I recently installed Pop!_OS on my new desktop machine and have been loving it, but have been suffering with this really strange issue where the entire UI would stutter roughly every second for a few milliseconds. This got really, really annoying so I had a little dig around and found out the cause was actually a strange interaction between Ubuntu AppIndicator (a bundled extension for Gnome Shell in Pop!_OS) and YTMDesktop - an electron wrapper for Youtube Music. Read More…

Having speed makes others happy in the short term. Having velocity makes you happy in the long term. One of the biggest lessons I learned was to prioritise ‘velocity’ over ‘speed’. This probably sounds meaningless to you, but allow me to explain. At some point around a year ago, during my one to ones with my manager, we were discussing the fact that I was heavily distracted and finding it tough to concentrate on tasks I wanted to work on. Read More…

Knowing when and how to make breaking changes is tough. It is even tougher in the Go ecosystem. After being burned by making a breaking change and annoying people, I’m going to investigate how best to mitigate this annoyance. Disclaimer: This is mostly opinion, and only my opinion. This post is not associated with my employer in any way. You can contact me on Mastodon @kn100@fosstodon.org What even is a breaking change, anyway A simple definition of a breaking change is any change you make to your code that could break other code which directly or indirectly depends on it. Read More…

As a kid, I used to love playing Minecraft. I was technically precocious from a fairly young age, and naturally gravitated to attempting to host my own Minecraft server for me and my band of geeky pals to play on. The problem was, I had no idea what port forwarding was, nor how to log into a router. The solution I found was about as novel as it was dumb. Read More…

A long time ago I worked for an ISP as Tier 1 technical support. This is just one of many stories I have from my time here. These were originally published elsewhere on the internet, but are being reworked and republished here. Sometimes, the degree of insanity in a conversation can reach such a fever pitch that it is hard to recover. Sometimes, people can say things that leave you so flabbergasted that you aren’t sure if you’re being trolled or not. Read More…

I recently worked on a task which involved checking every single value in a Redis instance, and modifying ones which matched a certain format. This script needed to run in a fairly timely fashion, as it would need to be run frequently. Making requests sequentially didn’t cut it, so I learned about pipelining. This simple optimization meant that a script which I originally calculated to take over 50 hours to run ran in under 4 minutes! Read More…

It all started when I noticed these particular stickers absolutely everywhere all over London. I’d also seen them in other European cities! I was never curious enough to actually search for them, to figure out their meaning, so I just noticed, acknowledged my curiosity and moved on. I later did discover their meaning, but the way I discovered this was something I never expected. The ‘why suspect us.’ sticker in question Read More…

I personally don’t pay a massive amount of attention to cryptocurrency. This isn’t because I dislike them, more because they’re just not that interesting to me at the moment. I’ll occasionally hear about Bitcoin rallying or some Etherium app getting hacked, but other than that I avoid it. Recently, I’ve had a bunch of people who wouldn’t normally be interested in such things ping me about Initiative Q, asking what I thought of it. Read More…

Like many people, I find it difficult to wake up in the morning. I want to automate some of the things I do in the morning in order to continue to hack away at my laziness. To this effect, I want my television to switch on and over to BBC news in the morning. Unfortunately, Hisense do not provide a way to control the television remotely as far as I can tell, and nmapping it doesn’t give me anything too interesting. Read More…

A while ago, I and a friend of mine got rather annoyed at a ridiculous propaganda attempt called “Not So Safe”, claiming that Electronic Cigarettes were extremely dangerous, so we countered it by parodying the complete lies with a website in the same shape, which contained well cited research. We called it Not So Educated. They’ve long since taken the site down, I suspect in response, but you can still somewhat experience it thanks to the Wayback Machine. Read More…