Mendhak / Code

While researching topics around relatively niche subjects, mostly cats, I’ve needed to access certain websites that block traffic from the UK, namely imgur and civitai.

Although I enjoy reading, having no mental imagery means that rich, descriptive passages are often lost on me.

I’ve mostly used terminals transactionally; though I don’t avoid them, I’ll usually interact with a terminal window to run a few commands, and get back to what I was doing.

An unfortunate aspect regarding the privacy discourse is how it has been subverted into a set of meaningless soundbites that detract from actual privacy issues.

Undervolting is something I’ve been ignoring for a long time on my GPU.

While Linux is the best environment for development purposes, Windows has been my go-to for gaming and photo processing needs.

Terminal progress indicators are a common sight in command-line applications, often used to show progress of long running tasks and ensuring users don’t get bored.

I have been seeing a number of articles and discussions regarding the decline of Stack Overflow posting activity over the past year.

When running machine learning workloads that require GPU access, it’s usually necessary to have the CUDA toolkit ready.

The most common way to run GitHub Actions is to use the hosted runners provided by GitHub, but these runners don’t have direct access to internal AWS resources such as databases or API/HTTP services in private VPCs.

Traditionally there have been two main ways to deal with having to run Windows applications when using a Linux environment as a daily driver.

Firefox has a chatbot sidebar that can be used to interact with the popular LLM chatbot providers, such as Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.

When working with multiple GitHub organisations, it is common to have to manage multiple SSH keys for git operations.

Since the Linux Terminal app was introduced for Android, I’ve been curious about the possibilities it could open up for personal app development.

Google’s Gemini CLI is command line, context aware assistant: it looks at your current directory, tools, and tries to make helpful suggestions.

My terminal-based text editing almost always occurs in short sessions.

My favourite feature of any mouse that I’ve ever used is the automatic infinite scroll wheel mode.

When my previous office building shut down, I ‘inherited’ a Pi-aware which had been set up many years ago.

I have been looking at using uv for a Python project, and I’m quite satisfied with the productivity and performance it brings to the table for a local development environment.

Feature flags (or toggles) are often used to control the visibility of new features in a product.

Compose keys are a Linux feature that allows you to type special characters.

Domains get blocked for a variety of reasons including security, family controls, content filtering, politics, and legal requirements.

I’ve been seeing some buzz around Sigstore recently, it’s a project that aims to improve software supply chain security by making signing and checking easier.

On Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, the background image that you set for your desktop doesn’t appear on the login screen.

While setting up PiHole on an Ubuntu 24.04 server, I realized that the usual instructions I’d been following for years on Debian systems for setting a static IP address (often involving /etc/network/interfaces or /etc/resolv.conf) weren’t going to work he…

A reverse shell is a type of shell where the target machine (under attack) communicates back to an attacker’s machine, and importantly, gives the attacker control over the target machine.

I’m not a networking professional, but I’ve often had to impersonate one.

When working with certain AWS services that require secure connectivity over TCP, you might run into the dreaded “unable to get local issuer certificate” error.

Returning to photography from a post-pandemic malaise has been an invaluable experience that forced me to re-evaluate my workflow and tools.

I’ve modified my Kobo device to generate images from passages of text that I highlight.

Git 2.34 introduced a new feature: the ability to sign commits using an SSH key instead of just a PGP key.

When the lockdown was announced in March 2020, there was a surge of traffic to online grocery sites.

A really nice quality of life feature I’ve noticed in some applications is the ability to automatically hyperlink some selected text when pasting a URL over it.

GraphQL’s touted advantages are numerous, including data retrieval efficiency, and flexibility that it can enable.

Due to the rapidly changing nature of LLM programming, this tutorial is likely to be outdated.

The most common programmatic interaction with Large Language Models (LLMs) and LLM APIs (ChatGPT, Claude) is to give it some natural language instructions and get a shaped, specific output back.

Due to the rapidly changing nature of the LLM landscape, this post may already be outdated.

As I spend a lot of time on the CLI, I often need to look up commands, even if I’ve used them before.

Common ways of choosing a password manager are to see what everyone else is using, search for what’s popular, or just pick something convenient.

My favorite kind of features are usually ones that let you start simple and still let you build powerfully on top without being overwhelming. .NET’s ConfigurationBuilder being one, is one of my favorite framework features.

There are two ways that websites can offer users a choice between light and dark mode.

I recently switched from a Kindle device to a Kobo Libra 2, and have been playing around with its customization and tweaks.

The common, prevailing advice given regarding TLS certificates is to avoid using wildcard certificates.

I have a simple epaper dashboard project, which displays the time, date, weather and calendar entries.

A rite of passage exists, that after a certain amount of time spent writing on a platform, a blogger feels a need to revamp or migrate to something else.

I used to develop my app solely for the Play Store, until just 2 years ago when I determined that the stress of arbitrary removals had accumulated to an unsustainable level.

Security improvements tend to be a one way street, they are usually implemented in newer versions of operating systems, and by extension, on newer mobile devices.

I prefer running my Torrent (and related tools) in a container, for isolation from my host OS, as well as the ability to route all of its traffic through a VPN.

Due to the rapidly evolving nature of the GenAI ecosystem, the instructions in this post may become outdated as applications are developed, updated, and abandoned.

I have written a script that will attempt to update your Github user profile status with the game currently being played on Steam.