Android 12: Preventing System Update (and that nagging popup window)

Android is not my profession I just want to say this first: I do completely different things for living. I’m not an Android expert, the last time I wrote code in Java was 20 years ago, and what’s written below is really not professional information nor advice. This is the stuff I found out while [...]

Linux + webcam: Poor man’s DIY surveillance camera

Introduction Due to an incident that is beyond the scope of this blog, I wanted to put a 24/7 camera that watched a certain something, just in case that incident repeated itself. Having a laptop that I barely use, and a cheap e-bay web camera, I thought I set up something and let ffmpeg do [...]

Ramblings on setting up my Google Pixel 6 Pro

Introduction I bought a Google Pixel 6 Pro (P6P henceforth) a few months ago, and as always, I write down what I do as I do it. The result is below. I hope this will never be useful for myself, because if it does, it means I had the phone completely reset, and not I’m [...]

Blocking bots by their IP addresses, the DIY version

Introduction I had some really annoying bots on one of my websites. Of the sort that make a million requests (like really, a million) per month, identifying themselves as a browser. So IP blocking it is. I went for a minimalistic DIY approach. There are plenty of tools out there, but my experience with things [...]

Google Translate, LaTeX and asian languages: Technical notes

Introduction These post contains a few technical notes of using Google Translate for translating LaTeX documents into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The insights on the language-related issues are written down in a separate post. Text vs. HTML Google’s cloud translator can be fed with either plain text or HTML, and it returns the same format. [...]

Translating technical documentation with Google Translate

Introduction This post summarizes my insights as I worked my way through translating some technical documents, written in LaTeX, into Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The immediate approach was to feed Google Translate with the pdf documents, but not only are the results ugly, but then there are a lot of technical terms in the documents [...]