Make Something That Isn't A Computer A Computer - Episode 3: Broken IP Camera

This one has been sitting on my shelf for a while now. I've talked about these kinds of cameras before, and now we have the opportunity to see what they're made of - both inside and out - to see what makes them tick, and to see how safe, performant, and reliable they are. We'll look at the firmware to see what's going on inside of it, strip it of all of its camera bits, and make it a generic computer that's somewhat reliable.

Some FFMPEG Commands I Find Useful

This post is more for me than for you. I've been working with FFMPEG and AVCONV quite a bit recently, and I've had to reuse these commands quite a bit over that time. I'm putting them here so I don't lose them, and I also hope that someone finds them useful at some point in the future.  So, without further ado, here are some FFMPEG things I do a lot.

Building a Communications Standard from the Ground Up

Before you read this, just know that this is by no means a good way to do any of this. Hell, it's probably wrong. But it's how I'm doing it for a school project. There are probably many ways and standards in existence that do what I already want to do and do it better, but that's no fun, not a waste of time, and doesn't make for a very good blog post.

Deconstructing a Laptop To Make A Bunch Of Things - Episode 0: Teardown

I enjoy going to surplus stores. Sometimes you can find something really neat in the endless boxes of stuff. That happened the last time I went to my local store. I got a graphics card for my friend's RGB Windows XP build, a cool PCI audio interface card, and a Samsung NP300V5A-A0GUS laptop. It comes complete with a second generation Intel i7, so I figured I'd take this $10 computer and turn it into something. But what if we could turn it into multiple things? We could deconstruct it and make a bunch of things out of it. Sound cool? I think so. And guess what! It's another multi-part post!

State of the Blog - Year 3

Wow. Already three years. Time flies when you try to keep a cadence of two posts per month. Some of them are pretty good, some of them I'm not super proud of. But, self-awareness is a gift, so let's reflect on what this blog is actually about and what we can do to make it better.

Simulating MapReduce in Mathematica

MapReduce is one of the most important algorithm types in big data. Perhaps its biggest draw is the fact that it can be massively distributed across commodity hardware to crunch massive amounts of data. This puts super computing in the hands of those without specialized parallel hardware. In a very basic example for a Hadoop class I did, I implemented a basic MapReduce simulator in Mathematica in order to illustrate how MapReduce works. I also got some extra credit for it, as well.

My High School Home Lab Is A Mess

I went home this weekend and I got a chance to work with my really janky homelab set up. Since I don't really have a whole lot to write about this month, I figured I'd take a anecdotal trip down memory lane for a blog post and document this this atrocity somewhere and begin to talk about how horrible this set up was.