Blog Posts
Incoherent ramblings, project updates, reviews, and other writings fallen into the ether.
Elasticon 2024
This is a bit of a retroactive post that’s been sitting in my drafts, but two months ago I had the pleasure of attending ElasticON 2024 in New York City thanks to our company being a partner and sponsor for the event. It was a great experience and I learned a lot about current and upcoming features within the Elastic stack. I also had the opportunity to meet some of the Elastic team as well as some of my clients.
RRTA ModeShift Reverse-Engineering
A few years ago, the RRTA (Red Rose Transit Authority) performed a big overhaul to their transit system, including the introduction of a new mobile app called RRTA Go Mobile by ModeShift. The app was designed to replace the old paper tickets and passes with a digital system that could be used to purchase passes and plan trips. As a big proponent of public transit, this was a very welcomed improvement for me. There were a few issues early on with QR codes not scanning properly and/or failing to renew, but those issues were quickly resolved. I myself have submitted a ticket or two to the developers regarding some issues I’ve encountered and received a fairly timely response with fixes following shortly after, so props to the developers for that.
LCWC and Dispatch Rabbit Holes
Earlier this year, I became interested in the LCWC (Lancaster County-Wide Communications) incident page - a county-wide dispatch system that provides incident updates for all of Lancaster County, PA.
Google Play Developer Account Termination
Recently I had the pleasure of dealing with Google’s heavy handed approach to over-sweeping account terminations.
Disable Nvidia Telemetry 1.1
Pushed out a small update to for the Nvidia Telemetry tool with a few new features:
Intel Core i7-7700K Delidding
For years, dating back to the Athlon line, I had been using AMD processors for my builds and had been waiting in anticipation for Ryzen’s release, which debuted in February of this year. I had been using an overclocked FX-8350 for a few years, which meant there was no upgrade path in sight that didn’t require a full architecture and socket change, whether that be AMD or Intel.
Disable Nvidia Telemetry
Back in early November, Nvidia started bundling telemetry services with their drivers. Gamers Nexus did an analysis where they inspected data transactions via Wireshark. Their focus seemed to be moreso on dispelling the rumors of personally identifiable information being sent unencrypted, as they didn’t decrypt any of the encrypted traffic. Their results yielded from an hour of testing that nothing was being sent, the services were seemingly dormant.
Moved to GitHub Pages & Site Redesign
I’ve just finished moving my website over from WordPress to GitHub Pages. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now. Despite using WordPress for years, I’ve found it to be rather excessive for my personal needs as far as resource usage and maintenece goes.
Seachem Doser 1.1
So I’m about 8 months late to posting this. Granted, I’m quite behind on posting a lot of developments (sleep deprivation puns). Anyway, Seachem Doser is an Android app that I developed a while ago that serves as a “dosage/quantity calculator” for various products Seachem offers.