sneela

<et cetera> The biggest takeaway is that you need to have a really fast internet connection, preferably ethernet.

Foreword This blog post is a summarized and introductory write up of our paper recently accepted at ESORICS 2026 to be presented in Rome, Italy between September 14-16, 2026: “A Systematic Look at Quality-of-Service Feature Effects on Side Channels in AMD…

There’s something charming about owning a physical thing that’s yours.

I wanted to have a place on the interwebs to synchronize my KeePass2 database across devices without relying on Dropbox or Google Drive.

<et cetera> I recently bought a film camera (Minolta X-700) and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it!

Got chatgpt to make this command for me: stress-ex: run stress-ng on every logical cpu except the ones listed: so stress-ex 0 2 3, will run stress-ng -c 1 on every cpu except 0,2,3 #!

<rant> I had issues with my internet at home where, every once in a while, I noticed really bad ping spikes on all my devices.

Foreword This blog post is a summarized and introductory write up of our paper recently accepted at NDSS 2026, “Eviction Notice: Reviving and Advancing Page Cache Attacks”.

Backstory My left wrist & forearm has been hurting quite a bit.

Are you freaking sick of having to calculate the TSC frequency on Intel systems?

Finally!

Today morning, I was building an AMD SEV virtual machine from source.

Hack available from: https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/ VSCode General Settings: { "editor.fontFamily": "'Hack', 'IBM Plex Mono', 'Droid Sans Mono', 'monospace', monospace", "editor.fontSize": 16, "editor.rulers": [ 80, 120 ],

No context:

Shell script used for multithreaded pngcrush and removing EXIF data, in one fell swoop.

A covert channel’s true capacity is calculated as: T = C · (1 + (1 − p)·log2(1 − p) + p·log2(p)) Raw Capacity [C]: Bit Error Rate [P] (0 - 100): Compute True Capacity [T] = —

Are you freaking sick of having to calculate the TSC frequency on AMD systems?

<praise> Recently, I found out about the Search and Run a Command function in GIMP, a hidden gem that makes GIMP 10x faster to use because you don’t have to know the location of the specific tool that you’re looking for.

Download file: bibtex-zotero-minimal.csl To add this: Download the file Zotero > Edit > Preferences > Cite Press the “+” button, and add the downloaded file.

<et cetera> I DIDN’T KNOW MARKDOWN SUPPORTED FOOTNOTES1.

<et cetera> I always wondered how discord launches its desktop application when you click on an invite link from the browser.

<praise> During the past few months, I’ve had many, many conversations about why I use PowerPoint.

I needed to add a custom System Request (Sys Req or SysRq) to a linux kernel some time ago.

<rant> When I’m in a cranky mood sometimes (perhaps due to the lack of food), I find the smallest nuisance EXCEEDINGLY annoying.

I had to set up multiple machines with slightly varying configs repeatedly.

<et cetera> As mentioned in I had a brain hiccup with __builtin_parity: Two things: I work with bits often on a daily basis.

<et cetera> I attempted to install something on my Virtual Private Server (VPS) this morning.

<et cetera> I needed a tmux script that launched 2 windows, each with 8 panes.

<et cetera> Two things: I work with bits often on a daily basis.

Foreword If you’ve read my Oct ‘23 ramble, I Made A Game, I partook in a course called Game Design & Development 1.

<rant> I use Zotero, a “free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research” (from their website).

<et cetera> I wanted a pastel color palette with 7 colors, one for each day of the week, for LibreOffice Calc around a year ago.

Foreword: This ramble is largely conjecture.

<et cetera> Caddy (https://caddyserver.com/) is one of the nicest web servers to work with and I’ve been using it since early 2020.

SearXNG For many, many years, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo and I’ve largely been satisfied with it.

<et cetera> Recently, I came across this now-removed meme and it was so stupid-funny that I could NOT stop laughing.

<et cetera> I don’t really like LinkedIn as a social media.

If you want to skip the floof and see the settings to tweak on Firefox, go to Settings to Tweak below.

<praise> Many moons ago, I found out about one of India’s (digital) gems: the Telecom Service Provider’s (TSP) “Do Not Disturb” registry.

<praise> Back in 2017, my parents got me a One Plus 5 and the one feature that made it truly incredible was ⚡ dash charging ⚡ (20 Watts).

<et cetera> For my Game Design & Development 1 course, I made a (pretty dumb) game in Unity: Blobby’s Adventure - https://sneela.itch.io/blobbys-adventure.

Introduction This semester I’m taking Futurology, a course taught by Christian Dayé and Roman Prunc, whose “aim is to enable students to understand and critically reflect on different approaches to futurology as well as the methods and techniques that this

<rant> Why does the Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual [1] use different fonts1 at different places and why is it so hard to read being technical documentation?

<et cetera> I needed a magic number recently and stumbled across this website while looking for all possible words made from the hex characters (abcdef): https://www.litscape.com/word_tools/words_made_from.php.

<et cetera> I recently deleted my swap partition (Debian 12, KDE Plasma) and created a bigger one which led to a change in the UUID of what the swap partition should be.

<et cetera> I bought my Desktop back in 2019 and I’ve made it a point to clean it roughly every six months.

<et cetera> Recently, I bought a pair of funky indoor flip flops as shown in Figure 1.

<et cetera> While doing a bit of ISO flashing recently, I was reminded of November 2019 - a dark moment in history (for me).

<rant> Every once in a while, I need to open Windows.

<praise> I love Flask’s documentation, their User’s Guide, and their API Reference.