Stavros' Stuff Latest Posts

The UX people

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 16:09:36 +0000

Who are they?

Today, at work, I was debating with other engineers on what the wording of the message should be, when a patient tries to register an already-registered blood test kit. The specifics (or the people) aren’t really important here, but what struck a chord was when someone said “this is up to the UX people”.

We don’t have “UX people”. “UX people” don’t exist.

The UX people

The unspoken assumption here is that

Spam spammers back

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 18:37:08 +0000

Now with added ChatGPT

I’m writing this post sleepless and with a headache, which I find is the best way to write posts, because it removes all the verbal guardrails, so, be forewarned.

Back in 2016, a year before recorded history, I stole a simple idea: What if I wrote a bot to reply to spammers, pretending to be interested in their wares, and wasting their time? After some creating this, it turned out that it was possible, and Spamnesty was born.

Spamnesty was cleverly disguised as a company, Mnesty, LLC, Asia’s premier maritime logistics company, strategically located in the land-locked Mongolia. Of course, this didn’t tip spammers off that the whole thing was fake, because why would they even care to look at the site? This resulted in untold amounts of entertainment, whiling the small hours of the morning away, reading about the likes of the hapless Abdullah Ishaq, whose attempt of selling LedTrading.com to my bot did not

Use your Wii Balance Board as a scale (again)

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 22:53:36 +0000

We did it again, internet

If you’ll recall, once upon a time I managed to get my Wii Balance Board to connect to my computer and function as a scale. At some point throughout the years, Linux changed, and that method broke. It would still measure your weight fine, but you could no longer activate the balance board by tapping its front button, you had to flip it over, remove the battery compartment lid and press the red button every time. This was too much of a hassle, so I stopped using the board, hoping that a solution to this problem would arrive one day to liberate me from the scourge of adipose tissue.

This day is today (well, a few months ago, actually, but I couldn’t be arsed writing about it until today, so). I received an email from a reader called Jawaad Mahmood, who had read my balance board article and spent a bit of time figuring out how to get the balance board to work, and packaged his work into a library called bbev.

I was initially sceptical because many people contacted me throughout the years, but nobody managed to get rid of the red button requirement. Talking to Jawaad for a bit, though, he confirmed that he could painlessly get the board to pair with his computer with the front button. Apparently something had changed in the Linux Bluetooth stack, and made pairing possible again, and he managed to figure out how.

This was great news! However,

Clearing up some misconceptions about Passkeys

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 14:41:28 +0000

I love passkeys so much

I am unreasonably excited about passkeys, I’ve long been looking for a better/more convenient way than passwords to do authentication, and I think passkeys are finally it.

However, whenever I see passkeys mentioned (for example on the recent Tailscale post about them), there are always a lot of misconceptions that surface in the debate. I’d like to clear some of them here, and hopefully explain a bit better what passkeys are.

A bit of backstory

Passkeys are a user-friendly name for, and an implementation of WebAuthn, which in turn is part of the FIDO2 project. All that is basically a way to say that passkeys are an open standard, developed by a consortium of companies that want to make authentication more secure and more usable. My personal opinion is that passkeys are a great solution to that problem, and that’s why I’m so excited about them.

At their core, passkeys are just a way for a website to ask your browser for authentication. That’s it, they aren’t tied to a specific piece of hardware or a way for that hardware to work. I’ll expound more on this further on.

I want to lay out some common misconceptions about passkeys that I’ve been seeing, and

I made an e-ink display that shows my calendar

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 05:40:08 +0000

Time to relax? Think again.

There’s an old saying I just made up, it goes “a man has a problem. Give him a solution, now he has two problems”, and that’s how I felt when I came across the LilyGo T5, a beautiful e-ink display with an ESP32 microprocessor and an 18650 battery holder.

I needed to find something to make with it.

The idea

I realized that one thing that’s missing from my life right now is more time pressure. I have a job, which got me most of the way there, but I’m bad at remembering the time of each of the twenty meetings I have every day. I really needed something that would allow me to see my daily calendar at a glance, and I realized that a 4.7” e-ink screen was the perfect thing for that use case, so I quickly started working on making this a reality.

The result was…

Stavros' Stuff Latest Posts

The UX people

The UX people

Spam spammers back

Use your Wii Balance Board as a scale (again)

Clearing up some misconceptions about Passkeys

A bit of backstory

I made an e-ink display that shows my calendar

The idea

The Timeframe