gbl08ma.com on gbl08ma's personal website

[2026 editor’s note: WhatsApp would add E2EE in 2016, but by that point, they had already been acquired by Facebook.

I know as much as you do, judging by these visitor analytics.

If you see something, say something.

Internet connections can be difficult to come by; fortunately, compilers don’t run in the cloud.

Featuring proof of the value of backups.

I felt the previous theme was a bit too white-ish so I changed to another one.

I’m sure nothing will go wrong with using this undocumented FAT partition… of this undocumented cheap Android tablet…

My most profitable blog post ever. [2026 editor’s note: to the question of whether I sold, I’ll leave you to ponder what’s the most likely answer.]

Hopefully, this time it will stick around. [2026 editor’s note: it would only shut down in January 2025, when the overhead of dealing with service abuse became unbearable]

Apologies (again), a promise, and a tease.

It’s a late announcement of a tightly coupled feature in disguise.

Musings about the semantics of “liking” things. [2026 editor’s note: and we barely knew what things people would do for likes…]

After some late-night Wordpress reinstalling.

From one weird home to another. [2026 editor’s note: and that wouldn’t be the final destination of this URL shortener…]

The harsh reality of depending on someone else’s domains.

All volunteer-run projects deserve some quiet time, after all.

It turns out they’re still going somewhere.

[2026 editor’s note: the use of the verb “warn” in this post is a good showcase of the differences between English and idiomatic Portuguese…]

microSD cards posing as internal NAND flash can be a boon for DIY repairs.

Why bother supporting a standardized authentication method, to only allow the use of specific authentication providers?

Ho, ho, and ouch, my tablet broke.

Somehow, drama ensues.

Delicious hardware. [2026 editor’s note: as we all know today, I was right.

Yes, this thing is on.

[2026 editor’s note: apparently I exchanged DMs with Liz Upton and I didn’t remember?!?]

Pick-and-choose.

A bleeding edge reverse proxy, for a boring old site. [2026 editor’s note: it’s using Caddy now.

May you live in, etc.

An early birthday gift.

I can’t believe this open source, volunteer-run project doesn’t reach its goals as quickly as I’d like!

Moving my posts to a not-as-shady home.

e-begging for nerds.

I’m sure it’s reasonable to ask for extreme granularity when banning malicious URLs!

Looking back on what changed in just four years.

Modern-ish software for aging operating systems running on obsolete hardware. [2026 editor’s note: to connect to a music streaming service that’s now defunct, I think?]

Where I realize that ‘apps’ are more fashionable than ‘websites.’

Sorting… people… into… bags?

Technology stack update resulting in the tragic loss of IE6 support.

[2026 editor’s note: I’d never have learned Linux if I didn’t have to reconfigure my servers every other month during my teenage years!]

I sure hope this airtight separation of Internet identities and real-life identities will continue forever!

Where I continue to act surprised that the entirety of someone else’s top-level domain is treated the same when it comes to web security.

The cries of someone yet to discover Arch.

Proof that before “the YouTube algorithm” we had “Search Engine Optimization,” but the sentiment was the same.

Reverse-proxying my frustrations with compatibility.

Ranting about an extremely annoying UX pattern. [2026 editor’s note: that annoys me just as much today as back then.]

What an achievement.

[2026 editor’s note: in retrospective, it must have been the quality of my writing.]

Frustrations with choices made by others. [2026 editor’s note: consider that Windows 11 hadn’t even come out!

Where I confuse Unity, the desktop environment, with Ubiquity, the Ubuntu installer.

Someone is delighted by newfound freedom.