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bigiain

23,843 karma · joined March 26, 2009

(Note: historically accurate "about" from early 2009. Preserved for lulz…)

Mobile, mobile web, business analysis, rapid web/mobile prototyping. Tech Director (according to my business cards).

But _really_ microcontroller toy/art projects (Arduino/RaspberryPi), radio and/or computer controlled flying things (slope soarers, gliders, electric drones, and quadcopters), motorcycles (a Ducati Monster and a Honda Spada), and coffee (mostly espresso, not such a big fan of pourover/syphon/aeropress).

From Sydney, Australia.

twitter: @iain_chalmers | bigiain@mightymedia.com.au

(GPG fingerprint: F1DE F002 29F0 9955 F1E6 141D 9E2C BE9E 4322 63ED)

submissionscomments
bigiain··on I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc
I reckon there's a decent argument to be made that an authorization to scan *.tesla.com definitively does NOT extend to any hosts resolved via a CNAME chain that goes foo.tesla.com -> bah.not-tesla.com -> host-that-never-authorized-attacking.
bigiain··on Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
I'm guessing that maybe 4 of them maintain that in their "20% time", while the 99,996 other engineers are:

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." -Jeff Hammerbacher

bigiain··on ESP32 Bit Pirate Hardware Hacking Kit with Web Tools That Speaks Every Protocol
They still run Macintosh System 7 with wireless AppleTalk, right?
bigiain··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
I agree, but there's still a big "Why now?" question in my head. I suspect the board knows of something even more spectacularly stupid he's about to do.
bigiain··on Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
leftpad
bigiain··on Fine, I'll build my own text editor
I was hoping for this to end with "I wrote emacs, and Karl wrote vi."
bigiain··on It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
"Only works with Juicero brand C cells."
bigiain··on What will be left for us to work on
There's a reasonable argument to be made that people who talk big game already dominate.
bigiain··on Dolly Parton has died
Within her family friendly choice of language, she wasn't shy of making jokes about her own appearance:

“I make jokes about it, but it's the truth that I kind of patterned my look after the town tramp. I didn't know what she was, just this woman who was blond and piled her hair up, wore high heels and tight skirts, and, boy, she was the prettiest thing I'd ever seen. Momma used to say, "Aw, she's just trash," and I thought, That's what I want to be when I grow up. Trash.”

and:

"It costs a lot of money to look this cheap"

bigiain··on Malware infects Android-based automotive head unit firmware
> we would have to assume the vendor's update server was compromised

You say "compromised". I say "monetised".

:sigh:

bigiain··on The August 17 outage
Some guy, profiling his linux distro, wonders why ssh connections are a few hundred milliseconds slower than expected, finds there PR introduced and RCE backdoor and p0wns the whole project.
bigiain··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
> Why this word

Because an AI company made their LLM "roll a dice" that was loaded in a specific way to choose that word, so they could claim ownership of your document later.

:sigh:

bigiain··on What Happened to HackerOne?
I wonder if that's the golden handcuffed founder equivalent of blinking out SOS in morse code?
bigiain··on What Happened to HackerOne?
Yep.

It can be power - see Reddit and Wikipedia mods - but it's usually money. And once VC fundraising is involved, it's pretty much always money.

bigiain··on Mea Culpa – Dark Hours
Every staff member with a ChatGPT account gets a complimentary promotion to CISO...
bigiain··on Decimen Optical Transfer: fountain-coded QR file transfer
I had a Timex Data Watch over 30 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink

It'd transfer phone numbers and calendar entries to the watch by blinking the screen of your computer. Kinda a 1 pixel version of this.

(I wonder where that ended up? From memory I threw it in a drawer when I finished the Windows 95 project I'd been working on, and switched to Mac. There was no Mac software to talk to it.)

bigiain··on Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick
I remember asking a chippie (carpenter tradesman) a while back why he was using Ozito brand power tools (the cheapest Chinese brand from the local tool barn). He said "The good gear like Milwaukee and Makita last years. The cheap Chinese junk lasts maybe six months. Whatever I buy it gets stolen about every 3 months. I'd rather have a spare $40 drill waiting at home when my van gets broken into, than have to go buy another $600 Milwaukee one that I'd otherwise rather be using."
bigiain··on The coolest use for the Vision Pro
Your legless manager in the daily Workrooms stand^h^h^h^h^floatup glares at you.
bigiain··on Did they ghost you?
Nah, she got the job. And that lead to her next even better one. Now I'd need something to go spectacularly right for me to be able to afford to head hunt her.

(We still catch up for coffee every 6 or 12 months.)

bigiain··on An ESP32 based plane radar for my desk
Gotta admit that's what I clicked through hoping for.

I've seen a few projects that use SDR to detect doppler shifts of reflections of broadcast FM radio station off planes as "passive radar". But that doesn't get much in the way of direction info, just approach velocity. I've pondered building something that uses that and correlates it with an ADS-B receiver, to see it it can detect aircraft that are not transmitting ADS-B. But that'd get me on another "list" if I published it I suspect...

This is not the project I remember, but it's the same idea and technique: https://github.com/Max-Manning/passiveRadar

bigiain··on Did they ghost you?
It's always worth considering whether you have people who will give you genuine glowing references.

I've only ever once been at a place where there was a policy saying "all you are allowed to say during reference checks is "yes, they worked here as [job title], from {month/year} to {month/year}". And even with that policy/restriction I still found ways to be much much more positive about the people who were genuinely great.

One great way around that kind of policy - at least if you far enough into your career for it - is to provided references for people who are also no longer at the company they're being a referee for. There are 3 or 4 people from that job I mentioned that didn't allow me to elaborate, where I've subsequently provided reference including something like "Ratica? Yeah - she is great! She lead my QA team and worked magic! You might want to warn the company she's applying to that as soon as I get a role and budget that suits her QA skills, I'll 100% be trying to headhunt her away from them."

bigiain··on An ESP32 based plane radar for my desk
Using ADS-B and calling it a "radar" feels wrong to me.

(But is is a cool project)

bigiain··on The Beam Engine
One of my treasured toys - probably from a few years older than your 3 year old though - was a rocking cylinder steam engine my father gave me. It was a present from his father as part of a steam powered boat they built together probably in the late 1940s.

Something similar to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillating_cylinder_steam_eng...

And you can still get them reasonably inexpensively: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007964198565.html

I bought one for a friend's 5 year old a while back and became BEST UNCLE EVER!

The run well on compressed air (like an electric car tyre inflator or small air compressor), or for a bit more high temperature danger they run great attached to the steam wand of an espresso machine. When I was a kid dad built me a steam boiler out of a steal aerosol can and some copper tubing with a folded brass sheetmetal alcohol burner. That's not a 5 year old friendly thing though, from memory I'd have been maybe 10 or 12 when he started letting my light alcohol on fire in that garage or backyard. (Modern parenting may disapprove...)

bigiain··on Making
'If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe' -- Carl Sagan
bigiain··on Making
> I find "make" potentially confusing with AI-assisted projects.

I'm feeling this right now. I have a working prototype of a project that has mirrors mounted on pan/tilt mechanisms driven by servos and controlled by an Arduino. I modeled the mirror mechanisms myself in OpenSCAD and 3D printed them, I laid out the wiring from my head, I assembled everything by hand. But I got Codex to write the Arduino code that uses a GPS module to get the location and time, calculates the sun position, and (with some manual calibration) aims the mirrors to beam sunlight 'pixels' in an x/z grid on the wall.

It works. But for some reason it's profoundly unsatisfying. I'm very unlikely to go from this 4 mirror prototype to the original dream of a James Web Space Telescope model in my courtyard with 18 steerable mirrors drawing low res 1 bit pixel art on my dining room wall.

bigiain··on “We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”
The C in DMCA stand for Copyright. All (I think?) software licenses are underpinned and made legally enforceable by copyrights. EULAs are underpinned by licenses which are founded on copyright. Patents are the only one of those protections that are not based on copyright, and there are lots of very good arguments against at least most software patents (all software patents of the form "Do {well known and obvious thing} with a computer" should, in my opinion, be immediately revoked and potentially have every company who's enforced payments from such patents investigated for fraud).
bigiain··on GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims
The cheapest option, Pixel 10, costs $1349 from Google, they want $1990 (in Australian Dollars, that's about $940 and $1390 in USD)

So not quite a 50% markup on the bard phone, not quite as bad as 4x.

And while I'd feel like a jerk if I asked for money helping someone at risk of DV setting this up, if I was doing it as a business with the mandatory warranty and support this'd need to include in Australia, I think that's expensive but probably fair?

bigiain··on GrapheneOS recommended for domestic abuse victims
The website also says:

"Australian research shows that 99% of domestic violence cases now involve some form of technology-facilitated abuse."

Where the "Australian research" is linked to a page where the first Key Finding states:

"Over one quarter (27%) of domestic violence cases involve technology-facilitated abuse of children."

Doesn't fill me with confidence in anything they say (even if I do believe the advice is right).

bigiain··on An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation
> a badly configured scraping setup?

Cynical-me assumes every single AI company is vibe-coding everything, and _all_ their scrapers are as badly written as the typical publicly available scraper code and tutorial - mostly written by self promoting spammers and SEO "experts" in the late 2010s.

Any they all DGAF about wasting website owners server/network resources, of the CPU and network resources of the "dumb schmucks" who have a free vpn installed or a factory-hacked cheapo media box or mobile game the developer has surreptitiously monetised with a residential proxy sdk.

It also wouldn't surprise me at all to find there are dozens of competing training data acquisition teams at every frontier and wannabe frontier AI company - scraping the entire web in parallel to meet internal KPIs. Half of which have lost entire datasets due to vibe coded storage and archive setups.

bigiain··on QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall
Is there a decent rule of thumb about how this style of antenna scales with frequency?

I'd kinda like something like this that could do 2.4GHz, 850-950MHz and even down as low as 400MHz.

Would by uneducated guess that 2.4GHz antennas would be twice the size, 900MHz about 6 times the size, and 400MHz about 10 times the size?

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