Capture everything and inspect it later’ sounds reassuringly forensic until the PCAP consumes the disk, records half the office, and still buries the failed handshake beneath six million irrelevant packets. Here is how to make tcpdump answer one question at a time – with limits established before optimism becomes an incident.
2026
08
Sep
Linux Snippets #11: Run It Once, Contain It, Forget It
Some jobs are too important for nohup, yet far too temporary to deserve permanent accommodation in /etc/systemd/system. Here is how to use systemd-run to give a one-off command strict resource limits, logging, and supervision—and then make the evidence disappear.
06
Sep
Linux Snippets #10: Punching Through Firewalls with Reverse SSH
Trapped behind CGNAT, Starlink, or a strict corporate firewall? Here is how to use a reverse SSH tunnel to force a headless machine to ‘phone home’ and grant you remote access without touching a router
27
Aug
Tachyon: How Forking an Abandoned Webmail Client Escalated Rather Quickly
What started as “I’ll just fork SnappyMail” somehow turned into a full-blown webmail project with modern PHP, CalDAV, better search, undo-send, tighter security and a rapidly growing user base. Tachyon is what happens when software archaeology, self-hosting and poor estimates of project scope collide.
04
Aug
Linux Snippets #9: The Ephemeral Workspace (tmpfs)
Working with highly sensitive plaintext files or trying to stop your Raspberry Pi from burning through SD cards? Here is how to carve out a chunk of your system RAM and mount it as a physical, completely volatile hard drive.
30
Jul
Linux Snippets #8: Saving a Doomed SSH Session
Forgot to start tmux before running a massive database dump over SSH? Here is how to use native Unix job control to detach a running process so it survives when you close your laptop
13
Jul
Your Repository Has Left the Building: Why You should never trust Grok Build
xAI’s Grok Build CLI was caught uploading complete Git repositories—including files the agent was forbidden to read and the repository’s commit history. Apparently, “do not open this file” and “please package it for cloud storage” are entirely different instructions.
13
Jun
When the AI Detector Becomes the Academic Random Number Generator
A new study suggests Turnitin can be oddly harsher on mostly human-written assignments than on fully AI-generated ones. So apparently the safest way to avoid looking like you used too much AI may be to use even more AI. Academia has finally reached peak absurdity: the detector is now grading the crime scene with a blindfold and a random number generator.
11
Jun
Hermes Portable: Because Your AI Assistant Should Fit in Your Pocket
I like tools that move with me, and I dislike reinstalling the same dependency circus on every machine I touch. Hermes Portable is a wrapper for Hermes Agent that keeps the important parts — state, sessions, skills, memories, and platform data — on a portable drive, while the host machine handles the disposable runtime mess. It is portable computing with fewer rituals and slightly less Python-induced despair.
26
May
The Virtual OS Museum: A Time Machine Made of Bootloaders, Dust, and Bad Fonts
A nostalgic dive into the Virtual OS Museum, where DOS prompts still blink, GEM still feels futuristic, Linux still smells faintly of 1997, and every boot menu is a trapdoor into another strange, brilliant future we almost got.