Rambling Writings

YouTube now adds a query parameter that discloses who shared a video. This is annoying, but thankfully there's a userscript that sanitizes and strips the tracking info from the URL.

You've almost certainly encountered Conventional Commits before. It may have reared its ugly head in the changelog of an open source project you've used. It may have been the enforced commit format for an open source project you contributed to. A lot of people swear by it. I swear at it. Even though it is used by a large number of popular open source

I really don't get Docker volumes over bind mounts. Docker says they're easier to backup/migrate over bind mounts1, but I don't understand how rsyncing a single directory that contains everything is supposed to be harder than doing whatever this series of commands are in their documentation. To me, Docker volumes make sense when you're dealing with temporary data, such as a cache. Or when you're needing to process data before making it permanent. Something like a /tmp. docker compose down…

Sonatype's Nexus is an artifact repository for a variety of formats (e.g., Maven, npm, Nuget, etc.), but I use it primarily for Docker. I cache all the images that I use1 not only for speed but also to keep a copy that I can control the life of. Once it's set up, it usually enters into that "forget it" step. However for dumb-dumb reasons of my own doing, I needed to re-configure my install. I ran into this last time, and I ran into it again this time. For a hot minute, I could not login to the…

With Home Assistant announcing that infrared is now "becoming a first-class citizen", this guide may become defunct quickly. I personally wouldn't mind that because this required more setup than I would've liked. I've been doing home automation stuff since at least 2012, cutting my teeth with X10 devices. Home automation has come a long way since then, and I've been happily using a Home Assistant Yellow (RIP) since around September 2024. The Yellow supports Zigbee and Bluetooth out-of-the-box,…

It's kind of wonderful to me that the Earthrise photo was a bit of a mistake. And they had to scramble to get that color film into the camera. And, at the same time, the fact that we got to see this perfect eclipse from space, this sci-fi view of something that we've never seen anything like before. Also, was not, like- we didn't plan the mission to be able to take that photo or anything; that's just a thing we got lucky enough to get. But in all of these cases, I think it's really importan...

That dismissal didn't sit right with me. So, a few days later, I decided to check the code myself. On the surface, it looked clean, even polished. But then I saw that line. A single, innocuous-looking database query. The AI had constructed it in a way that was wide open to a classic SQL Injection attack. Alex's tests, done with "normal" fake user data, passed perfectly. But a malicious actor could have wiped their entire user database with a single, cleverly crafted request. The code worked...