Thomas Karpiniec
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octet-stream.net
Thomas Karpiniec
@octet-stream.net
110 followers 110 following 350 posts
Tasmanian programmer often writing networking-related Rust. Likes music but mostly posts opinions about computers. Also known as thombles and VK7XT.

https://octet-stream.net/
https://standard-search.octet-stream.net/
https://site-validator.fly.dev/
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octet-stream.net
epic handshake meme. left arm: infosec. right arm: musical theatre. handshake: we're gonna need a key change
February 1, 2026 at 9:58 AM
octet-stream.net
Deleting Signal now that I know it's compromised. Find me on WINCHAT.EXE
Screenshot of Windows Chat with Windows 95-era chrome. Window divided into two text areas. Left side says "Oh, pretty well... Thanks!" Right side says "So how are things going at your end of the network?"
January 29, 2026 at 12:34 AM
octet-stream.net
In case anyone wanted to know, about 12-60 Mbps over the last few minutes if you want to consume the firehose.
Screenshot of bmon running in a terminal showing graphs of RX and TX bytes/second for eth0. The RX graph is showing mostly around 2 MiB/s with a couple of spikes in the middle up to 5.32 MiB/s.
January 15, 2026 at 10:48 AM
octet-stream.net
I do enjoy the "number of minutes to read" calculation for the blog entries on toki.la
Screenshot of HTML page source with a snippet of inline javascript highlighted. The highlighted line says "let time = Math.floor(Math.random() * 90);" and in the next line it is injected into the page as "${time} min read".
January 13, 2026 at 10:19 PM
octet-stream.net
Tensions running oddly high on the Wikipedia page for Jingle Bells
Screenshot of Wikipedia article text: Notes to lyrics a. DO NOT CHANGE THIS! “bob tail” (two words, no caps) is correct; see (link to PDF)
December 31, 2025 at 6:41 AM
octet-stream.net
Now we're getting somewhere: Memory Integrity Enforcement on Apple Silicon catching (deliberately) bad unsafe Rust operations 🎉 #rustlang #iosdev
Screenshot of a crash caught in the Xcode debugger, showing Rust source code. The highlighted line of code is: unsafe { *buf.as_mut_ptr().add(i) = 0; } And the error message is: "Thread 1: Heap buffer overflow by 1 bytes".
December 29, 2025 at 8:41 AM
octet-stream.net
Woot it worked for real. If I get enough failures maybe I can make some graphs and try to annoy the ISP.
Screenshot of a terminal with some output text selected. Specifically: # cat power-watchdog.log ... 2025-12-26 03:00:21 Internet failed, restarting router 2025-12-26 03:00:22 Power off succeeded 2025-12-26 03:00:27 Power on succeeded
December 27, 2025 at 8:46 AM
octet-stream.net
More things I didn't know about C. I kind of like it. lobste.rs/c/lqlcle
Screenshot of a forum comment. "The way to write a non-NULL pointer argument in C is" int t(int a[static 1]) { return *a; }
December 19, 2025 at 2:07 AM
octet-stream.net
I grew tired of needing to power cycle my modem by myself so I made a Raspberry Pi do it: tangled.org/octet-stream...

Thanks @leofebey.bsky.social for the assistance finding a suitable relay!
A Raspberry Pi in a red/white case is powered on, resting on a dark surface next to a power board. In the closest plug of the power board there is a black wallwart plugged in via a squat square-ish white box, a controllable relay.
December 18, 2025 at 9:53 AM
octet-stream.net
hackerman meme
December 17, 2025 at 8:10 AM
octet-stream.net
Blog: Experiments with Memory Integrity Enforcement
octet-stream.net/b/scb/2025-1...

TL;DR this thing is awesome
Screenshot of Xcode showing a debugger stack trace on the left and some Objective C code on the right. One line is highlighted in red, ret[i] = 0; which has the debugger annotation "Thread 1: Heap buffer overflow by 1 bytes". It is showing that it's detected this assignment outside the range of the heap allocation returned by an earlier malloc().
December 16, 2025 at 4:24 AM
octet-stream.net
Kids literature is wild these days
Hand holding a book at a library: Blockchain for babies by Chris Ferrie and Marco Tomamichel
December 10, 2025 at 8:52 AM
octet-stream.net
This AI stuff is getting out of hand
Screenshot of Spotify notification on iOS: new album coming soon. Johann Sebastian Bach started the countdown on Spotify.
December 6, 2025 at 8:06 AM
octet-stream.net
Not too concerned yet about AI replacing network engineers.
Screenshot of copilot output: Your DNAT rules currently only match destination ports >= 40000 and >=49152. Since 41734 < 40000, those rules don't match, so the packets aren't rewritten to 192.168.10.144
November 23, 2025 at 10:58 AM
octet-stream.net
I bought a CO2 sensor just to see how things are going around the home. Not very well, as it happens.
A screenshot of a graph showing a rise overnight from around 850 to 2844 ppm carbon dioxide
November 13, 2025 at 8:19 PM
octet-stream.net
I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead
Cropped screenshot of the bottom of a VS Code session with the terminal tab selected. The user has run the command "top" and the terminal is showing the expected text layout of "top" except that some text encoding error has occurred and all of the letters and numbers in top's output have been replaced by what looks like mostly Chinese characters
November 12, 2025 at 10:04 AM
octet-stream.net
People are putting markdown into RSS now? Sounds like a great idea
Screenshot of an update dialog for NetNewsWire showing the new features in 6.10. The top dot point has been highlighted and it says "Added support for Markdown in RSS via the source:markdown element. When present, the Markdown is rendered as HTML"
November 10, 2025 at 9:54 AM
octet-stream.net
Apropos of nothing, please enjoy a chill sheep I saw today
A young sheep lying in a field of grass
November 9, 2025 at 5:21 AM
octet-stream.net
Hot Diggity Dog, a fun AR game by Mel Huang where you have to move your face around and bite hotdogs, on display at the Science Gallery in Melbourne. The nod to the Windows 3.1 theme is a nice touch.
A computer game on a screen with a big button in a Perspex case. It’s in a public display area with a projector mirroring the screen overhead. The screen has a mock Program Manager from Windows 3.1 with an icon to start the game. Everything is in red and yellow colours. In game photo where someone’s face and mouth is being tracked as they try to position it over a hotdog for biting
November 8, 2025 at 3:31 AM
octet-stream.net
Daang this is a demo app Apple published for devs to try out on-device OCR. The actually-hard parts of this are maybe 10 lines of calls to their Vision API. It has a tendency to turn ł→t, ż→z, ą→a, ę→e, but y'know, still, dang. There are things I want to do with this.
Screenshot of an app running on an iPhone. Most of the screen is a previously captured photo of an open book, the first page of Mały Książę, a Polish translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "Little Prince". All of the text on the page has thin red rectangles around each line showing the bounding boxes where text has been recognised. Around the photo are some UI elements: "Retake Photo", "View Text", "Accurate", "Language Correction", and a language selection dropdown. The result of clicking "View Text" from the previous screen. Another screenshot from an iPhone. It has a hearing "Text extracted from the image", following by the Polish text that was detected in small writing. The formatting is haphazard but the text all there with pretty decent (possibly perfect this time?) accuracy, demonstrating that the OCR process succeeded.
October 30, 2025 at 10:30 AM
octet-stream.net
Edit of https://xkcd.com/303/ (Compiling) The #1 programmer excuse for legitimately slacking off: "My conversation's compacting!" -- (voice from inside office) "Hey! Get back to work!" (programmers having a sword fight on office chairs) "Compacting!" (from office) "Oh. Carry on."
October 22, 2025 at 8:21 AM
octet-stream.net
epic handshake meme: left arm "gemini protocol", right arm "LLMs", handshaek "what if the internet was unstyled text without inline images"
September 12, 2025 at 4:08 AM
octet-stream.net
ancient aliens meme "uber but for kubernetes. ubernetes."
September 8, 2025 at 9:24 AM
octet-stream.net
I ran some quick numbers on 11 years of blogging. You can take me at my word when I say the em dashes will continue regardless of recent events. #emdash
a bar chart titled "Em Dashes". The X axis has the years 2014 through to 2025 and the Y axis shows yearly em dash usage ranging from about 14 to 48.
August 6, 2025 at 2:56 AM
octet-stream.net
It's been years but I still see the bar chart emoji and think "dang we're going to need some more commercial zones"
enlarged screenshot of the "bar chart" emoji, at least as envisioned by Microsoft
July 15, 2025 at 5:39 AM