Weeknotes 111

id Software released the Quake II rerelease game source 🔥

This repository contains the game code for the 2023 rerelease of Quake II

I tried to load some MP3s onto my iPhone this week. What a fiasco. You’d think that the settings would be in the Apple Music app, right? No, they’re in Finder :-/

I’ve noticed certain websites highlighting text when you click through to them from search results but assumed that some weird Javascript was at play, but no! It’s URL Fragment Text Directives as Simon Willison explains in Scroll to text fragments. I’m hoping to take advantage of this new standard here as I often want to link to previous pages but have struggled with Hugo’s inability to generate anchor links.

New acoustic attack steals data from keystrokes with 95% accuracy

Stealing keystrokes by recording the sound they make.

Such an attack severely affects the target’s data security, as it could leak people’s passwords, discussions, messages, or other sensitive information to malicious third parties.

Make sure to hum loudly whilst typing.

Weight loss update. I’ve lost 11.3kg (24lbs) since 4th July. Not bad considering I’ve visited the curry house twice and Burger King once in that time 😉

This week I’ve been experimenting with Tailscale on my home network. It’s been on my radar for a while but I never got around to trying it – it’s very cool.

Every device that you install Tailscale onto becomes part of a virtual private network (courtesy of WireGuard) where each device can talk to one another like they are local to each other. Tailscale is zero config. So far, everything just works. No forwarding ports on your router necessary.

This is really nice if you run services within your network which you’d like to access remotely but you’d rather not expose those services to the Internet.

You can also designate Tailscale nodes as being an “Exit Node” which means that when you’re connected to your tailnet you can choose to route all internet traffic through your chosen Exit Node. If you have an Exit Node inside your home, and connected to your tailnet, you can use this as a replacement for traditional VPN offerings but instead of connecting through your VPN provider’s servers you route traffic through your home internet connection.

Name Checker is a cool little project if you’re thinking of starting something and want to know if the name is already taken.

Downfall Attacks

Downfall attacks targets a critical weakness found in billions of modern processors used in personal and cloud computers. This vulnerability, identified as CVE-2022-40982, enables a user to access and steal data from other users who share the same computer.

For instance, a malicious app obtained from an app store could use the Downfall attack to steal sensitive information like passwords, encryption keys, and private data such as banking details, personal emails, and messages.

I find vulnerabilities in CPUs fascinating. The fact that this is in hardware is scary. No rolling out patches for this software. I guess you can workaround it in userspace? I don’t know.

zfs.rent is neat. An online backup service where you can send zfs snapshots. I love the website. This is the web I want.

I usually use fast.com from Netflix to test Internet speeds but I became aware of Cloudflare’s Speed Test this week and it’s much more comprehensive. Not necessarily better, but it has more information.

Supabase are working on a LSP for Postgres.

The side project has seen some action. I’m trying to let perfection go in the name of progress.

The way that IRB’s configuration files do not stack is annoying. Sometimes a project I’m working on will have project specific irb file in order to provide domain specific helpers etc, but if you have an ~/.irbrc like I do it will be ignored.

IRB reads a personal initialization file when it’s invoked. IRB
searches a file in the following order and loads the first one
found.

- $IRBRC (if $IRBRC is set)
- $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/irb/irbrc (if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set)
- ~/.irbrc
- .config/irb/irbrc
- .irbrc
- irb.rc
- _irbrc
- $irbrc

I realised this week that I can export a IRBRC environment variable pointing to the irbrc file I want, but I still can’t stack them, which is a shame.

What if you need to know what your external IP address? https://icanhazip.com/ is a curl away. There’s a nice write up of it’s history by it’s creator Major Hayden.

In 2021, the traffic I once received in a month started arriving in 24 hours. The site went from a billion requests per day to 30-35 billion requests per day over a weekend.

This is a crazy amount of traffic from something that return an IP address as text.