bigbigvpn is an ephemeral VPN self-hosting managing system. You give it API keys from your favorite VPS providers, and it allows you to get VPNs on all countries they support.
You pick a country, hit connect, and in a minute or so it finishes setting everything up and automatically connects you to the VPN. You disconnect (or be offline for a configurable amount of time), and it automatically deletes the server.
You get the best of both worlds, with very low prices, dynamic IPs, large amount of locations AND the comfort of self-hosting.
The Turkish ID Card, aka TCKK, is a smartcard, quite an interesting one actually. It has two separate chips for contact and contactless. Both run a locally developed smartcard OS (AKİS/“Akıllı Kart İşletim Sistemi”, lit “Smart Card Operating System”). It can theoretically use a locally developed IC (UKTÜM), but none of my IDs so far had it.
aka “How to use a ZTE MF110/MF627/MF636/MF190 on Linux in 2020”
I was looking at random cheap networking stuff on the Turkish ebay clone the other day when I stumbled upon the good old 3G modems.
I always wanted one, and at some point one entered the house, but I never got a chance to use it, and I no longer am on good terms with the person who owns it now. I also ended up being given one by my grandparents several years ago, but I managed to break the sim slot before I could test it by storing a sim converter in it without the actual sim, which got stuck on the pins, and the attempts to pull it out led to the pins being destroyed. Ouch.
So, after all this time, I wanted to finally give it a shot, and they were being sold for as cheap as $3.5 + shipment, so I ordered the first one I saw, which was an “Avea Jet” model. It arrived this morning in a bootleg nutella box, and I had to pay like $2 to shipment. Yup. Can't make that shit up.
Let me tell you: I suffered a lot. Anything from random internet cuts to constant network-wide slowdowns whenever we watched anything on Netflix. I was constantly spammed with calls trying to sell me Turkcell TV+ (even when I told them that I don't watch TV countless times), and roughly 5 months before my contract expired, trying to sell me expensive and lengthy contract renewals*.
I'm not the fastest typer, and I don't really use 10 fingers- I tend to use 7-8, but in general, I try to minimize the amount of keypresses that I make. This means that I use shortcuts and dedicated keys as much as I can. One example of this (that involves the delete key) is how I press delete instead of right arrow and backspace.
And ever since I got my Pinebook Pro, I felt the distinct lack of a delete key.
Winter of Getting Stuff Done is a seasonal theme I have set for Winter Season of 2020, based on CGP Grey's video. It's about getting stuff that I wanted to finish for some time done and not jumping onto new ideas all the time.
I've been interested in public transportation for many years, and the systems that are used for collecting fares (as they're sadly paid). In Istanbul, a mifare desfire EV1 card called istanbulkart is used for this purpose. Here's the page for it.
Winter of Getting Stuff Done is a seasonal theme I have set for Winter Season of 2020, based on CGP Grey's video. It's about getting stuff that I wanted to finish for some time done and not jumping onto new ideas all the time.
I've been meaning to figure out a promising alternative to Authy ever since Chrome Apps got killed back in 2017, especially as that was the only way to use Authy on a desktop computer back then.
Since then, Authy made their own electron app, which is the same thing as the chrome app, it just runs a separate chromium instance.
Initially, this covered my needs. I could access my tokens on my laptop, and that's sort of all I asked for.
But each time I launched it, waited for a couple seconds for it to load, scrambled in it to find the right entry, hit copy, alt-tabbed, pasted, alt-tabbed again and shut down Authy Desktop, I died a bit more inside. It just took too long, and required way too much interaction. Surely, there must be a better way to do this, right?
Winter of Getting Stuff Done is a seasonal theme I have set for Winter Season of 2020, based on CGP Grey's video. It's about getting stuff that I wanted to finish for some time done and not jumping onto new ideas all the time.
The issue at hand
ACS ACR122U is an inexpensive NFC reader/writer based on the NXP PN532 chip. It's what I do most of my NFC experimentation on.
Other than the limitations of it, I have one big issue with it: It has a loud, monotone buzzer.
