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Key Principles of Web Design according to me
A set of rules and tips on how to create good websites that focus on content rather than appearance. These guidelines have been discussed with several online communities I know, and the consensus is that the tips below are absolutely essential for beginner web developers creating their first websites.
Most of the tips below were written with the so-called internet revival movement in mind, sometimes called Web 2.0 or the indie web. This is a movement that seeks to bring back imperfectly crafted websites created out of passion by people for people.
Training your own AI model
source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Artificial-Intelligence.jpg
A large language model (LLM) is a type of machine learning model designed for natural language processing tasks such as language generation. LLMs are language models with many parameters, and are trained with self-supervised learning on a vast amount of text.
For some time now, I have been thinking about training an open source LLM, e.g. Ollama, and training it with all the material on my disk or in this wiki, and then publishing it on my website as a chat bot that you can ask anything about.
Here is how traceroute works
source of illustration: Wikimedia.org
When you send a packet to its destination, it often has to pass through multiple routers or 'hops'.
To prevent packets from endlessly circulating through the network due to routing loops (router A points to router B, which points to router A…), they include a Time-To-Live field that is set to a reasonably high value when the packet is created, and each machine the packet passes through reduces this field by one.
Can 5G cause cancer?
Very often friends or various people I come into contact with ask me the question „can this 5G network really be dangerous?”. Below is one of my old studies on the subject.
The introduction of the 5G network was launched in July 2016 from then on many providers around the world started to deploy the 5G network in their infrastructure. It is a network that, among those who are not familiar with the topic, causes concern as if it is dangerous to life and health in this post I will try to dispel this myth.
Let's start with the parameters of this network compared to 4G:
- The 4G/LTE network is used on frequencies from 700 to 3600 MHz, while in Poland the highest used band is 2600 MHz. In the case of the 5G network, it is even possible to use frequencies up to 26GHz. The connection can be used by many more users at the same time.
- The maximum theoretical speed of 4G is 300Mbps, but in practice it may be lower due to various interferences, e.g. dense buildings, unfavourable terrain or a large number of users. The average actual download speed for internet in the 4G network in Poland is 20-30 Mbps and upload 10-15 Mbps.
- The 5G network will make it possible to achieve much higher bandwidths than 4G. It already allows download speeds of 600 Mbps and this should increase to 20Gbps in the future.
- 5G also makes it possible to reduce transmission delays. In 4G, ping averaged 30-40ms. In 5G, the ping is 1-4ms.
How to use the TOR network
In this post, I will focus on showing and demonstrating how to use the Internet the way Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman uses it.
It is a case study of how little free software there is in our daily lives
People who have shaped modern computing
source: Wikimedia.org
This article is my subjective listing of people who are little talked about when teaching the history of computing, or little heard of in the media. This compilation is a collection of interesting people who, in my opinion, had a greater impact on computing than we all think. I have chosen people here who I have read a lot about in my time and was interested in their history or achievements in the world of computing. Quite a few of these people are listed here because of their influence on the hacking community, I myself am a supporter of hacking culture and principles as you can read about on the main page of this wiki. The collection is in no particular order, it is divided into thematic categories that describe what sphere of computing the people listed in them have influenced.
DDS generator test FNIRSI
Original blog post: July 12, 2023
I don't always want to take out my large generator which weighs about 20kg, it does have very good performance but I don't always need a 10MHz sine wave with a distortion factor of less than 1%. Sometimes I need a simple sine wave with a stable frequency. Sitting on an allegro the other day I spotted such a simple DDS FNIRSI generator, tiny, lightweight and powered from a power supply, I thought why not. I know that if there is an obstacle standing between me and doing a new project then I won't start working on a new project. And that is how I became the owner of this tiny generator. In this material I will try to see if such a generator will be useful in an electronics technician's workshop.
FLprog - Arduino programming for the reluctant, Introduction
Original blog post: august 27, 2022
There are many different programs that allow you to do graphical arduino programming ie: ardublock, XODide, MyOpenLab. However, this program compared to the others is external is not an add-on to the Arduino IDE like ardublock. It is not a completely new programming language with a very high input threshold, nor does it need to be connected to a computer like MyOpenLab. FLprog is a completely external program that generates code that we can upload to the arduino. After interpreting our graphical output, the programme simply opens an Arduino IDE window with our code.
A simple blog in markdown
Below is a post about a blog I wanted to create in markdown, but as is the case with me, I changed my mind and went back to the old method. Access to this misfired idea is at this link. https://ostrowski.net.pl/blog/index_copy.php
Plaintext: Dylan Beattie
Link to the material discussed in the post
This is one of the best presentations I have ever listened to. It is comparable to Art Of Code, which is also a presentation by the same author. Both are of a similar standard, but this one makes a bigger impression because… it is about plaintext… Yes, you heard right, plaintext. You may ask how it is possible to make an interesting presentation on this topic that lasts a full hour :))))
In my opinion, the most interesting parts are:
- 10:51, where the author shows interesting codes in the ASCII set, some of which have survived to this day, and explains, among other things, where Ctrl+C, which stops a running program in Linux, came from
- 38:26 the author begins to talk about how Unicode was created, why we use it, and how different diacritical marks can be combined in Unicode (among other things, the author talks about how countries that do not use the Latin alphabet were effectively excluded from functioning in IT because classic ASCII does not support their characters)
The level of humor in these presentations is great, they are very enjoyable to listen to, and all technical issues are presented in a very practical way and through very cool and funny anecdotes “taken from real life.”
Memories from the minecraft server
We all have our favorite games, and one of mine, which I grew up with, is Minecraft. My first adventures were in the so-called golden age of Minecraft, i.e., the alpha and then beta versions. The game has changed beyond recognition these days, and probably because I am older than I was when I first played it, I am left with mainly nostalgia for it.
As of today, there are many other games that I prefer to play, mainly because Minecraft is one of those games that requires endless amounts of free time and, ideally, a group of friends to play with. It is much more difficult for adults to find an hour or, even more so, 2-3 hours a week to play a game in which you can only achieve some cool, satisfying results after dozens of hours of playing. That's why I moved from the Minecraft community to other games. As of today, I still consider this game to be great and it will remain in my top 10, but I have moved away from games such as Minecraft, Rimworld, and Factorio, because I prefer to play something that I can play for 20-30 minutes or an hour and have a lot of fun. Games that have a virtually infinite barrier to entry, such as Factorio, where the difficulty of playing increases exponentially, are no longer for me. I don't have time to sit for 4-5 hours and figure out how to better optimize the production of something, or come up with new buildings and browse internet forums in search of ever better building designs for Minecraft.
That's why this post is called “memories,” because all I have left after this game are memories, positive ones, but still just memories.
Below are photos from one of the first servers I hosted on a computer hidden in a closet at my parents' house ☺️ These photos are all that remain of that server. I don't have a copy of the world, but if I did, I would of course share it.
API testing tool
Nowadays, almost all API testing tools (e.g., Postman, Reqbin, SoapUI) require you to create an account and log in using an SSO provider.
But what if we don't want to log in and want to have a program on our computer that no one else has access to?
This is where the Bruno tool comes in handy.
It allows you to install it locally on your workstation and does not require you to log in to any SSO providers.
NASA photo archive
NASA publishes all the terabytes of photos it has taken with its space probes and rovers on its website for free.
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