Against-Entropy on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Back up your TOTP codes by just printing them

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Scan the Quick Response (QR) code above with your favorite Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) app. You should get a six digit number, rotating every 30 seconds, that looks something like

1
2

237601
# as of Wed May 20 09:44:53 AM EEST 2026

If you then take the secret key that QR code maps to, say

Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation. It’s much more valuable to walk away with the heuristic “some dude got a 300x memory reduction by swapping out a database he hacked together for a tiny, static, specialized data structure that does exactly what he needs it to and no more.”

I still like Jenkins

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Before GitHub Actions, before GitLab CI/CD, and before the panoply of startups all promising to help you build your software faster and with less hassle, there was the humble, open source Jenkins. Or perhaps I should say is: Jenkins is still actively maintained to this day, and has actually been in use in basically every single place I have worked since graduating from high school, although not everyone who was using it was exactly happy with it.

LLM tutored writing practice for secondary language acquisition

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Language learning for the contemporary adult learner can be broken down roughly into four highly correlated, but distinct, skillsets.

	Passive understanding	Active production
The written word	Reading	Writing
The spoken word	Listening	Speaking

You may know from my FOSS software that I have been learning Finnish for the past 4 years or so. For the first few years I pretty much focused exclusively on reading comprehension, as I consider that to be the easiest quadrant to skill up in first. This focus put me in the interesting position for some time of being able to read most YA fiction and tax documents while being unable to order a pizza for myself on the phone.

Cross-platform TUIs are easier than cross-platform GUIs

Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Below is a GIF of tsk, my pocket Finnish-to-English dictionary, running in my terminal emulator of choice under Linux. It’s what the kids call a TUI, a graphical program that just happens to drive its graphics using terminal graphics instead of graphics-graphics.

Insert GIF here.

You can probably tell that this program fits neatly into the “home-cooked meal” clade of programs. There is a very straightforward problem I want solved - fast, single-executable-portable dictionary lookup, with a few conveniences for the busy language learner layered on top. I am quite happy with tsk in its current iteration and don’t plan to add much more to it anytime soon. It would still save me a lot of time and hassle if I were the only person who could use it.

The highest personal ROI program I have written so far

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It would have to be finstem, a simple command-line program I wrote to reduce Finnish words down to their root form.

Finnish is a lot like Latin or Russian in that its words often become lumbering behemoths of rewritten consonants, suffixes upon suffixes, and this makes it hard to look up in a dictionary – that is, until you factor in its very regular orthography and the phenomenal efforts of the Finnish programming industry: finstem is basically a very specialized UI for the OpenOffice spell checker, and I have no shame in admitting that.

My pet theory of how great software gets started

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

(Inspired by yungporko’s Ask HN post, which got me thinking.)

Pretty much every community, dojo, workplace, subculture, scene you can imagine in the modern day had a software sub-scene embedded within it. It can be as small as “that guy who does our Excel”, or as large as the scene itself . This is owing to the fantastic generality of software as a way to make almost anything more efficient, but we won’t go on that tangent now.

Trackballs are great for the mostly-mouseless

Sun, 26 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was 100% mouseless back before it was cool. Between dropping out of high school and enrolling in community college, I replaced my laptop with a $80 HP EliteBook I found on eBay; when I discovered its trackpad didn’t work anyway, I went all in on a no-X setup. I eventually concluded that going 90% mouseless got me almost all of the benefits, with almost none of the downsides. It’s almost as if returns are usually diminishing!

Disable your browser history to write better internal docs

Tue, 14 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Most of us work in companies with something approximating a shared online internal wiki, be it Confluence or MediaWiki or even a searchable, static website custom built for the task.

A common problem with these sites is making what you write discoverable to other people on the site. Your chosen title might tell you, a person fully in the weeds of whatever you were just doing, exactly enough to know this is the article you were looking for. Another human being, who might be searching for help on how to do this for the first time? Not so much.