Tech

Build Your Own GitHub Codespaces With the Windows OpenSSH Server

GitHub recently made Codespaces available to every GitHub user, and they’ve been getting rave reviews. Like a digital petting zoo in the cloud, a Codespace is a virtual machine built just for programming that you can access through any ordinary web browser. Code on your ultrabook, your iPad, even your phone; it’s easy to see the appeal. The promise of...

A Farewell to Arms: Why I’m Quitting Linux on the Desktop

It goes without saying that 2020 has been the year of the inconceivable. And to top it all off, after daily driving Linux on my laptop for nearly a decade, I just switched back to Windows!

Let me explain—it’s not as if I’ve given up on the Penguin OS entirely. My servers and routers continue to run Linux, delivering funny...

How to Fix Grandma’s Network on Verizon FiOS

In my family, the person with the fastest Internet connection is… Grandma, a Vietnam War refugee who has never used a computer in her life. This is by virtue of her residence on a main road in the great state of Delaware, which gets fiber TV and Internet service through Verizon FiOS. She subscribes to the cheapest Internet plan so...

The 30-Second WebRTC Guide

(Web technology changes fast! Mind the date this post was written, which was November 2019.)

I get the feeling nobody uses WebRTC in the real world, since all of the tutorials use the same toy examples that don’t involve any actual network connectivity. That’s a shame, because WebRTC makes peer-to-peer communication a cakewalk. Somewhere in our imaginations, there’s a whole...

Introducing Sia Slice, My Absurdly Cheap Block Storage Solution

I dabble in cryptocurrencies, occasionally. I hesitate to get too partisan on a subject the Internet takes very seriously, but it seems to me that the fairest judge of a coin’s...

How to Assign IPv6 Addresses to LXD Containers on a VPS

This post was rewritten on July 26, 2019 to incorporate a cleaner solution. The original version can be viewed here.

LXD is my favorite containerization stack. For my use case, which is running various services on the same machine with isolated root filesystems, it’s more flexible and easier to use than Docker, particularly in terms of networking capabilities.

Using...

My VGA Passthrough Notes

Introduction: What is VGA passthrough?

Answer: Attaching a graphics card to a Windows virtual machine, on a Linux host, for near-native graphical performance. This is evolving technology.

This post reflects my experience running my VGA passthrough setup for several years. It is not intended as a complete step-by-step guide, but rather a collection of notes to supplement the existing...

Print Your Stuff from the Terminal with utprint.py

Recently — in the spring of 2016, I believe — the UT Austin libraries rolled out a new printing system that allows students and staff to upload documents via a web interface. This was a huge deal to me because previously, I had to get off my laptop and sign in to a library computer to print things.

Hacking Piazza with Cross-Site Scripting

Piazza is a free classroom discussion service marketed for science and mathematics classes. It is best described as a hybrid wiki and forum; students can post questions, and other students can collaborate on answers. Like WordPress, content can be formatted with a rich-text editor or with plain HTML with a restricted set of features. Piazza’s distinguishing feature is the...