GreatReads - Blog Aggregator · Phoenix Framework

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The Tymscar Blog 2 months ago

Automating What Backblaze Lifecycle Rules Don't Do Instantly

I recently moved from Synology to TrueNAS and set up cloud backups to Backblaze B2. I have two buckets: one for important files like documents, and one for homelab services. The services bucket backs up things like qcow2 disk images for my VMs, some of which are hundreds of gigabytes. When I created the buckets, I set the lifecycle rule to “Keep only the last version of the file.” I assumed this meant Backblaze would automatically replace old versions when new ones arrived. It doesn’t work that way.

Cloud

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The Tymscar Blog 2 months ago

I Tried Gleam for Advent of Code, and I Get the Hype

I do Advent of Code every year. For the last seven years, including this one, I have managed to get all the stars. I do not say that to brag. I say it because it explains why I keep coming back. It is one of the few tech traditions I never get bored of, even after doing it for a long time. I like the time pressure. I like the community vibe. I like that every December I can pick one language and go all in.

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The Tymscar Blog 3 months ago

Imgur Geo-Blocked the UK, So I Geo-Unblocked My Entire Network

Imgur decided to block UK users. Honestly? I don’t really care that much. I haven’t actively browsed the site in years. But it used to be everywhere. Back when Reddit embedded everything on Imgur, maybe fifteen years ago, it was genuinely useful. Then Reddit built their own image hosting, Discord did the same, and Imgur slowly faded into the background. Except it never fully disappeared. And since the block, I keep stumbling across Imgur links that just show “unavailable.” It’s mildly infuriating.

Web Development

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The Tymscar Blog 3 months ago

OpenAI Demo'd Fixing Issue #2472 Live. It's Still Open.

During OpenAI’s GPT-5 launch event, they demoed the model’s ability to fix real bugs in production code. Live on stage. In their own repository. The kind of demo that makes CTOs reach for their credit cards and engineers nervously update their resumes. There’s just one small problem: the fix they promised to merge “right after the show” is still sitting there, unmerged, three and a half months later. At exactly 1 hour and 7 minutes into their launch video, they started working on issue #2472 in their openai-python repository.

AI

Python

Open Source

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The Tymscar Blog 4 months ago

From 400 Mbps to 1.7 Gbps: A WiFi 7 Debugging Journey

I recently upgraded from a UniFi Dream Machine to a UniFi Dream Router 7 because I’m getting 2.5 Gbps internet in two weeks and figured I’d jump on the WiFi 7 bandwagon while I’m at it. My iPhone 17 Pro Max supports it, so why not? After setting everything up, I was getting nowhere near the speeds I expected. Time for some debugging. My wired connection was pulling 950 Mbps through a 1 Gbps switch, and iperf3 directly to the UDR7’s 2.5 Gbps port showed around 2.3 Gbps. The backbone was solid. But on WiFi 7 (6 GHz, 160 MHz width), standing literally a foot from the router, I was getting around 400 Mbps with iperf3. With 10 concurrent streams it went up to 650 Mbps, but that’s still pathetic.

Performance

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The Tymscar Blog 5 months ago

When Curl Works But IntelliJ Doesn’t: The Ollama Connection Mystery

I run a bunch of internal services through Traefik on my LAN, each with a proper domain name and TLS, so I don’t have to remember ports. One of them is Ollama, sitting on a beefy gaming PC at and exposed as . From the terminal everything behaved exactly as expected: fast responses, certificate valid, models listed. Then IntelliJ IDEA decided this host basically didn’t exist. The “Test Connection” button just said “Failed to connect”. No detail. No hint. Just a smug little red failure.

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The Tymscar Blog 6 months ago

I washed my Yubikey twice by accident. Here's how I saved it both times.

For the past five years, my Yubikey has been my digital companion. Every single day, I use it to sign my Git commits, authenticate into countless websites, and secure my most important accounts. It’s become such an integral part of my workflow that I barely think about it, until it’s not there. A couple of years ago, I made the classic mistake of leaving it in my jeans pocket before throwing them in the washing machine. When I discovered it hours later, soaking wet and seemingly lifeless, I thought I’d lost everything. But I managed to save it using a technique I’d learned from dealing with other water-damaged electronics.

Security

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The Tymscar Blog 6 months ago

Running OpenAI's GPT-OSS locally: the good, the bad, and the loopy

OpenAI recently launched something I didn’t expect to see from them: an open source model called GPT-OSS . After years of keeping their models locked behind APIs, they’ve finally released both 20 billion and 120 billion parameter models that you can run entirely on your own hardware. Both can run on consumer grade hardware, but realistically most people would go with the 20 billion model since it fully fits into 16 gigs of VRAM on a GPU, which is why I went with that one as well.

AI

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The Tymscar Blog 8 months ago

Public Dotfiles, Private Secrets: My Nix OS Docker Workflow

For the longest time I ran every container in my homelab on Proxmox. It did the job, but because I use NixOS on my main workstation and NixDarwin on my laptop, I eventually wanted the lab to follow the same declarative model. A few months ago I switched those machines to NixOS as well. Everything went smoothly except for one thing: moving the containers themselves. The problem was secrets. I keep my entire configuration, including the lab, in a public dotfiles repository . Many of the containers need tokens such as Cloudflare, API keys, you name it, that obviously must not end up on GitHub. Every time I sat down to migrate the stack I put it off for this single reason.

Security

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The Tymscar Blog 10 months ago

Using Nix to build JS/TS projects with private dependencies

Nix is a great tool for building software, especially in professional settings because of the guarantees it comes with. For example, you can be sure that the software you build is reproducible and that it will work on any machine. When it comes to building packages in the Nix world, you usually end up going with derivation builders already made for you. For Rust there is , for Go there is , for JS/TS there is , and so on.

TypeScript

Rust

JavaScript

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The Tymscar Blog 1 years ago

How to fix static noise on macOS headphones

A bit over a year ago, I bought a pair of Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro headphones. They are amazing for what I need—they work great over 2.4 GHz, so I don’t experience noticeable latency like with Bluetooth, and I can connect four devices to the base station simultaneously. This is something I do daily when working on multiple computers. I never had any issues until I connected them to a Mac mini with an M2 processor. After an indeterminate amount of time, static noise started coming out of the headphones, getting progressively louder until they became unusable. Rebooting the headphones didn’t help, nor did changing the output device to something else and back again. If I hadn’t used them successfully on other devices, I would have assumed they were broken.

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The Tymscar Blog 1 years ago

I wrote my Vision Pro killer app (Script Anchor)

For 15 years, I’ve been captivated by the possibilities of VR/AR. It all became real when I held my first Google Cardboard at Google I/O 2015—here’s the moment captured: My professional and personal life has been deeply intertwined with virtual reality. I spent five fulfilling years harnessing VR’s potential at JLR, and for my Bachelor of Science First Class Honours degree at BCU, I pioneered an augmented reality project that allowed users to overlay virtual attractions onto the real world. Even outside of work, I’ve remained an avid VR enthusiast, frequently engaging with the best headsets out there, from the industry-celebrated Microsoft Hololens to the impressive capabilities of the less known Pimax 8K.

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The Tymscar Blog 1 years ago

Simulating soapy water

Do you ever just scroll mindlessly online and stumble upon a satisfying video about physics and you can’t help but have that urge to reproduce it in code? No, just me? Well perhaps this blogpost isn’t for you then. Otherwise, buckle up! The experiment that caught my eye this time around was this video of a plate of water, with some pepper sprinkled on top uniformly, that when touched with a soapy finger, makes the pepper repel.

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The Tymscar Blog 2 years ago

How to fix WSL2 crashing mid compile (Or any heavy IO)

Reminiscing with some friends about how long the compile times were on Gentoo back in the day when we used it, I got curious about how long it would take to compile Chromium today in WSL2 on an i9 13900KF CPU . Back then, it used to take well over a day on my i5 3470 . All you have to do to compile Chromium is follow the official Google build instructions here :

Tutorial

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The Tymscar Blog 2 years ago

Critical Alert - Tech Industry Must Act on Job Market Chaos!

This blog post is a call to action, urging reform in the tech recruitment process. It’s a shared struggle, demanding change for a more efficient and promising future in our industry. In the tech recruiting scene, a significant emphasis is placed on writing personalized cover letters. However, these letters, requiring genuine and thoughtful effort, are time-intensive to compose, sometimes demanding as much time as a full-time job, just for a chance at being noticed.

Business

Career

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The Tymscar Blog 2 years ago

Playing around with Gaussian Splat

Photogrammetry has held my interest for a very long time. After all, my profile picture , almost everywhere, is a LiDAR scan of my head that I accomplished with the FaceID of an old iPhone about five years ago. Recently, I stumbled upon a new paper about something called Gaussian Splatting . This topic is fascinating because, instead of creating a 3D mesh, it more closely resembles a point cloud that is expanded and shaped in such a way that it looks highly realistic. One usecase that interests me in particular is bringing these in as VR backdrops.

AI

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The Tymscar Blog 2 years ago

How I deploy private GitHub projects to local self-hosted servers (CI/CD)

I have a lot of experience with massive CI/CD pipelines that deploy private code to public servers. I’ve also worked with pipelines that deploy public repositories to private servers, such as my homelab. However, I never experimented with a pipeline that takes a private GitHub repo, builds it, and deploys it to a server on the LAN. That’s precisely what I needed for a project I’m currently working on that isn’t yet public.

Ci Cd

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The Tymscar Blog 2 years ago

Running Jetbrains remote dev servers on NixOS

EDIT: I have raised a PR to fix this upstream and got it merged, so you don’t have to follow the guide anymore, you can just use the package on nixpkgs unstable for the time being and later on in the future, a stable branch. For the past year or so I have been very interested in NixOS and Nix in general. I have set it up as my main OS on my desktop , I have used it on remote VPS instances, and I have used it for local projects as well in the shape of nix environments.

Open Source

Tutorial

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The Tymscar Blog 4 years ago

Hack The Midlands CTF 2021

HackTheMidlands is a 24-hour hackathon, or “creative marathon”, which was founded in 2016. I used to participate back in the day, and I’ve even won a prize before, here you can find a video about it! 📷 Being a programmer at heart I’ve never played seriously with capture the flag challenges before, but because I am busy with work I did not have the time and energy to participate in the coding part of the hackathon, so I thought I’ll give the CTF a try! It was a lot of fun for someone starting out with CTFs but with a good grasp of systems, programming, and web development!