Stavros' Stuff Latest Posts

Making the Strofara

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 16:14:27 +0000

I made yet another silly thing

This is going to be pretty specific to a Greek audience, as it’s all based on a Greek meme video, but I’ll try to explain. Watch the video first so you know what I’m talking about while I describe it:

Two guys are driving on a road near a remote village

Saving SSH passphrases on KDE

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 14:51:12 +0000

I hate technology

I now notice I haven’t written anything in almost a year, which nobody else seems to have noticed, so I guess it’s just as well. I have, though, broken my unintentional hiatus to post something that reminds me why I hate technology so much: All UX is bad.

I’ve been a Linux user for more than a decade now, but the latest Ubu

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,