📨🚕

📨🚕 (MSG.TAXI) is a multi-protocol push notification router. You post to it via a webhook URL and it flings that data to your configured targets. It’s the missing glue between your code and your notification channels, whether that’s your smart home, your CI pipeline, your RPG guild’s Matrix room, or just your phone at 3AM when your server falls over (again).

Tl;dr:

Push notifications from anything, to anything.

Intro Updates Website

Njalla Has Silently Changed: A Word of Caution

I’ve been using Njalla as my primary domain service for the past few years, and I’ve had nothing but good things to say about them. Their website is simple yet functional, their support is quick and efficient, and the company offers its services in a way that should be the global standard when it comes to data and privacy protection.

Njalla made sense for me on many different levels:

They’re a domain provider headquartered on a former pirate island nation in the Caribbean, which is home to countless offshore trust funds, that registers your domain in their name, so none of your personal information appears in the mandatory ICANN...

IoT in Python For Beginners: Blinking the LEDs

Let’s Work with Hardware (no Soldering is Required)

Continue reading on Python in Plain English »

Mass-Surveillance History & Trivia

Note: This post focuses on mostly Wikipedia-documented programs/acts and major events. Many additional local or classified efforts exist but are omitted if lacking a solid Wikipedia entry.

Info: Years denote program start, reveal, or key legislative milestone. Organized chronologically with brief context and trivia.

VENONA (USA/UK/AUS) [1943–1980]

SIGINT program decrypting Soviet communications; Not domestic surveillance per se but foundational to Cold War signals intelligence.

Project SHAMROCK (USA) [1945–1975]

NSA predecessor harvested copies of most international telegraphs entering/leaving the U.S.; Ended after the Church Committee.

UKUSA Agreement (from which Five Eyes derives) [1946]

Signals intelligence alliance formalized publicly later; Underpins many joint programs.

NSA founded (USA) [1952]

Creation of the National Security Agency institutionalized large-scale SIGINT capabilities.

COINTELPRO (USA) [1956–1971]

FBI’s...

Radiation Monitoring in Home Assistant with Python and MQTT

Improve Your Smart Home With a Radiation Meter

Continue reading on Level Up Coding »

Photo Walk: 5 “Radioactive” Places in Berlin Worthy Of Visiting

Let’s Combine Some Fun, Science, and History

Continue reading on Never Stop Writing »

Doubting Your Favorite Web Search Engine

Info: Many links in this post reference specific text segments on the linked website. If your browser is unable to handle links to text fragments (#:~:text=) it might appear as if the linked page is irrelevant to the text in this post. The links should work in newer Firefox and Chromium desktop versions, however.

Kagi was founded in 2018 by Vladimir Prelovac, a Yugoslavia-born entrepreneur whose first venture, ManageWP, a platform for managing multiple WordPress instances, was acquired by GoDaddy. He later served as the company’s VP of Product before setting out to build a search engine of his own.

The company has followed an interesting playbook. They started...

Anonymous (Paid) E-Mail Account

Alright, it’s time to dust off your tinfoil hats again and dive into the paranoid world of online privacy with me! Today we’ll be looking at e-mail services and walking through the steps of opening a paid e-mail account without having any personal information directly attached to it.

Why would we want to do this in the first place? First and foremost, because we cannot trust any online service to safeguard our data anymore. According to NordLayer, 2024 has been one of the worst years yet on the cybersecurity front:

2024 has been another banner year for data breaches, with cybercriminals accelerating their efforts to steal and monetize confidential...

Pure TypeScript class to handle math draw games: build your HTML5 math game in a matter of minutes – Phaser example included

Build your own HTML5 draw and sum game in just minutes: the DrawSum class is a standalone, dependency-free TypeScript class that manages the board, scoring, chain logic, and even calculates sprite animations. Phaser example included.

Embedding Wren in Hare

I’ve been on the lookout for a scripting language which can be neatly embedded into Hare programs. Perhaps the obvious candidate is Lua – but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it. When I was evaluating the landscape of tools which are “like Lua, but not Lua”, I found an interesting contender: Wren.

I found that Wren punches far above its weight for such a simple language. It’s object oriented, which, you know, take it or leave it depending on your use-case, but it’s very straightforwardly interesting for what it is. I found a few things to complain about, of course – its scope rules are silly, the...