For 10 years, I thought that Kenneth Jeyaretnam came up with this iconic quote. Then while reading, I stumbled upon French philosopher Joseph de Maistre who wrote the original phrase “Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite” or "Every country has the government it deserves" in 1811.

I recently spent more time than I would like to admit trying to convert a Btrfs filesystem from free-space cache v1 to v2. The conversion appeared to fail silently, and the usual tools for diagnosing a busy device gave no useful output whatsoever. Background The filesystem in question was a ...

Every few months, a new wave of articles appears warning that quantum computers will soon render all existing encryption obsolete and that organisations need to act urgently. The reality is considerably more mundane. For most people and most organisations, the transition to post-quantum ...

There is a running joke in software circles that developers hate writing documentation. Ask a developer to build a feature and they will dive headfirst into the code. Ask them to document it afterwards and it will never get done. This is not a character flaw so much as a reflection of how IT ...

Docker installed using Snap has a pecularity where it is restricted to the user's home directory. The AI models which I used to assist took me round and round convincing me that the file did not exist, or that the version of Docker I was using expected compose.yml instead of docker-compose.yml ...

Recently, I have taken to sleeping with my windows closed. I don't get disturbed by mosquitoes buzzing at my ear in the wee hours of the morning and don't get affected by the haze as well. However, there is always the nagging thought that the "better sleep" I am experiencing might be attributed ...

The CSIT Mini CTF 2026 presented us with a 2 stage Windows binary. The first stage downloads an ascii payload from https://minictf2026.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/enc_release-2.txt, performs some decoding where the bits were inverted and reversed, and then loaded into memory and executed. The ...

I've recently come into a Kaiterra Sensedge Mini and spent some time integrating it into my Home Assistant setup. The Kaiterra Sensedge Mini is a commercial grade Air Quality Sensor capable of monitoring CO2, TVOC, PM2.5, PM10, Humidity and Temperature. The easiest route to integrating with ...