Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Tinkering with e-ink

Sat, 30 May 2026 10:22:00 +0000

For a long time I avoided e-ink devices. E Ink Corporation effectively holds a monopoly on eletrophoretic e-ink technology, and that has kept panel prices high. When combined with very slow refresh rates, e-ink devices are unitaskers like eBook readers, yet priced the same as versatile devices like tablets with much better display quality. Unlike some, I also find I prefer reading on LCD or OLED screens than e-ink. The sole saving grace of the technology is the display does not need to be powered on, which can lead to devices with outstanding battery life measured in weeks.

Fragmentation comes for Software

Fri, 08 May 2026 19:41:00 +0000

Until the 1970s, there were only four TV networks in the US. Then cable led to an explosion, from 28 in 1980, 79 in 1990 to well over a thousand today. Part of this was cheaper distribution via cable, but also because technology like computer video editing reduced the cost of production.

The flip side of this explosion was a fragmentation of audiences. The big four networks went from having 20-30% of the population and 80-90% of prime-time TV viewership to 20-30% prime time audience and low single digits of the population. This had all sorts of consequences, including politically as there is no longer a widely shared frame of reference, or someone like Walter Cronkite to tell Nixon the Vietnam War was over and lost.

GL.iNet Comet 5G Review

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:02:00 +0000

One of the downsides of self-hosting critical applications like email on your homelab is that if you lose connectivity, especially when you are travelling, you are out of luck. It’s happened to me twice. The first time I had to ask a colleague (Hi Jason!) to go get my spare keys from the building super and reboot my home server. In the other instance, I walked my wife over the phone through the steps of rebooting our OpenBSD home router that runs on a somewhat dubious computer sourced from AliExpress with an Intel N100. I actually ordered an industrial-grade Asus NUC 13 Rugged N50 to replace it, but in a variant of the Heisenberg effect, the original machine started working flawlessly, go figure.

Llama-bench on some consumer-grade AI hardware

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:28:00 +0000

I have been on a bender this weekend experimenting with various LLM-capable machines in my homelab, specially the very capable yet fast Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. I haven’t found good benchmarks, though, so I ran the small Gemma4 E4B Q4_K model (4.62 GiB, 7.52B params) using llm-bench. This has two measures: prompt processing 512 (pp512) is how quickly in tokens/second the LLM can read a 512-token prompt, i.e. how good the LLM is at “reading”, and token generation 128 (tg128) is how quickly it can write 128 tokens’ worth of text, i.e. how fast it is at answering the question.

Dardenne dark milk chocolate praliné

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 15:14:23 +0000

It’s been a while since I last did a chocolate review. There are not many bars that can claim to be made using a patented process invented by a Nobel laureate. The Dardenne Lait Praliné (dark milk chocolate with ground hazelnuts) is one.

The special cooking process was invented in 1910 by Paul Sabatier (Chemistry Nobel, 1912) to make chocolate easier to digest for people who don’t tolerate it well. In any case, this is an organic and Fairtrade bar with a moderately high 43% cacao content (for milk chocolate).

Moving away from Apple platforms, a living diary

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:25:00 +0000

My first computer was an Apple ][+ in 1981. The first computer I purchased with my own money was a Mac Plus, circa 1990. Then I discovered Linux in 1991 and switched. When Apple introduced Mac OS X, I purchased an iMac G4, and over time transitioned fully to the new UNIX-based Mac. I also got the first iPod, iPhone and iPads, so I could fairly be accused of being an Apple fanboi, even if I have never been blind to the platform’s limitation and Apple’s questionable business practices.

Making the LEDs on the LincStation N2 work in Alpine

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 20:27:00 +0000

I normally run backups on my network on a SmartOS server equipped with 2x14TB mirrored hard drives running ZFS, using rsync and SMB/CIFS as the access protocol (and eventually Kopia). It’s a bit noisy and sluggish, despite having a 10G Ethernet connection, so I recently bought a LincPlus LincStation N2 all-flash server during its Kickstarter to eventually replace it.

The N2 is a very slim device, has 10G (copper) networking, supports 4x M2 SSDs plus 2x SATA 2.5" drives (I suppose they could be spinning rust) and a 128G MMC boot drive so you don’t have to waste data drives on the operating system. The only thing missing, really, is ECC memory.

Paris travel tips

Sun, 11 May 2025 19:02:00 +0000

France is the world’s most popular destination for tourism, and its capital is of course the entry point for most visitors. The Paris region has a population of 9 million, but Paris intra muros (Paris within the walls, the deep historical core city within the Périphérique ring road) is only about 2 million.

Driving within Paris proper is a nightmare, and completely unnecessary given the quality of the regional public transit network. Going to suburbs like Versailles or Saint-Germain en Laye is easy, but going from one suburb to another is harder because the public transport network is radial, you often have to go all the way back to Paris to transfer, although the situation is improving.

Apple privacy checklist

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 22:17:00 +0000

Apple claims to hold privacy at its core, but it has been an advertising company for at least a decade, and now that smartphone and computer sales are plateauing and new products like the Apple Vision Pro have failed to set the world on fire, Services revenue (an euphemism for the 30% App Store tax on developers and advertising) is critical to maintaining the company’s stock price.

Recent behavior from Apple has confirmed Google or Meta’s take that Apple’s privacy claims are just that, clever marketing to obscure the fact the privacy measures they do have are mainly there to stymie its competitors:

Getting the Hasivo F1100W-4SX-4XGT switch to work

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 20:05:00 +0000

I was first exposed to Cisco network equipment in 1995, and for a long time I used their gear for my home network. Then around 2012 I switched to Juniper switches for their more sane management interface and more reasonable prices. Neither have WiFI equipment that’s really appropriate for a home setting, however, with onerous licensing terms or crackpot schizophrenic hardware like my old Cisco 877W that was one half ADSL router and one half WiFi AP (coexisting uneasily in the same physical box with separate management interfaces).

Fiber for your home network

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 18:03:00 +0000

My apartment, like many, is elongated. The living room is on one end, the bedrooms (one of which is my home office), on the other side. This makes it hard to cover both sides with a single WiFi access point, or to have uniform Internet access speed on the wired network. I have a semi-pro Ubiquiti UniFi network of WiFi access points and switches, which makes it realtively easy, but only if you have good backhaul connectivity between the APs.

PSA: LinkedIn single-sign-on dangers

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 13:35:00 +0000

I have a work-issued computer that I keep rigorously separate from my personal stuff. It belongs to my employer and thus I do not keep personal files on it, or access personal email and certainly don’t save personal passwords on it. I even have it on a separate VLAN on my home network.

This is why I was horrified when I went to the LinkedIn website on my work computer (to look at a colleague’s posting) and it automatically started a single sign-on with my company’s GMail (my work address is of course linked to my LinkedIn profile).

Funding the vetting of the Software Supply-Chain

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 10:36:00 +0000

As memorably illustrated by XKCD, the way most software is built today is by bolting together reusable software packages (dependencies) with a thin layer of app-specific integration code that glues it all together. Others have described more eloquently than I can the mess we are in, and the technical issues.

Crises like the log4j fiasco or the Solarwinds debacle are forcing the community to wake up to something security experts have been warning about for decades: this culture of promiscuous and undiscriminating code reuse is unsustainable. On the other hand, for most software developers without the resources of a Google or Apple behind them, being able to leverage third-parties for 80% of their code is too big an advantage to abandon.

The fetish for uptime

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 09:07:00 +0000

At one of my previous jobs, the engineers on my team had an informal competition as to who could rack up the longest uptime on their workstation (they all had Sun Solaris or Linux, of course). When the company moved to a new office, one crafty engineer managed to beat all the others by putting his Sun into the seldom-used hibernation mode to preserve his uptime when everyone else was forced to reboot.

PSA: iCloud Private Relay can make Safari on your iPad unusable

Tue, 24 May 2022 21:01:00 +0000

After upgrading my iPad to iPadOS 15.5, Safari became unusable. It would take forever to load the Reddit login page, and many others like Dilbert.com. Opening the same in Firefox Focus had no issues.

Going into Settings / Safari / Privacy & Security / Hide IP Address and disabling it fixed this for me. Alternatively you can disable it only for specific networks (Settings / Wi-Fi / ⓘ / Limit IP Address Tracing / Off).

Batch-converting HEIC images to JPEGs on the Mac

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 10:49:05 +0000

I use Lightroom 6 to manage my photo collection, although it is falling victim to bit rot (e.g. the face recognition module no longer works, apparently due to a licensing logic time bomb in the code). Exploitative pay-forever software subscriptions are simply unacceptable so I will not yield to Adobe’s Creative Clout bondage, and since Lightroom will not work in newer versions of MacOS, that means I am working on migrating to Darktable, albeit very slowly.

How to ensure a cron job runs exclusively

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 16:18:05 +0000

Often you need to run a job periodically, e.g. backing up files, but the job could take more time than the interval allotted between runs, and you do not want multiple instances of the process to be running at the same time. For instance, bad things happen when multiple rsync processes are trying to synchronize the same folders to the same destination. Thus you want a mutex, something that ensures only one copy of the process can run at any given time.

Setting HTTP headers for a static site on AWS CloudFront

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 15:49:00 +0000

For a very long time, I ran this site off my cloud server in the US. When I moved to London, I started experiencing the painful impact of the ~100ms latency on the loading time for images and videos, and decided to move to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with global reach. Unfortunately, most CDNs have steep minimum spend requirements that are excessive for a low-traffic site like this one. Amazon’s CloudFront is an exception, and my hosting costs are in the vicinity of $20 per month, which is why I settled for it despite my dislike for Amazon.

HSTS: surprisingly rare

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 16:21:57 +0000

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a critical security feature that allows a site to say “always use the secure HTTPS version, not the insecure unencrypted one”. There is a chicken-and-egg effect where the first time you access a website, you have no way to know if your site has HSTS turned on or not without accessing it, so browsers distribute a “HSTS Preload” list of domains for which it is turned on even if you have never accessed it before, as explained by Adam Langley of the Google Security Team. On Chromium based browsers you can check by accessing chrome://net-internals/#hsts. Yours truly is on the list, which means that almost every single device on the planet has a file with my name in it, to my never-ceasing amusement.

My Broadband Setup

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 23:15:05 +0000

I moved to the UK, a country that was a leader in Europe for PC adoption and early telecoms deregulation, but has since become one of the worst for the quality of its broadband through misguided laisser-faire policies. The only fixed broadband option available in my apartment is BT OpenReach’s pathetic VDSL service¹ (resold by Vodafone), which advertises 72 Mbps but I am lucky to get 40 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up.