raudette's comments

On: Turning a Bluetooth device into an Apple AirTag without root privileges

[raudette]

Yeah - this is really really cool, but if you have code running on the target device, why relay its location via FindMy? If you are already talking to an external server to get pre-computed keys, there are easier ways to share location than FindMy… I guess if the target device doesn’t have GPS, FindMy does get you closer than other geolocation methods.

[rahimnathwani → raudette]

Yes, not having GPS is one reason. The other one (less good) is that you can continue to track the device even when it has no network connection (as long as it's turned on and near an iPhone).

But there probably aren't many situations where someone has a network-enabled device turned on, disconnected from the network, but in range of at least one iPhone that has a network connection. Perhaps on a plane?

On: Amazon now discloses you're buying a license to view Kindle eBooks

[raudette]

When Microsoft shut down its eBook store, you could no longer read the eBooks you purchased. They did refund their customers. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367

Also, there are examples where a company arbitrarily changes its DRM - like when Microsoft launched its Zune media player, it wouldn't play their own "Plays For Sure" DRM music - they just dropped support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure

On: Apple Debuts iPhone 16e

[raudette]

Ultimately, one of the cameras in my iPhone 7 failed, and I replaced it with an SE3 - which was indistinguishable from the 7 - but another issue was patches.

With very little skill, I found I could duplicate this issue on my iPhone 7 running the latest supported version of iOS: https://joshua.hu/apple-ios-patched-unpatched-vulnerabilitie...

On: Amazon is closing USB access in Kindle that made it easy to remove DRM

[raudette]

I was interested in a self published book that was only made available by its author on Kindle. I actually bought a used Kindle solely to remove the DRM from the content I bought from Amazon using this method. Then I could read the content on my preferred reader.

I ended up doing this with a few books. The Kindle ended up getting used by others in the family.

On: Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog

[raudette]

I maintain a blog that I write myself, and a blogging bot on a separate site/domain, which I run as an exercise/sandbox.

They both get traffic. Neither site is optimised for SEO. Looking at analytics (Matomo on my blog, Google Analytics for the bot), the stuff I write myself gets "real" visitors. People will stumble on a project, and you can see them navigate to the next article, and the next article.

The content from the bot isn't engaging - people might stumble on it, then bounce.

Absent search, interesting content gets shared. Blog spam does not.

I don't worry too much about my content being used to train LLMs - I don't feel it takes away from me, it a bit feels like content getting indexed by a search engine. And I see value, for me, in just creating it.

On: Migrating Away from Bcachefs

[raudette]

I ran a very small personal webserver with limited storage on Ubuntu on EC2 for a while.

The EC2 instance, likely the smallest configuration available at the time, hit an inode limit just running updates over time.

[Dylan16807 → raudette]

Super small drives are a special case for sure. You don't want to go below a certain number of inodes even on a 5GB root, but you also don't want to scale that up 50x on a 250GB root.

[starspangled → Dylan16807]

Why are super small drives a special case? It's still the same data to inode ratio.

[Dylan16807 → starspangled]

There's a lot of small files that come with your typical OS install, going into the first handfuls of gigabytes.

When you add on another terabyte, the distribution is totally different. The files are much bigger.

[starspangled → Dylan16807]

Right, so it's entirely about usage rather than filesystem size.

[Dylan16807 → starspangled]

Different sizes have different uses.

On: Show HN: I made a service to convert WordPress blogs to Hugo

[raudette]

I actually did write this up if it helps anyone... I did something similar, my WordPress site only had ~100 pages, so I just put the page map in a table in the js: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/something-mildly-different/ (my ?p=### script is near the bottom)

On: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

[raudette]

I wrote an article on how to resolve ink blobs smearing onto a page for Epson Expression printers years ago - just based on the people who've written me (which is just a fraction of the number that have found and viewed the page), I've extended the life of many Epson printers.

On: All the data can be yours: reverse engineering APIs

[raudette]

A technique not covered here is setting up a wifi hotspot to impersonate a device. I wanted to reverse engineer the protocol used by an inexpensive action camera. I ran the Android app through a decompiler (JADX), and the app supported many different types of cameras, so it wasn't clear which calls were related to the one I owned.

So I setup a Raspberry Pi with the SSID as the camera, logged the first API call. Then I ran that API against the camera, and then wrote a small python script on the Pi to return the same API result. I did that call by call until I'd worked everything out. I wrote it up here: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/reverse-engineer-akaso-ek7000/

On: Wp2hugo: Best WordPress to Hugo migrator (written in Go)

[raudette]

Last year, I moved my small WordPress blog (~100 posts) to Hugo, and tested a couple of these - I can't remember if I tried Wp2hugo, but ended up using wordpress-export-to-markdown ( https://github.com/lonekorean/wordpress-export-to-markdown ).

I probably could have tweaked it for my own purposes, but with only 100 posts, I just reviewed every one. It probably took me a few evenings to get everything looking right following the conversion.