Patching boot.wim with chntpw to no effect
I was building a custom Windows 11 install ISO and trying to do a clever registry tweak inside boot.wim to make in-place upgrade scenarios work the way I…
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When the upstream CDN just isn't reachable from your house
I needed to download Windows 11 25H2 ISO bits via the UUP build flow. Aria2c started fine, pulled the small metadata files (a few hundred KB total), and…
Read →Bref 2 to 3 and provided.al2 to al2023, the gotchas
AWS sent the usual EOL notice for the provided.al2 Lambda runtime. I had 13 functions on Bref 2 / al2 spread across two serverless projects. The…
Read →Reverse engineering a Bluetooth-only irrigation controller
I have an Orbit B-hyve XD irrigation controller. It's Bluetooth-only — no Wi-Fi hub built in. Every existing integration (Home Assistant, pybhyve…
Read →USB 2.0 Billboard means the cable is charge-only
Plugged an ESP32-class dev board into the Mac. Instead of a serial port, macOS showed it as a USB 2.0 BILLBOARD device from VLI Inc., vendor ID 0x2109…
Read →qBittorrent's API rate-limits fresh logins
A dashboard tile of mine that aggregates torrent counts across five qBittorrent instances started intermittently returning 403s. The page would refresh…
Read →An on-this-day journal feature from 3,000 Day One entries
I exported 3,060 Day One journal entries as JSON, imported them into DynamoDB, and built an
Read →Two flags for one boolean, drifted apart
A user of a side-project reported that the
Read →Disabling Zebra printer Bidi when PowerShell refuses to help
I write deployment scripts for Zebra ZQ521 mobile printers running CPCL. Two of the standard config knobs — disable bidirectional communication and…
Read →A counter clock as the simplest thing that could possibly work
I needed a public webpage that counts time since a fixed instant. Two days, four hours, big number, mobile-friendly. The interesting part wasn't the page…
Read →Disabled the schedule. Got paged anyway.
I disabled a stuck check-in schedule at 09:05. At 09:33 my phone buzzed with
Read →Counting a word across Signal messages with the macOS keychain
I wanted to count how many times I'd used a specific word across all my outgoing Signal messages. Sounded like five lines of SQL. The interesting part…
Read →A BYOS e-ink dashboard that wakes once a day
I wanted a tiny always-on display in my office that showed the day's useful information and lasted a season on a single battery charge. The constraint…
Read →Sketching a one-click honeypot installer
Honeypots are useful and almost nobody runs them, because the existing stacks are either too heavy (multi-container threat-intel platforms that need 16…
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