Found while unpacking boxes last night:

Shown above, top to bottom, left to right:

• Sony PSP-2000: Handheld game console. Mostly used for playing emulated SNES games. Covered unlocking and installing custom firmware in this 2008 blog post. Battery failed ~5 years ago.
• Nintendo 2DS XL: Handheld game console. Also mostly used for emulated games.
• Anbernic RG350M: Handheld game console. Only used for emulated games. I liked the build quality but the metal put strain on my wrists.
• Nokia N810: “internet tablet” (smartphone precursor). Used quite a bit before I got my first Android phone. Battery failed at some point, but I only discovered the failed battery last night.
• Cowon iAUDIO X5 60GB: Portable media player with a 60GB spinning rust (!?!) hard drive. Note: Physical disks in media players made sense at the time because flash-based players had extremely limited capacity. Had Rockbox installed. Covered in this 2006 blog post. My patches for the Rockbox Game Boy emulator were covered in this 2005 blog post.
• RIM Blackberry (model unknown): Old work phone that I never liked and rarely used. Covered in this 2007 blog post.
• Apple iPod Classic 120GB: Portable media player. I didn’t like this thing, rarely used it, and can’t remember how I got it. Maybe a gift or reward?
• Samsung Galaxy S II (SGH-T989): Used CyanogenMod to add features, ditch the awful Samsung Android skin, and extend the support by several years.
• Google Nexus One: My first smartphone without a keyboard. I liked it, but the screen was too small, the capacitive buttons were hard to press, and the trackball mostly just got in the way.
• OnePlus One: Good price/performance at the time. Ran Cyanogen OS out of the box. Novel textured back. Awful camera.
• OnePlus 5T: Great phone at release. Still decent even now (for me, at least). I liked the rear fingerprint scanner and the slim bezels. Bad camera. I plan to install LineageOS and continue using it for non-phone stuff (drone remote control, dubious apps, etc).

Not shown (lost, recycled, or still buried in boxes):

• Samsung SGH-t809: My first cell phone. Bought in 2006. Battery failed ~10 years ago. Covered in this 2006 blog post.
• Motorola Cliq: My first Android smartphone. Not a very good device in retrospect.
• Barnes and Noble Nook Color: Immediately installed CyanogenMod and used as a cheap Android tablet.
• Google Nexus 7 (2012) and Nexus 7 (2013): I liked the form factor of these tablets. The original model was a bit slow so I upgraded to the 2013 model at release and used it daily until it stopped booting.

Current gadgets:

• Google Pixel 8 Pro: Current smartphone and the first one I’ve owned that is waterproof. I’m very happy with it. Great camera. Screen is large enough to read eBooks. Used to take the picture above.
• Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e (Wi-Fi): Current tablet. Immediately installed LineageOS because I prefer it to One UI. I use it to read eBooks and with the detachable keyboard as a second laptop.
• PowKiddy RGB10 Max: Current handheld game console. Only used for playing emulated games. Lighter and has a larger screen than the Anbernic RG350m shown in the picture above. Rarely used.
• Sony WF-1000XM4: Current Bluetooth headphones. I use these daily for meetings and to listen to music and to watch TV shows past my bedtime. Great audio quality, battery life, and charging speed. My only complaint is the phone app tries to railroad you into an unnecessary Sony account during installation.

Update (2024-07-26): I found the Nook, Cliq, both Nexus 7 tablets, an iPaq, and two digital cameras. Everything except the Cliq is shown below:

Those are some massive bezels!

On Friday I posted a long Site Backend article which explains how the content on this site is managed, speed and security tweaks, Hugo customizations, Apache configuration, and more.

Last week I released a browser extension for Firefox which sorts entries in Daily Kos live update articles in chronological order and adds a sort toolbar.

Install Firefox Add-On, Git Repository

Background: Several months ago I created a bookmarklet (available here) which sorts entries in Daily Kos live update articles from oldest to newest. Unfortunately the bookmarklet was difficult for people to use because:

• Installation required copying minified JavaScript into a text field, and
• You had to click the bookmarklet after loading a live update article in order to activate it

To address these problems, I converted the bookmarklet into a browser extension. I also added a couple of features during the convdrsion.

Note: The extension isn’t Firefox-specific, but it’s unlikely I will port it to Chrome because I recommend people ditch Chrome.

This week Google announced they are moving forward with the plan deprecate Manifest V2. Despite claims by Google, this change has nothing to do with security and everything to do with hobbling ad-blockers.

Last year I switched to Firefox in anticipation of this change and in response to several other user-hostile changes,

At this point I recommend everyone do the following:

1. Switch to a non-Chrome browser. I recommend Firefox.
2. Install an ad-blocker. I recommend uBlock Origin.

This recommendation applies even if you don’t care about ads or privacy; the current "don’t be evil" incarnation of Google has been a poor steward of Chrome and it’s only a matter of time before they do something that you do care about.

Update (2024-06-27): Don’t forget that ad networks regularly serve up malware as well.

While perusing Vim scripts, I noticed that there are several Vim books. A couple of them piqued my interest:

• Practical Vim, Second Edition (2015)
• Modern Vim (2018)

I bought both books and I’m about 300 pages into Practical Vim. So far it’s great. I have been using Vim for over 20 years but I still learned a few things; for example, I did not know about the \v “very magic” prefix for patterns.

If you buy the books from the publisher instead of Amazon you can download the eBooks as DRM-free PDF, EPUB, and MOBI files. I read the PDFs on my desktop and the EPUBs in the Kindle app on my phone (imported via Send to Kindle).

Unlike many technical books, the EPUBs render very nicely in the Kindle app. Example:

Page from “Practical Vim” rendered by the Kindle app on a Pixel 8 Pro

Update (2024-06-15): I finished both books. Practical Vim is great and I recommend it. Modern Vim is a bit of a tossup:

• Pros: The introduction to neovim is helpful and so is the section on fzf integration.
• Cons: Several chapters are a subset of material from Practical Vim (examples: chapters 2 and 4). Also Modern Vim does not cover modern Vim features like the terminal command, which I use regularly.

To be fair, :terminal is mentioned briefly in the “What’s Next for Vim 8” section of Appendix 1, and it was not included in a stable release until after Modern Vim was published.

A couple of site updates:

• Added dark mode support and a dark theme.
• Added pictures on the About page.

Dark Mode

Dark mode uses a prefers-color-scheme media query to determine the default theme, so it should do the right thing™ for people who have their system configured to prefer a dark color scheme. The theme can also be set explicitly using the “Switch Theme” icon on the right side of the menu bar.

There is a minor refresh bug and probably a few rough edges with older content, but I will get them sorted as time permits.

Screenshot:

I strongly prefer dark mode and have wanted to add it here for years, so this change is a big victory for me.

About Page Pictures

There’s not much to say here; the About page now has a couple of pictures.

Adding the images in a way that I was satisfied with turned out to be a lot more effort than you might expect… This site is statically generated with Hugo, the theme is a heavily-customized version of Bulma, and blog posts and articles are written in Markdown.

The features that I wanted were:

• A responsive layout containing a horizontal row of images on desktop which gracefully falls back to a vertical list of scaled thumbnmails on mobile.
• Multiple image format support (in other words, the <picture> element).
• Accessibility (title, alt, aria-label, <figcaption>, etc).
• Ability to specifily all of the above in the article front matter.

In order to support everything above, I ended up copying my existing pe-figure shortcode and modifying it to support image “carousels” in articles.

In any case, it’s done now. Here is the result:

I just released v0.6 of fips203ipd.

fips203ipd is an embeddable, dependency-free, MIT-0 licensed, C11 implementation of the FIPS 203 initial public draft (IPD) with scalar, AVX-512, and Neon backends. The final version of FIPS 203 will become ML-KEM, NIST’s standarized post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism (KEM).

Git Repository, API Documentation, Original Announcement, pqc-forum Announcement

Changes in v0.6

• Add Neon backend
• Add MacOS support to test suite (thanks Rod!)
• Add backend auto-detection, BACKEND command-line build parameter, and fips203ipd_backend() function
• Add Raspberry Pi 5 (Cortex-A76) benchmarks
• Add “Backends” documentation section with brief notes about each backend

Benchmarks

Here are median cycle count as measured by the included bench tool for each parameter set, function, compiler, and backend from several of my systems.

For context, the results below are competitive with the eBATS results (kyber512, kyber768, kyber1024), although the comparison is inexact because the results were measured with different tools and because Kyber and ML-KEM differ slightly.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, 6th Gen (x86-64 i7-1185G7)

Download CSV

Raspberry Pi 5 (ARM Cortex-A76)

Download CSV

Odroid N2L (ARM Cortex-A73)

Download CSV

Update (2024-05-16): Added cycle counts for scalar backend (clang and gcc), added bar charts, added downloadable CSVs. The CSVs and SVGs generated by the Python scripts in the scripts/bench-chart/ directory of the Git repository.

Today’s solar eclipse took a healthy bite out of our solar energy production for the day. According to the details on timeanddate.com, the partial eclipse in our area lasted from 2:04 pm until 4:32 pm (Eastern).

Those times line up perfectly with the dip shown on our dashboard:

Unfortunately we couldn’t find our solar eclipse glasses, so we had to fall back to ye olde pinhole method.

Update (2024-04-09): Several comments on this Ars Technica article also show dips in solar energy production.

Two new releases:

• sha3 v0.6
• fips203ipd v0.3

sha3

Embedable, dependency-free, MIT-0 licensed, C11 implementation of all algorithms from FIPS 202, SP 800-185, and the draft KangarooTwelve and TurboSHAKE specification.

Git Repository, API Documentation, Original Announcement

Changes in v0.6

• Improve speed of absorb, squeeze, and scalar Keccak permutation.
• Refactor SHAKE128 and SHAKE256 functions.
• Add CAVP tests in tests/cavp-tests.
• Documentation improvements.

fips203ipd

Embedable, dependency-free, MIT-0 licensed, C11 implementation of the FIPS 203 initial public draft (IPD). The final version of FIPS 203 will become ML-KEM, NIST’s standarized post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism (KEM).

Git Repository, API Documentation, Original Announcement

Changes in v0.3

• Add AVX512 polynomial addition, subtraction, and multiplication.
• Faster scalar Barrett reduction and scalar polynomial multiplication.
• Upgrade to sha3 v0.6 for faster hash/XOF performance.
• Add NIST draft ML-KEM test vectors to self tests and as examples/2-nist-tests/.
• Embed hash/XOF functions, remove sha3.[hc].
• Documentation improvements.

Last year we got rooftop solar. The picture above is our Enphase dashboard, which shows how the solar panels performed in 2023.

The blue bars indicate the energy produced by our solar panels and the orange bars indicate the energy consumed by our house, in megawatt-hours (MWh).

The relevant values are:

• Consumed: Total energy consumed by our house.
• Produced: Total energy generated by our solar panels.
• Net Imported: Energy we are actually billed for.

Any excess energy that we produce is exported back to the grid and credited to our account (net metering), so our power bills during the spring and early summer look like this:

The sections of the bill highlighted in red show the following, respectively:

1. Four months of zero net energy use.
2. A bare minimum power bill.

Savings

Here’s a breakdown of the money we saved this year from solar:

Notes:

• The solar panels offset 62% of our energy use for the year (6.2/9.9 = ~0.62) and saved us $868.00 (6200 kWh * $0.14/kWh = $868).
• We received a $260.25 property tax exemption from the Fairfax County Solar Energy Equipment Tax Exemption.
• We generated 6 solar renewable energy credits (SRECs) in 2023 and 5 have been sold. We received $179.52 for them (after fees).

The expected lifetime of the solar panels is 20 years. We expect to recoup the initial installation cost in 11-13 years.

That’s longer than usual (most folks try to break even in 5-8 years), but we’re okay with it; our house is partially shaded and our panel placement is deliberately less than optimal for aesthetic reasons.