
(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 that paper is that (just like humans), unless told and trained to write secure code they won’t.
No surprise there really, as a lot of example code out there is insecure.
Continue reading →
Sunday, August 3, 2025
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 important for survival.
But I’ve seen many examples of being popular on the internet is not a good thing. I would like to specifically thank Marcus Hutchins aka.
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Friday, August 1, 2025
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 a bit like the sound the dog makes when it ate too much too fast.
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