TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
The Montreal subway ticket uses NFC technology through a small chip that communicates with the turnstile, allowing data exchange between the reader and the ticket over a short distance through magnetic fields. The NFC chip is extremely small and transparent to the user, providing basic data to allow entry to the subway. The chip lacks […]
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The author discusses the limitations of tools like sudo and doas that rely on setuid binaries for privilege escalation to run commands as root. A unique alternative explored is s6-sudod, which splits the program into a privileged server and an unprivileged client. The experiment involves using ssh locally to enable authorized users to run commands […]
Nick Desbarats, who has taught data visualization to numerous professionals worldwide, now believes box plots are flawed. He finds them unintuitive, hard to read, and prone to misinterpretation. Despite being a classic chart type, box plots are often unfamiliar to audiences, requiring lengthy explanations to grasp. Desbarats suggests alternative chart types like strip plots and […]
Tonight with the Impressionists at Musée d’Orsay in Paris offers a unique virtual reality experience where visitors walk through a recreated 1874 exhibition by Monet, Renoir, and other Impressionist artists. Despite visually stunning details with no frame rate drops, the experience suffers from the awkwardness of navigating non-existent physical spaces and constant collisions with other […]
Radio astronomy is a cost-effective and enjoyable way to explore the skies. Our mission is to guide you through creating your own radio telescope using simple materials like cardboard, all for under $200. The tutorials will help you build the CHART instrument to study the Milky Way’s spiral structure. No previous knowledge of radio astronomy, […]
In 1984, David Edwin Potter founded Psion, a company with a vision ahead of its time. Their first major success was the Organiser, a handheld microcomputer that used EPROMs for storage. Despite the limitations, the Organiser was power-efficient and innovative, faking a real-time clock and achieving long battery life. Psion continued to release successful models, […]
The author discovered a simple but significant Xorg bug that went unnoticed for 8 years. The bug involved GrabServer function in the X server, which caused windows to disappear while holding the server lock. Through debugging with eBPF and uprobe, the author found that the bug stemmed from a misuse of epoll in the X […]
Music is a freeing experience of self-expression, but the twelve musical tones in Western music are surprisingly narrow. Most musicians are using a very limited number of notes when far more are possible, like microtones, notes between notes. The Infinitone, created by Subhraag and Robert, is a wind instrument controlled by computers, providing access to […]
Discrete Event Simulation in PicoLisp can be used to create a fun model railroad simulation with tracks, trains, and switches all represented in ASCII. The trains, or “bots,” move, shunt, and wait based on a dynamic simulation that makes the entire experience engaging. Containing source codes on GitLab or software-lab.de, the simulation is controlled through […]
llama.ttf is a font file that doubles as a large language model and an inference engine. In essence, this font utilizes the Harfbuzz font shaping engine in applications like Firefox and Chrome to allow the embedding of code to generate text. This means you can use the font to run the language model and generate […]