My MSHTML Workaround, One Day Before Patch Tuesday
A walkthrough of the manual registry workaround for the MSHTML zero-day (CVE-2021-40444) being exploited in the wild, one day ahead of the patch.
Tutorials
Tutorials
A Month With GitHub Copilot
A month into using GitHub Copilot's technical preview: when it nails a whole function on the first try, when it quietly hands you a broken regex, and why the GPL licensing fight has me keeping it off my work laptop for now.
Two Days Into the Android 12 Beta
Flashed the Android 12 Beta right after the Google I/O keynote and spent two days living with Material You's wallpaper-based theming, warts and all.
A Weekend Spent Patching Other People's Exchange Servers
A personal, in-the-weeds account of patching small business Exchange servers after Microsoft's emergency ProxyLogon fixes, including finding an actual webshell on a client's box.
Three Months Into the M1 Switch: What Still Doesn't Work
A three-month check-in on daily driving an M1 MacBook Air: what's genuinely fast now, and which dev tools (Homebrew, Docker, Python builds) still need the Rosetta workaround.
Three Weeks Into the Great Signal Switch
Three and a half weeks after ditching WhatsApp for Signal, here's the unglamorous reality: no import tool, half your contacts won't switch, and you end up running both apps anyway.
Refresh, Refresh, Refresh: My Xbox Series X Launch Day Survival Notes
Notes from a chaotic Xbox Series X launch day: why stock tracking is broken, what actually helped, and why the $219 storage expansion card still bugs me.
An Evening With a Raspberry Pi and Too Many DNS Requests
I finally set up Pi-hole on an old Raspberry Pi to deal with our overloaded home wifi during remote school week, and found out just how much junk traffic ads and trackers actually generate.
Setting Up Jitsi So I Can Stop Worrying About Zoom
Zoom's security mess pushed me to spend an evening self-hosting Jitsi Meet on a cheap droplet instead. Here's what actually broke and what I'd do differently.
My Actual Home Office Setup Now That Everyone's Remote
A practical rundown of what's actually working for suddenly working from home this week: router placement, VPN split tunneling, a cheap headset, and keeping some shape to the day.
Windows 7 Is Dead, Long Live the Dell in My Parents' Office
Windows 7 lost official support this week. Notes from actually migrating my parents' decade-old Dell off it, including a free Windows 10 upgrade trick that still worked.
Two Days With Android 10's Gesture Nav
Android 10 landed on Pixel this week, and the new gesture navigation is good but fights with half your apps' own swipe gestures. Here's the sensitivity slider fix and what still doesn't work.