[DRAFT] Finite fields for mortal comprehension

So you've got the “natural numbers”, $\mathbb{N}=\left\{0, 1, 2, \dots\right\}$. Or the “counting numbers”, or whatever you want to call them. Addition works, and multiplication works. But subtraction is broken, because there isn't any natural number equal to $2-3$. We might think about fixing subtraction, and one way of doing this is by moving to the integers, which allows negative numbers: $\mathbb{Z}=\left\{\dots, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, \dots\right\}$. But …

Firefox: play videos on Rocky Linux / Red Hat 9

Red Hat / Rocky Linux doesn't include patent-encumbered video codecs out of the box, so sudo dnf install \ "https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/el/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E '%rhel').noarch.rpm" \ "https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/el/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E '%rhel').noarch.rpm" \ && \ sudo dnf install ffmpeg I didn't even need to restart Firefox afterwards; it just all seemed to start working immediately

Rocky Linux 9 & HP Elitebook 8470p

Annoyingly, the Rocky 9 installer ISO didn't come with the Wi-Fi drivers for my HP Elitebook 8470p. The laptop seems to have a “Intel Corporation Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (rev 3e)” PCIe Wi-Fi adapter, which worked fine out-of-the-box on Ubuntu and every other distro I tried on it, but not this one. I diagnosed this via dmesg: [ 108.888963] Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux [ 108.889046] iwlwifi 0000:25:00.0: enabling …

Attempt to recover Amazon Seller account linked to old phone number

tl;dr: actual human seller support is NOT available over email or phone; it's ONLY available through a portal that you can access if you're already logged in. If you can't access your account, you're just *screwed*. I'm posting this not to help anyone per se, but more as a scream into the void about Amazon's worthless Seller Support representatives. 8 months and 14 days after the day my account …

[DRAFT] Transcript: Babylon Bee congress testimony March 28 2023

(Personally, I think TBB is dead wrong here, and their opinion is actually dangerous. I’m unconvinced that UGC-centric websites should or even CAN be regulated like a utility. Dillon’s redactive quoting of §230 in the closing remark belies bad faith. I’m leaving this post tagged as “draft” because I haven't properly expressed my thoughts here, but I am archiving Dillon’s statement in full because I had a seriously hard …

Edgar Allan Poe Proves Stockfish Can't Exist

A summary of Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelzel’s Chess-Player. §1–§4, §6–10, §11–14, and §15–18 describe the physical appearance, (public) operation, and cultural/historical context of the chess robot; §5 and §19 actually present the argument that the robot can't be a “genuine” (or “pure machine”) mechanical chess player — that it must have a human operator. §5 sketches the outline of the argument: Abridged Original Verbiage It’s inconceivable that any physical …

Weird issues trying to transfer a domain (XYZ's EPP infrastructure broken?)

tldr: XYZ infrastructure is literally collapsing, they couldn't transfer in one of their own domains without a staff override. Initial transfer attempt Namecheap e-mails me the “transfer Authorization Code” Gen.xyz web interface claims “Invalid EPP Code” I contact Gen.xyz support Gen.xyz staff tells me“Please request a new EPP code from Namecheap” I contact Namecheap support via web chat “I need a new EPP for my domain, ishygddt.xyz; XYZ support …

EC point serialization formats

I looked into this when trying to make a piece of toy software to serialize and de-serialize *all* OpenSSH-supported public key formats. While OpenSSH uses standardized formats for private keys, the ssh-* AAAA/3NzaC0… format you're used to pasting into remote servers is actually a "proprietary" (though with freely-licensed spec and implementation) encoding—it's not JSON, and not any standardized BER/DER codec; instead, it's mostly a Length-Value encoding (think TLV without the T) …

IA5string definition

From ITU-T Rec. X.680 (02/21): C.5.7 IA5String [is] mapped into UniversalString by mapping each character into the UniversalString character that has the identical (32-bit) value in the BER encoding of UniversalString as the (8-bit) value of the BER encoding of IA5String[.] 41.6 The characters which can appear in the UniversalString type are any of the characters allowed by ISO/IEC 10646 [aka Unicode]. 43.8 For IA5String, [the] entire character set …