I'm a 32 year old UIUC Computer Engineer building mobile apps, websites and hardware integrations with an interest in 3D printing, biotechnology and Arduinos.
Compressing epub in Linux CLI
Many epub files are not saved in optimized sizes because the intended path is that you download them once to a device. However, if you use something like calibre-web and stream the file to readers every time you open the epub reader, you might wish some better compression was used. epubs are actually just zip files, with some very [...]
Improving 10G Performance
When you first make the jump from 1G Ethernet to 10G you will be both impressed with the speed jump and also a bit disappointed that you can’t actually send a full DVD (8GB) in a second. Bottlenecks To get better 10G speed will require resolving many input/output bottlenecks on your network ranging from your disk drives being able [...]
Using Jenkins to Monitor SSL Certificates
There are great tools like Let’s Encrypt to generate free HTTPS certificates for your websites, but sometimes certbot renewals fail. Everyone should have some level of monitoring to ensure that your site has a valid SSL. It’s always embarrassing to go to a site you run and find the dreaded blocked page. If you are looking for [...]
Goland Tests Running Slow on Windows
If you are using JetBrain’s Goland IDE on Windows, you might find that running your go application takes forever to build or run tests on. On my machine, when you went running any test, it would take 45 seconds in the state of Instantiating tests… then finally run the test in a fraction of a second. Solution Your anti-virus [...]
Blackjack Game
An older, nontechnical friend asked me if there are any good Blackjack games without all the ads, microtransactions, and other modern weirdness. To that I said, yeah, let me find one for you. After many weeks of searching, I have given up. Everyone that I found had something in it that made it a deal-breaker. So I built one I found a [...]
Upgrading to 10G Ethernet in 2020
Gigabit Ethernet (1G) came out in 1998 but took years before consumer devices actually see end-to-end gigabit improvement. Now in 2020, we finally are seeing affordable 10G Ethernet appearing on consumer devices. This article runs through how to take a first step into upgrading your 1G network and the differences between copper, direct [...]
Setting up API Gateway Endpoint showing User IP
If you are looking to get started in serverless, a common endpoint that I like to add is /ip that returns the requester’s wan address. It’s helpful when creating firewall rules and I see it like a hello world app that has some practical uses. In AWS API Gateway, I quickly ran into issues getting this to work and finally [...]
