Samy's Blog on Samy's blog

AI coding agents run plugins with full system access.

I nearly died.

The Swordless Samurai is the story of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a peasant who rose to the rank of Kampaku or the emperor regent – the most powerful role in the Japanese government of that era.

I genuinely love meeting new people and getting to know them.

TL;DR: A nice and easy fantasy read – the plot is straightforward, and almost predictable which makes it a good choice for a short and healthy form of escape to disconnect from noises of daily life to recharge WARNING – Massive spoilers ahead.

A few months ago I was talking to a few colleagues about books and what’s everyone reading.

One of the reasons I didn’t enjoy writing before was that my brain thinks too fast for my hands.

I recently set up a local Paperless-ngx instance to manage the unending stream of paper documents I have to manage.

Pain is an inevitable part of life, a subscription fee for living and doing things that matter.

I can never have enough of two things: time, and mental energy.

__UPDATE - 22, Sept, 2024 ___ I have received two emails recently, one that said it worked and thanked me for sharing this, and another one that said it did not work for them.

A few days ago Tailscale stopped working on my Mac.

TL;DR Not recommended. 1/10.

I’ve come to realize that regardless of my efforts, my workday is consistently interrupted.

During one of our casual talks over lunch, a friend of mine tossed an interesting thought my way: " We all should listen more to poets, not pros".

This Unending Pursuit of Being Happy A very dear friend of mine recommended “Dopamine Nation” to me not so long ago, almost as if he knew the internal dialogue I was having with myself.

Picture this: It’s 2 am, you’re on your fifth coffee, and you’re up against a deadline that seemed impossible two hours ago.

What a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future Annie Duke Around a year and a half ago, I was working on a critical and time-sensitive project and realized that I was frequently making decisions without fully understanding how I arrived at the…

About six months ago, I decided it was time for a change so I went ahead and looked for a new job.

TL;DR Open the native Mail app on Windows (10 or 11), find the invalid event in the Calendar (bottom left), and delete it from there.

I was recently reviewing an application written in Python for possible security vulnerabilities.

Why did I choose to quit caffeine?

OpenSuse Tumbleweed comes mostly ready for use with YubiKey (Assuming you have already configured your Yubikey before).

TV is like fast food for the brain, easy to grab, easy to absorb, little to no benefits.

We all have done glue work.

Whether you’re working toward a goal, changes are inevitable.

Is it a duck, or a rabbit?

Breaking a rule means having to make an exception.

The Practice: Shipping Creative Work The Practice is by certainly one of the most amazing books I read in the past few years.

SG-1100 is a decent firewall for a home setup, It uses PFSense as its core and has 1 Gbps throughput.

I eventually got tired of ugly fonts, and decided to install a few fonts.

I hear it often Let’s do X because it’s the low hanging fruit.

I was reviewing a huge spaghetti PHP codebase some days back and I needed to have a general understanding of what’s what.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.

I was listening to the Tim Ferris Show podcast where he interviewed Seth Godin .

Manual code review helps with finding vulnerabilities that can stay hidden from automated tools.

Sort your emails by “From” instead of “Date”.

I measured my weight loss progress based on lost pounds.

Most of the world's seven billion people found their destinies largely determined at the moment of birth.

I have a habit of writing about my day in a journal, It’s been a long time since I started doing this and it really paid off.

A while ago I was doing a security review of a web application, I came across a piece of JavaScript code.

A while back ago I was teaching son of a friend about different search and sorting algorithms.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*CK is tiny book compared to all other books in this genre, yet don’t let this tininess fool you.

There are times when you need to find all files that may prove useful for escalating privilege either during penetration testing, forensic analysis or securing a Linux server.

How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Documenting, writing, and thinking.