iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 09/08/2026

I have the HaLow dongles up and running. The good news is that iPhones can both supply power and get bridged ethernet connectivity over a single USB connection. The bad news is that Android appears to lack the required driver. More notes: octet-stream.net/b/scb/2026-0...

A recent-model iPhone is connected via its USB-C port to a Heltec-branded WiFi HaLow radio dongle with an antenna attached. It has a little multicoloured LED showing purple. They are placed on a desk next to a second Heltec dongle, whose USB connection extends to a computer off screen. It has a blue LED. The iPhone is showing a basic speed test website in Safari on a host at 192.168.100.228. The page reports that it has downloaded 1 MiB in 14.40 s (71.1 KB/s).

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 07/08/2026

Exciting HaLow delivery today - very interested to see what these can do

Photo of an opened box on a table. Company is Heltec Automation. Product title is HaLow Dongle; Wi-Fi Halow (802.11ah); Network Bridge. The open box shows two small plastic units alongside antennas and USB cables.

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 05/08/2026

Some notes on using OpenCode and DS4 for local inference with Xcode Coding Assistant: octet-stream.net/b/scb/2026-0...

screenshot of Xcode showing a Coding Assistant conversation in progress with OpenCode where it's preparing Swift code

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 15/07/2026

Having fun and learning Polish with some local models. (Not pictured: Siri voice speaking the tutor lines)

Screenshot of a terminal program. It shows an AI language tutor speaking in a mixture of english and polish, and logs about taking recordings and processing it via various local models including Qwen, Whisper, and PhoneticXeus.

Some of the conversation:
Tutor [en]: I think you said
Tutor [pl]: Czy to jest blisko Śląska?
Tutor [en]: That means "Is it close to Silesia?"
Tutor [pl]: Tak, Tatry są niedaleko Śląska. Można pojechać samochodem.

Can you explain the grammar of blisko Śląska.

Tutor [en]: Sure.
Tutor [pl]: blisko
Tutor [en]: means "close" and is followed by the genitive case.
Tutor [pl]: Śląsk
Tutor [en]: in genitive becomes
Tutor [pl]: Śląska.
Tutor [en]: So
Tutor [pl]: blisko Śląska
Tutor [en]: means "close to Silesia." Similarly:
Tutor [pl]: blisko Warszawy, blisko Krakowa.

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 19/04/2026

A normal week using Microsoft for Business™

Screenshot of billing summary on the Microsoft 365 admin center - charges $223, credits $-5,833, tax $-561

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 16/04/2026

Firehose is a little spiky right now

Screenshot of network monitor in btop showing incoming traffic over the last few minutes ranging from almost nothing up to 564 Mbps, with sharp peaks

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 09/04/2026

~30 days uptime on my indexer, including verification traffic. 👀 I'm only getting away with it because it's running at a VPS company that doesn't care about ingress

screenshot of network stats from btop. Total download is 5.90 TiB and upload is 58.8 GiB

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 19/03/2026

Sure does! If you want to go the extra mile, it’s possible to assign a link to the Bluesky post where you first shared it too, so those who find it in the standard.site world (like I did) can easily get back to here.

Screenshot of the blog post on Standard Search results list

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 11/03/2026

Finally spending some quality time with @martin.kleppmann.com’s book and the main thing I’m learning is that database people have a lot of fun making up acronyms

(Systems that do not meet the ACID criteria are sometimes called BASE, which stands for Basically Available, Soft state, and Eventual consistency. This is even more vague than the definition of ACID. It seems that the only sensible definition of BASE is "not ACID"; i.e., it can mean almost anything you want.)

This approach is known as fencing or, more emphatically, Shoot The Other Node In The Head (STONITH).

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 20/02/2026

Chatting on the internet in 2026. It feels like only yesterday this was just Pidgin or Adium.

Screenshot of Windows 11 system tray with icons for lots of running chat apps: Zulip, Discord, mIRC, Signal, Element (Matrix), Teams

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 20/02/2026

Woo, bluesky post references on search results. Sadly I had to purge the DB and it's backfilling. I think I have everything cached now so I can add things like that without having to do that again.

Screenshot of search results from the author's standard.site search engine, where several of the results have a Bluesky link that takes you to the post where they shared it

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 29/01/2026

Deleting Signal now that I know it's compromised. Find me on WINCHAT.EXE

Screenshot of Windows Chat with Windows 95-era chrome. Window divided into two text areas. Left side says "Oh, pretty well... Thanks!" Right side says "So how are things going at your end of the network?"

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 15/01/2026

In case anyone wanted to know, about 12-60 Mbps over the last few minutes if you want to consume the firehose.

Screenshot of bmon running in a terminal showing graphs of RX and TX bytes/second for eth0. The RX graph is showing mostly around 2 MiB/s with a couple of spikes in the middle up to 5.32 MiB/s.

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 13/01/2026

I do enjoy the "number of minutes to read" calculation for the blog entries on toki.la

Screenshot of HTML page source with a snippet of inline javascript highlighted. The highlighted line says "let time = Math.floor(Math.random() * 90);" and in the next line it is injected into the page as "${time} min read".

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 31/12/2025

Tensions running oddly high on the Wikipedia page for Jingle Bells

Screenshot of Wikipedia article text:
Notes to lyrics
a. DO NOT CHANGE THIS! “bob tail” (two words, no caps) is correct; see (link to PDF)

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 29/12/2025

Now we're getting somewhere: Memory Integrity Enforcement on Apple Silicon catching (deliberately) bad unsafe Rust operations 🎉 #rustlang #iosdev

$Screenshot of a crash caught in the Xcode debugger, showing Rust source code. The highlighted line of code is: unsafe { *buf.as_mut_ptr().add(i) = 0; } And the error message is: "Thread 1: Heap buffer overflow by 1 bytes".$

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 27/12/2025

Woot it worked for real. If I get enough failures maybe I can make some graphs and try to annoy the ISP.

Screenshot of a terminal with some output text selected. Specifically:

# cat power-watchdog.log
...
2025-12-26 03:00:21 Internet failed, restarting router
2025-12-26 03:00:22 Power off succeeded
2025-12-26 03:00:27 Power on succeeded

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 19/12/2025

More things I didn't know about C. I kind of like it. lobste.rs/c/lqlcle

Screenshot of a forum comment. "The way to write a non-NULL pointer argument in C is"

int t(int a[static 1]) {
return *a;
}

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 18/12/2025

I grew tired of needing to power cycle my modem by myself so I made a Raspberry Pi do it: tangled.org/octet-stream... Thanks @leofebey.bsky.social for the assistance finding a suitable relay!

A Raspberry Pi in a red/white case is powered on, resting on a dark surface next to a power board. In the closest plug of the power board there is a black wallwart plugged in via a squat square-ish white box, a controllable relay.

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 16/12/2025

Blog: Experiments with Memory Integrity Enforcement octet-stream.net/b/scb/2025-1... TL;DR this thing is awesome

Screenshot of Xcode showing a debugger stack trace on the left and some Objective C code on the right. One line is highlighted in red, ret[i] = 0; which has the debugger annotation "Thread 1: Heap buffer overflow by 1 bytes". It is showing that it's detected this assignment outside the range of the heap allocation returned by an earlier malloc().

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 10/12/2025

Kids literature is wild these days

Hand holding a book at a library: Blockchain for babies by Chris Ferrie and Marco Tomamichel

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 06/12/2025

This AI stuff is getting out of hand

Screenshot of Spotify notification on iOS: new album coming soon. Johann Sebastian Bach started the countdown on Spotify.

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 23/11/2025

Not too concerned yet about AI replacing network engineers.

Screenshot of copilot output:
Your DNAT rules currently only match destination ports >= 40000 and >=49152.
Since 41734 < 40000, those rules don't match, so the packets aren't rewritten to 192.168.10.144

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 13/11/2025

I bought a CO2 sensor just to see how things are going around the home. Not very well, as it happens.

A screenshot of a graph showing a rise overnight from around 850 to 2844 ppm carbon dioxide

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 12/11/2025

I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead

Cropped screenshot of the bottom of a VS Code session with the terminal tab selected. The user has run the command "top" and the terminal is showing the expected text layout of "top" except that some text encoding error has occurred and all of the letters and numbers in top's output have been replaced by what looks like mostly Chinese characters

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 10/11/2025

People are putting markdown into RSS now? Sounds like a great idea

Screenshot of an update dialog for NetNewsWire showing the new features in 6.10. The top dot point has been highlighted and it says "Added support for Markdown in RSS via the source:markdown element. When present, the Markdown is rendered as HTML"

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 09/11/2025

Apropos of nothing, please enjoy a chill sheep I saw today

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 08/11/2025

Hot Diggity Dog, a fun AR game by Mel Huang where you have to move your face around and bite hotdogs, on display at the Science Gallery in Melbourne. The nod to the Windows 3.1 theme is a nice touch.

A computer game on a screen with a big button in a Perspex case. It’s in a public display area with a projector mirroring the screen overhead. The screen has a mock Program Manager from Windows 3.1 with an icon to start the game. Everything is in red and yellow colours.

In game photo where someone’s face and mouth is being tracked as they try to position it over a hotdog for biting

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 30/10/2025

Daang this is a demo app Apple published for devs to try out on-device OCR. The actually-hard parts of this are maybe 10 lines of calls to their Vision API. It has a tendency to turn ł→t, ż→z, ą→a, ę→e, but y'know, still, dang. There are things I want to do with this.

Screenshot of an app running on an iPhone. Most of the screen is a previously captured photo of an open book, the first page of Mały Książę, a Polish translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "Little Prince". All of the text on the page has thin red rectangles around each line showing the bounding boxes where text has been recognised. Around the photo are some UI elements: "Retake Photo", "View Text", "Accurate", "Language Correction", and a language selection dropdown.

The result of clicking "View Text" from the previous screen. Another screenshot from an iPhone. It has a hearing "Text extracted from the image", following by the Polish text that was detected in small writing. The formatting is haphazard but the text all there with pretty decent (possibly perfect this time?) accuracy, demonstrating that the OCR process succeeded.

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 06/08/2025

I ran some quick numbers on 11 years of blogging. You can take me at my word when I say the em dashes will continue regardless of recent events. #emdash

a bar chart titled "Em Dashes". The X axis has the years 2014 through to 2025 and the Y axis shows yearly em dash usage ranging from about 14 to 48.

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 15/07/2025

It's been years but I still see the bar chart emoji and think "dang we're going to need some more commercial zones"

enlarged screenshot of the "bar chart" emoji, at least as envisioned by Microsoft

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Thomas Karpiniec @octet-stream.net · 24/04/2025

Horseshoe Falls in Mt Field National Park, yesterday #tasmania

Outdoor photo of Tasmanian bush featuring a small waterfall with one flow from the left and another on the right, joining in the middle to create a horseshoe shape. Water flows over mossy rocks and the scene is framed by green fern fronds.

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