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 …
Late Fee Reimbursement with Discover Bank BillPay
Not sponsored/affiliate in any way, just came out of a stressful situation better than expected so thought I'd share this positive outcome/experience with using a bank's "automatic billpay" for anyone in my position or similar…
Getting SCALE-MAMBA working
a wandering pile of shell script fragments to get the most robust—and most technically bankrupt—secure multiparty computing library working
[DRAFT] "Direction" of time?
if entropy is inherently connected to causality, and causality is inherently connected to the "direction" of time, what's that imply? TODO: read Judea Pearl
[DRAFT] "PROTON_USE_WINED3D" explained
Explaining why the Steam launch option “PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%” sometimes fixes things, and whether YOU are cargo-culting or genuinely need it
A very tiny bitmap font
Could be useful for very small LCD displays, or for fitting an entire movie script on your monitor at once. TODO: convert to OpenType Bitmap…
Old-school new-school: Optical Tape Archives
I had come up with this "cursed technique" a while back at work, when I needed to transfer a ~1GB file onto a quite old Linux machine that, for "security reasons" had USB mass storage access as well as the UDF kernel drivers disabled (and I was unable to access it over the network)…
Switching to Picom (Compton) on the MATE desktop
You may have read some convoluted (and outdated—Compton was abandoned in 2017) tutorials on the matter like MakeTechEasier's, or perused the excellent Arch Wiki article's page on it to some despair, but if you are just a layperson who installed the MATE desktop for e.g. Ubuntu 20.04 (Fossa) and wants a slightly faster (i.e. GPU-accelerated) environment, there is a workaround that doesn't take too long to set up: …