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Why Does My Computer Not Boot with a USB Hub Attached?
My trusty old USB 3 hub has failed. It was only around a year old, but it was cheap and it worked. It wasn’t powered, but most of the time it didn’t need to be. One day I began having very strange issues with USB on my computer. Devices randomly disconnecting, devices never connecting until the computer was rebooted and so on. I eventually narrowed it down to the hub. I tossed it out after a quick internal inspection had revealed nothing obviously wrong, and went shopping for a new hub.
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Diyode.com published a feature about the air quality meter!
You may have seen my article on the air quality meter I built a while ago. Diyode, a print magazine in Australia kindly published an article discussing the process I took to create the thing! It’s a really cool feeling to be featured somewhere like this. The article is a great read, check it out over on Diyode: Sense of Smell.
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Embedded Meets the Internet: Build Your Own Air Quality Meter
The Finished Product - quite rustic! This article was recently featured in Hackaday and Diyode!
I’m bored. I’m sure you are too. I’m personally very thankful that I can still work through this strange period - but there are still hours in the day to fill. I wanted a personal project, so I thought about remote working and the health impacts. Most offices here have air handling units, air conditioners, and fans to keep air circulating.
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Gnome Shell Stuttering Caused by AppIndicator
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.
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What My First ‘Real’ Software Engineering Job Taught Me
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.
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How Do I Make Breaking Changes in Go Without Annoying People?
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 @normankev141
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.
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Exploiting UPnP, Literally Childsplay.
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.
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Those Damn Romanians and Their Damn Data Protection Laws.
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.
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Beating Round-Trip Latency With Redis Pipelining
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!
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That Time a Sticker Made Me an Accidental Domain Squatter
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