The intended audience of this post is those who are very familiar with the inner workings of Linux and familiar with usage of the QEMU emulator from the command line. I recently found myself needing to set up a Windows VM on my Linux laptop such that the guest operating system of the VM had unrestricted access to one …

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This post's intended audience is those who are familiar with low-level data structures and the basics of NFC and Mifare Classic technologies. Data are encoded in an NFC-formatted Mifare Classic tag's memory using the TLV (Type-Length-Value) and NDEF (NFC Data Exchange Format) formats. An Adafruit article …

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This post's intended audience is those who are familiar with low-level data structures, the basics of NFC and Mifare Classic technologies, and the basic usage of Proxmark hardware. Proxmark devices are pieces of RFID test equipment commonly used in security research and penetration testing. Each model of device—of …

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Errata: in the section on adding a bottom bar to the ZSH prompt, the previously given $PROMPT variable contained bugs. Use the current one instead. /This post's intended audience is those with Unix command line experience. More in-depth terminal and shell experience is required to understand how the given …

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While reading a Conrail intermodal train schedule from August 1991 (reproduced in part below), I became confused as to why there were three times listed next to the initial terminal—a cutoff time, a release time, and a departure time (denoted LV). Most—but not all—intermodal schedules listed these three times at the …

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I often find myself in a situation in which I suffer as a result of a design choice made by someone else when the solution to that seems obvious to me. Below are some examples of bad design choices with solutions that I'm aware of. Further parts of this series will be posted as I write down other instances. The …

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The new Gateway North platform, serving Red Line trains bound for Downtown Portland. On Monday, March 4, TriMet, operator of Portland's MAX Light Rail system, opened a new platform at the Gateway Transit Center station. Christened "Gateway North," this platform serves Red Line trains going from Portland …

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This article originally appeared in The Reed College Quest. Among the things the Northeastern United States is known for is its electric high-speed railway network, something no other part of the country or the entirety of North America has (at least until California High-Speed Rail is completed). High-speed trains run …

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The KC2G ionospheric data website is best known in the amateur radio world for its MUF (Maximum Usable Frequency1) contour map, which is used by many radio amateurs to determine which bands to use for long-distance (DX) contacts. But the MUF doesn't tell the whole story: it's only valid for long-distance …

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Motivation and inspiration Remembering secure passwords is hard. That's why password managers were invented. But there are still passwords that one must remember without the aid of a password manager: these include those used to access the password manager (local user login credentials, cellphone passwords, full …

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