31 Aug 2024
internet
·
linux
·
networking
This past weekend, I wanted to set up Miniflux, a browser-based RSS reader. I have been using
it locally for the past two weeks and it has been extremely worthwhile. It has the dual advantage of
always being online and the ability to categorize feeds, which helps me group the feeds that I want
to read (blogs) from those that I want to skim (news). I did not want to set up a Miniflux
instance which would have ports open to the Internet. I wanted the instance to be available only
inside a private network; I wanted to use Wireguard to set up the private network. I ran into a
problem that looks extremely simple in hindsight: The packets which were being sent on the Wireguard
interface were larger than the Max Transmission Unit of some router between the VPS and my
laptop. This is something that I have not run into before. It was interesting to delve through the
various layers of Linux’ networking stack. What follows is an account of my investigation.
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29 Aug 2024
apple
·
linux
I bought an iPhone 5 years ago. Admittedly, it was a strange choice: I don’t like proprietary
software that one can not customize. I knew that iPhones work well only if one was willing to pay
for subscription services like iCloud and Apple Music. The fights that Epic Games and Spotify have
started in court over Apple’s attempts to block their native integration into iOS is
well-known. But I bought one anyway, because I could not get an unlocked Android phone (back then)
in Japan, and I certainly did not want to buy a locked phone, pay for overpriced cellular network
coverage for 2 years before the phone could be unlocked and I could switch to a different
carrier. So, an iPhone was the least worst option. Over the years, I have struggled with iPhone’s
software to do basic things, such as writing a text file, transferring photos to a hard drive,
understanding how exactly WhatsApp and other such apps store their pictures within the phone,
optimizing to never go past the 30% disk usage mark because flash memory becomes extremely slow
beyond it and makes the phone unusable, and using browsers like Firefox without the ability to
install ad or tracker blocking plugins. This post is a summary of some of the things that I have
learned.
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12 Jun 2024
book-review
·
capitalism
·
humor
Rating: 5/5
What if a novel was very funny? If every single sentence that came out of the protagonist’s mouth,
only served to make him look progressively less important and more foolish than you thought? What
if it was the author mocking the protagonist privately to the reader, without letting the
protagonist in on the joke? That would be a great novel, and White Noise fits the bill. The
protagonist is a man who walks around a college in long robes and dark glasses, because it makes him
look important and unapproachable, because it gives him authority. He continues this pretense in his
thoughts as well. The chaotic misinformation rallies that go around in the back of his car, as
everyone is talking over each other, and no one is answering the question which sparked the
conversation, are a treat to read. The level of ignorance is deliberately exaggerated to a comic
level. I can’t wait to watch the movie adaptation. Meanwhile, here’s a review of the book.
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02 Mar 2024
hardware
·
internet
·
technology
After moving to a new apartment recently, I made a contract with an ISP offering a best effort 1
Gigabit connection. At both apartments I lived in previously in Japan, an Internet connection was
bundled with the rental agreement. As these connections had a maximum bandwidth of 100 Megabit, I
never looked at my peripherals to see whether they were capable of Gigabit. When I bought a
computer, I noticed (without much interest) that the computer’s motherboard was capable of Gigabit
ethernet. When I checked my Internet speed with a Gigabit connection, I noticed that it was only
about 93 Mbps. This post is the story of understanding my home network, the various bottlenecks
along the way, and finally, going beyond 100 Mbps.
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31 Dec 2023
distractions
·
internet
·
tools
“Look up,” “Take it easy,” and “Keep it real.” What do these phrases mean? Their literal meaning is
easy enough to grasp. But they are never used in the literal sense. They are touted as cures to our
collective ills; metaphors for the actual processes which would make everyone less cynical and more
attentive. I heard these phrases in the coda of an inane Hindi movie recently. The movie contained
generic drivel about young people: the improbably rich MBA graduate in her 20s, the extremely
hardworking gym trainer that luck does not favor, and the stand-up comedian who appears to be
happy-go-lucky but is in fact hiding a dark part of his past. These characters are “finding their
way” in the world; the typical plot of a “coming-of-age” movie. The lesson of this movie was to
convince everyone to put their phone in a (stupid and futile) bowl, “look up,” and take notice of
the world around them. One of the characters is told to stop stalking her ex-boyfriend on Instagram;
“I don’t know [why]; I can’t stop.” It is ironic that it is this same character, a few minutes
later in the movie, who recommends “keeping it real.” What was the great revelation?
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06 Nov 2023
summary
·
technology
A large number of articles, opinion pieces, blog posts, video essays, podcasts, television dramas,
and movies saturate the information landscape. It is bad form to say that there is more out there
than can be read by any one person. The dreaded information overload has arrived. A few acknowledge
the existence of this swarm of multimedia. The majority beckon an Algorithm, entrusting it with the
responsibility of collecting, filtering, and sorting them in the unknowable order that each
component particle of the majority expects. Opting out is futile. Not knowing about something is
superior to not knowing about its occurrence. What follows is a view of culture and society based
on the contents of 3 issues of the WIRED magazine.
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09 Oct 2023
artificial-intelligence
·
philosophy
·
technology
Rating: 5/5
I wanted to read a book which would delve into the philosophical underpinnings of the ongoing AI
hype: What was the root of the idea that humans, with all their confusions and complexities, can
ever be replaced by computers? O’Gieblyn’s column in the Wired magazine, Dear Cloud Support,
is my favorite part of the magazine. Her writing is lucid and her references come from far and
wide. I was not really prepared for the philosophical depth that is on display in this book:
O’Gieblyn goes to the very beginning of the world and starts with the earliest philosophers (Plato,
Aristotle) and ushers the reader through a series of “frames of mind.” She is not averse to religion
or science; nor is she biased to any particular philosopher or their ideas; quoting from a huge
variety of sources throughout the book to show the ways in which thinking has evolved. Her religious
upbringing and her current vocation as a technology writer feature heavily throughout the
book. After reading this book, I have a clear idea of where the foundation of the hype lies and how
it has gotten this bad.
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23 Jul 2023
advertising
·
economics
·
internet
Rating: 4/5
What would happen if all the free services that you use on the Internet, which are powered by
advertisements, stop being free one day? This is the premise of the Subprime Attention Crisis. If
you ask yourself this, you might realize that many of the services that we think of as free are
powered by advertising. For me, the most frequently used services that are ostensible free are
Google Maps, WhatsApp and YouTube. I use at least one of them almost every day. If they were to
become paid services, or the hurdles to using them without giving up too much data increased, it
would be mildly annoying. This calculus will be very different for an Internet user who uses Gmail
and uses it to receive important communication. Hwang’s argument is sensible and easy to
understand. He starts from the basics of advertising on the Internet and builds up to his myriad
theses: Programmatic advertising is very similar to the financial markets. Ad networks claims that
targeted advertising on the Internet is better than “spray everyone” advertising on TV. This claim
is a lie and that banner ads don’t really change consumer behavior. Commercial interruptions are
blocked by users using ad blocking plugins or because users reliably skip ads on video-only
platforms in under half a second. To back all of this, he presents a lot of industry research and
anecdotal evidence. This was a convincing case for being aware that free services could stop being
free any day, and there would be nothing really surprising about it. (Just the other day, YouTube
took a step towards blocking ad blockers.)
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22 Jul 2023
technology
·
vpn
·
wireguard
I have been using Wireguard for about 4 years now. I started with the basic Wireguard setup, where I
did everything manually and used the ip link
and ip addr
commands to create new links and assign
addresses to them. The wg-quick
utility is open-source and has built-in SystemD support. So, I
switched to using the configuration file that wg-quick
requires. With an ad-blocking DNS server, I
was able to use the setup for a long time without having to change anything at all. The client
support was excellent on Linux, Android and (even) iOS. I never really noticed whether I had my VPN
enabled. I kept it enabled at all times except when I needed to access some geofenced
service. However, I was still writing the wg-quick configuration files manually and most of them
were very similar. This caused me to put off adding new peers to my network as soon as I needed to.
Recently, I wrote a Golang CLI tool which generates wg-quick
compatible configurations for
Wireguard peers, based on a simple JSON input file. Using this tool, I was able to add a new
Wireguard peer and create a new network in less than 10 minutes. The path to that CLI tool is what
this post is about.
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17 Jun 2023
books
·
reading
·
technology
Recently, I have taken to reading magazine articles and long newsletter posts on my Kindle by
converting them to the ePub format, rather than reading them on the computer, where the process of
making highlights and taking notes differs from the process that I use for all the e-books that I
read. As I started doing this for some long articles (such as this one), I realized that the best
online options out there are not good enough. I have been using dotepub.com which seems popular and
converts to both the generic Epub format, and the Kindle-specific Mobi format. While it does a good
job with all the text, this particular article was particularly heavy on images, and all the images
were required to understand the text. When I converted the page to an Epub format, it told me that
it would not include all the images from the article. So, I set out to write a few scripts which
could fix that problem and actually export web pages as self-contained epub files.
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