Computing
Non-AI computing: networks, servers, hardware, software engineering, and digital security and privacy.
Non-AI computing: networks, servers, hardware, software engineering, and digital security and privacy.
#6193: Why Email Images Still Phone Home
That "load remote images?" prompt is older than your phone. Here's what fetching a picture actually tells the sender.
#6188: Every Way Linux Relieves Memory Pressure
Zram, zswap, swappiness, and the OOM killers — the full ladder Linux climbs when RAM runs out, and what to actually run.
#6187: Can Your Laptop Borrow Your Desktop's RAM?
Two gigabytes free on the laptop, sixty-four idle on the desktop next door. Can swap over the network actually help?
#6186: A Virtual Disk Inside Your Linux Filesystem
Loop devices let a plain file act as a real disk — format it, encrypt it, mount it from fstab. Here's what works, and what bites back.
#6183: Private Podcast Feeds: Tokens, Buckets, and Basic Auth
How do you keep a podcast feed for four people away from everyone else? Tokens, buckets, and the auth podcast apps barely support.
#6182: Running a Private APT Repo for Family Machines
Daniel wants his Debian packages on family machines without becoming their unpaid update service. Here's the modern way to do it.
#6181: Shipping Private Android Apps to Your Family
Daniel wants to ship private Android apps to non-technical relatives. F-Droid repos, Basic Auth, and the Google verification cloud on the horizon.
#6168: Hebrish: Hebrew-Aware Dictation That Actually Works
Two new speech models fix English-Hebrew code-switching dictation — and the whole training run cost about fifty cents of GPU time.
#6167: Streaming Browser Cookies to a Headless Server
Daniel wants his logged-in browser on the home server. Chrome bolted the front door — so what's left?
#6166: Turning a Drifted Server Into a Rebuildable Playbook
Your server grew for years. Now you want a recipe that can rebuild it from scratch. Here's the honest path from drift to playbook.
#6165: Watching 20 Batch Jobs at Once
Batch APIs give you a discount, then hand you a babysitting job. Here's what actually watches a batch run — and what doesn't.
#6164: We Gave Each Host Its Own AI Agent
We split our two hosts into separate AI agents with private context windows. The bill came to 78 cents an episode.
#6163: Forking a Keyboard for One Voice Feature
Daniel built a Hebrew-English dictation engine. Now he wants to fuse it into someone else's keyboard — without inheriting its entire future.
#6162: Why Dictated Words Rewrite Themselves
Hold-to-talk dictation shows dimmed text that silently changes when you release the key. Here's the architecture behind that rewrite.
#6161: Turning Words Into Sound: G2P, IPA, and the Hebrew Vowel Problem
Text-to-phonetics tools exist, but the neural ones guess wrong on exactly the words you care about — names, brands, and Hebrew.
#6160: Where Do Tiny Speech Rules Live? A Ladder From Regex to LoRA
A regex notebook, a WFST grammar, or a fine-tune? Where do tiny speech-rewrite rules actually belong in a 600M-parameter model?
#6159: When a Speech Model Can't Decide How to Write Dollars
One dataset says "$20," another says "twenty dollars." Fine-tuning a speech model means finding out which convention wins — and why it matters.
#6158: Naming the ASR Sub-Tasks Nobody Mapped
A 2001 linguistics paper already named Daniel's problem — but it points the other way. So what do you call a fine-tune set that expands "F Y I" to ...
#6154: Who Checks the Labels? Weak vs Strong Supervision
Human labels, rule-based labels, or a teacher model writing the exam — what actually makes supervision "strong," and who verifies it?
#6151: Invisible Characters That Catch Leakers
Canary traps, binary space codes, and zero-width Unicode characters: how organizations actually trace a leaked document back to its source.