Grzegorz Nowak metteo

This guide has moved

The CHIP-8 emulator guide has now been finalized and published on my blog.

Please go here to read it: https://tobiasvl.github.io/blog/write-a-chip-8-emulator/

The Markdown source is located here: https://github.com/tobiasvl/tobiasvl.github.io/blob/master/_posts/2020-07-20-write-a-chip-8-emulator.md

If you have this link I'll assume I should thank you for your valuable input while I was writing it. Feel free to continue making suggestions/pull requests over at GitHub!

An introduction to alternative keyboard layouts

This is a post to satisfy your curiosity about alternative keyboard layouts, why some people use them, and whether they're for you. It is intended to discuss the topic in broad terms, but I will share my personal preferences towards the end. Due to time constraints and my own limited knowledge, I will focus on layouts optimized for the English language (ANSI variants, with an occasional nod to ISO).

First off, it's important to understand how much debate there is about how we got here: I will not even attempt to settle the issue of who invented the 'first' typewriter layout, because the modern device had many predecessors going back centuries. The usual legend of typewriter evolution holds that American Christopher Latham Sholes debuted the typewriter in 1868 with a 2-row layout that was (nearly) alphabetical. A horizontal stagger between the rows made room for the lever arms attached to each key:


 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
2 4 6 8 . A B C D E

Controlling the Brother P-Touch Cube label maker from a computer

The Brother PTP300BT label maker is intended to be controlled using the official Brother P-Touch Design & Print iOS/Android app. The app has arbitrary limits on what you can print (1 text object and up to 3 preset icons), so I thought it would be a fun challenge to reverse engineer the protocol to print whatever I wanted.

Python code at the bottom if you want to skip the fine details.

Process

Intitially I had a quick peek at the Android APK to see if there was any useful information inside. The code that handles the communication with the printer in Print&Design turned out to be a native library, but the app clearly prepares a bitmap image and passes it to this native library for printing. Bitmaps are definitely something we can work with.

This guide has moved to a GitHub repository to enable collaboration and community input via pull-requests.

https://github.com/alexellis/k8s-on-raspbian

Alex

Workarounds for Netflix and the blocking of Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnels

The dreaded "You seem to be using an unblocker or proxy." error message. Cool story bro.

This gist was essentially created out of my own rant about Netflix being hostile to IPv6 tunnel services since June 2016. You are welcome to read my opinion on the matter, this is the more technical side to the issue and how to combat it within your own network.

Since I wrote this, various GitHub users have contributed their thoughts and ideas which has been incorporated into this gist. Thank you to everyone who have contributed their own methods and implementations.

The problem

Netflix now treats IPv6 tunnel brokers (such as Hurricane Electric) as proxy servers. A while ago it became apparent to users and Netflix that somewhat by accident, IPv6 tunnel users were being served content outside of their geolocation because of the way Netflix was identifyi

FWIW: I (@rondy) am not the creator of the content shared here, which is an excerpt from Edmond Lau's book. I simply copied and pasted it from another location and saved it as a personal note, before it gained popularity on news.ycombinator.com. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the exact origin of the original source, nor was I able to find the author's name, so I am can't provide the appropriate credits.

Effective Engineer - Notes

By Edmond Lau
Highly Recommended 👍
http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/

What's an Effective Engineer?

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.

	import static com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonTypeInfo.As.EXISTING_PROPERTY;
	import static com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonTypeInfo.Id.NAME;
	import static jsinterop.annotations.JsPackage.GLOBAL;

	import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonIgnore;
	import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonSubTypes;
	import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonTypeInfo;
	import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonTypeName;
	import javax.annotation.Nullable;
	import jsinterop.annotations.JsOverlay;

	package hello.client;

	import com.google.gwt.core.client.*;
	import com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.*;

	@GwtModule(renameTo="basic")
	public class YourEntryPoint implements EntryPoint {
	@Override
	public void onModuleLoad() {
	Button button = new Button("Click me");

	#!/bin/sh
	# This self-executing Java program uses the following /embedded shell script/ to compile & execute itself..

	# magic constant holding length of script
	SKIP=26

	# parse our name..
	FILE=`basename $0 .java`

	# get some working space, clean up old crud