1-1sam

newver

2025-12-24T18:00:00Z

newver

I have recently released my newest project newver, a utility for scanning upstream web page's for new software versions. If you have experience with Debian's uscan, newver is similar to that but not designed around a speciifc packaging scheme. The idea came to me after playing around with uscan and wishing there was a similar tool to that could be used for non-Debian packages. I previously used to use the repology API to get informed about new software updates, but I didn't like the idea of relying on a 3rd-party service that itself relied on other package repositories that may not be completely up-to-date or accurate.

If you are interested, you can install newver via CPAN:

cpanm App::newver
# or
cpan App::newver

Thank you, and Merry Christmas!

noss 2.00

2025-11-12T18:00:00Z

noss 2.00

I have recently released version 2.00 of my RSS feed reader noss. You can find the project's homepage and repository here on Codeberg. noss is also available on CPAN.

The big feature of this release that I believed was worthy of bumping noss to major version 2 was the addition of colored output. This should hopefully make the output of noss prettier and easier to understand. And for those of you who hate color, you can disable it via the colored_output configuration setting or the --no-color CLI flag. There are also a lot more minor nifty features and improvements introduced in this release, a complete list of which can be found in the Changes file.

In other news, I've been in communication with some Debian developers who are working on packaging noss for the Debian repos! It's crazy to think that software I wrote is being officially packed for Debian. Thank you to the Debian developers for their hard work :-).

LLM Poison

2025-11-03T18:00:00Z

LLM Poison

After being inspired by this blog post, I've set up my own humble little LLM poison trap on this site. It's not as sophisticated as the one you'll find in the page linked prior because of the limitations of Codeberg's static page hosting, but it was still a fun project to do. A link to the pages can be found here.

I implemented it by writing a Perl script that reads text from input, builds a Markov tree of said input, then outputs a Markov-chain-generated output. I used an aggregation of Slackware's fortune databases, Moby-Dick, Three Men In A Boat, and Pudd'nhead Wilson as the source input text. Another Perl script then takes these generated texts and converts them to HTML pages which all link to each other, so that LLM scrapers will get "stuck" hopping between these pages.

It was a fun project! I don't know how effective it actually will be considering its just 30 different static web pages, and Codeberg works hard to block LLM scrapers from scraping its services, but it feels nice to do my part in combatting the scourge of evil, incompetant scrapers taking over the web :-).

My site now has an Atom feed

2025-10-27T19:00:00Z

My Site Now Has an Atom Feed

Despite my affinity for RSS, I have never actually gotten around to creating a feed for my own site. I feel some may find it strange that someone maintains an RSS feed reader yet doesn't even have a feed of their own, so I have finally corrected that. A link to the feed can be found here.

I would also like to use this opportunity to recommend some feeds I enjoy reading. Most of them will be primarily related to computing and programming.

Andrew Kelley (feed) - Creator of the Zig programming language. Interesting programming and computing culture articles.
AlienBob (feed) - Polific Slackware contributor. Mostly writes about Slackware.
briandfoy (feed) - Perl writer. Programming and Perl articles.
Drew DeVault (feed) - Developer known for his work on Wayland. Interesting programming and culture articles.
GingerBill (feed) - Lead developer of the Odin programming language. Interesting articles about programming.
jwz (feed) - Legendary hacker known for his work on NetScape. Writes about whatever he feels like.
LWN (feed) - Linux Weekly News. Weekly articles about Linux and open-source projects.
Marginalia (feed) - Creator of the Marginalia Search Engine. Primarily writes about their experience developing their search engine.
Project Nayuki (feed) - Programmer and Patchouli zealot. Interesting articles about programming and mathematics.
NRK (feed) - C developer of Suckless-like projects. Interesting articles about C programming.
rachelbythebay (feed) - Tech articles and sysadmin war stories.
ratfactor (feed) - Fascinating tech explorations and programming articles. My personal favorite site :-).
Unix Digest (feed) - Articles about Unix (primarily BSD).

quixftp

2025-10-26T19:00:00Z

quixftp

I have recently released the first version of my latest project, quixftp. It is a simple, zero (or more ;-) configuration FTP server designed for quickly sharing files over the network. It focuses on ease-of-use and convenience over robustness and security; it's designed for simple file-sharing rather than serving as a fully-fledged FTP server like vsfptd.

This is my first "serious" project in Go, and so far I have enjoyed my experience with Go :-). It feels a lot like C but with all the annoying headache-inducing parts removed (manual memory management, hacky string handling, a crappy standard library, etc.). I hope to do more projects with it in the future!

Also, it's been a year since my last blog post. I find writing long-form blog posts like those that I am a fan of reading to be quite difficult and drain a lot of my energy which I would rather use for other things, which is why it has taken me so long to write another blog post. I think in the future, I'll stick to short-form writing and maybe someday I'll graduate to longer posts.

New(ish) Site

2024-12-26T18:00:00Z

New(ish) Site

Just recently, I have switched my site over from using handwritten HTML to HTML generated from Markdown files using a Raku script. You can look at what the new site's structure looks like on its Codeberg page.

The script I wrote for generating HTML pages is ugly and not very versatile, its designed to exclusively generate this site, so I wouldn't recommend you use it yourself. Also, the duck image is gone, sorry :-(. Maybe one day it will return, when I can figure out how to get it formatted correctly. For the time being, I'll just leave the duck here.

The use of Markdown should make writing and maintaining web pages much easier. Maybe I'll start using this site more often. Probably not. Who knows.

Anyways, I thought this was notable enough to write a quick post about. That's all.

Edit: 2/1/2025

The duck is back :-).

Manuals for Raku Programs

2024-12-12T18:00:00Z

Manuals for Raku Programs

In this post, I will detail my strategy for distributing manuals with Raku programs, especially those which you wish to distribute via Zef.

TLDR

Write your manual in Pod, then include a --help option that does

use Pod::To::Text;

multi sub MAIN(Bool :h(:$help)!) {

    put pod2text $=pod;

}

The Problem

Manuals (or manpages) are a form of documentation that have been standard in Unix operating systems since ancient times. I believe two reasons manpages have stood the test of time are the following:

Detail: Manpages typically contain all the information necessary to use a program (or they should, at least ;-).
Accessibility: Manpages can be immediately accessed via the command line using man command. Convenient and no network required!

Despite this, there are two issues with traditional manpages.

Portability: Systems like Windows don't believe in manpages.
Language Support: Some programming languages don't support distributing/generating manpages very well.

These are unfortunately problems you will run into when trying to distribute a manual for a cross-platform Raku program. The conventional way to distribute documentation for a Raku program is to either put the manual in its backend module's Pod or in the README. Neither of these are ideal either, primarily because of accessibility concerns. If you put it in program's module Pod, the user will have to know how to access it. This isn't an issue if you're a Raku dev who knows about rakudoc, but is an issue if you aren't in the know and just want to read the documentation. The alternative, to put it in the README, is just as bad, as the README is not installed with the distribution, meaning the user will have to go out of their way to find and save the README themselves.

The Solution

Many programs have the option to be ran with the --help option, which will print out a help message that details the usage of the program and its options. The help message is usually meant to just be a quick synopsis on the usage of the program, as opposed to the manual which contains much more comprehensive documentation. However, many programs have their help option bring up their manual (exiftool, systemctl, off the top of my head), so what if we did something similar; have a --help option that prints out a manual? By combining the manual and help message, we have a manual that is:

Accessible: Can be read from the program itself.
Detailed: We can choose the level of detail to write our help message.
Portable: Built into the program itself; if the program be ran, it can be read.
Supported: Raku provides a simple way to implement this

use Pod::To::Text;

multi sub MAIN(Bool :h(:$help)!) {

    put pod2text $=pod;

}

=begin pod

=head1 NAME
...

What this code does is render the Pod in the file it is located in and print it out. It accomplishes this by using pod2text, which is exported by Pod::To::Text. Pod::To::Text is a core module provided by Raku, so portability is not a concern here. $=pod is the variable holding your file's Pod structure, it's guarenteed to be there as long as you have Pod. Then you just have to write your manual in Pod.

I also like generating a README from my manuals, which I do via the Pod::To::Markdown module. That way, my README and manual have the same documentation, but I only need to maintain a single file.

One issue with this approach is that you won't be able to use special Pod comments (#|, #=). It's not a problem for me because I never liked using them anyway, but YMMV.

If you'd like to see this trick used in practice, you can view the following programs of mine:

Conclusion

That's all. I've been trying to come up with a good idea for a new post for a while but nothing could come to mind. I realized that manuals seems to be a relatively untapped topic in Raku, so I thought this post might be helpful to some folks.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays :-)

My (Inexperienced) Experience with CompTIA Certs

2024-10-17T19:00:00Z

My (Inexperienced) Experience with CompTIA Certs

This posts details my experience studying and taking the following CompTIA certification tests:

CompTIA A+ 220-1101
CompTIA A+ 220-1102
CompTIA Network+ N10-008

I should probably note that I do not have actually have any professional IT experience (I am working on changing that :-). I just thought that perhaps some folks out there studying for these tests might like the perspective of a newbie like me that they can relate to.

Time

Each of these tests took me roughly two months each to study for. I passed each of them on my first try with the following scores:

220-1101: 746 (675 required)
220-1102: 768 (700 required)
N10-008: 781 (720 required)

While I was studying for each test, I was in high school. However, I had a lot time of downtime in my classes so that combined with the fact I didn't participate in many extra-curricular activies meant I had a decent bit of study time. If I had to guess how many hours I spent studying a day, it would probably be around three hours? I would study every day, only taking breaks if I got sick or I was particularly busy.

Studying

Here is a list of the study material I used for each test and how much it costs:

CompTIA Exam Objectivies - Free
Professor Messer Video Course - Free on YouTube
Professor Messer Tests (no Network+) - $30
Jason Dion's Practice Tests - $10
Pearson ExamCram Book - Free from library
Google - Free

As you can see, I did not have to splurge on study material. Along with the above material, I also did some hands-on stuff which I will also detail.

CompTIA Exam Objectives

This will be your most important study resource. Each CompTIA exam has a set of exam objectives, which you can basically consider your rubric for the exam. It goes into great detail about what topics will be tested for on the exam. You can find it for free on CompTIA's website, or various other places on the web. Later on I'll write on how you can use the exam objectives during your studies.

The exam objectives will also have a huge list of acronyms that test takers are encouraged to look over. Many people will make the mistake thinking they have to remember every single acronym on that list and what it represents. That is not really the case. While you should probably have some familiarity with the acronyms, one should focus on studying the exam topics themselves.

Professor Messer Video Courses

Professor Messer's video course was my primary study material for all three tests. Messer's videos are nice because they short yet packed with information. They do not tend to stray out of the exam objectives, so a lot of what you see in the videos you can be sure will show up on the exam. Each of his videos also has a slideshow to go along with it that is pretty convenient for copying notes. The slides can be a little bit terse and uninformative, so I wouldn't recommend just blindly copying them down. Messer himself will typically go into more detail about each subject, so you'll want to combine what he's saying with the notes on the slides.

Messer's videos are good enough to pass, but many people say that you should not solely rely on him to study. While his videos do cover all the material on the exam objectives, he does not usually go into quite as much detail as the exams do, so it is important that you pair him with some more detailed study material. I paired him with the ExamCram book, which I will go into more detail on later. I'd also like to add that Messer's Network+ course does a poorer job than his A+ videos on going through the material. There are many sections in the objectives that he does not touch, and there also many sections that barely touches upon. I would definitely not recommend on solely relying on Messer for your Network+.

Professor Messer also has two other useful resources for studying that often get overlooked; his monthly study group livestreams on YouTube and his weekly/semi-weekly quizzes on his website. His livestreams typically consists of a PBQ-style question and around 5 multiple choice questions. They make for some good practice. His pop quizzes are simple multiple choice questions. They are not really anything like the questions on the actual exam, but they still do make for some decent practice.

Professor Messer Tests

For $30, you can get a set of three 90-question practice tests from Professor Messer's website. The tests consists of 5 PBQs, and 85 multiple choice questions. These questions do a better job at emulating the exam's actual question style. Also, like Messer's other study material, his tests stick strictly with the exam objectives, so you will not have to wonder if a question on the test will actually be relevant or not for the real exam. In my personal opinion, these tests are lot better than Dion's practice tests. One critique I have with these tests is that the PBQs are nothing like the actual exams. Most of the PBQs are nothing more than just match the term with the purpose, the PBQs are on the actual exam are more complex than that. The multiple choice questions are still fairly accurate. Before taking the real exams, I was scoring around 85-95% on the Messer exams first try. So aim for that range. Subsequent attempts can still make for good practice, but subsequent attempts might not be as accurate gauges of your readiness as it's likely you will have remembered the answers to many of the questions. If you want to retake the practice tests, it's best to space them out by a couple of weeks so that you will forget most of the questions.

It should be noted that Messer never wrote practice tests for the N10-008, and the 009 practice tests are not out yet.

Jason Dion's Practice Tests

Jason Dion sells a set of 6 90-question practice tests on Udemy for each CompTIA certification test. I don't know if Udemy still does this, but when I went to buy the tests, they would be listed at ~$100. If you came back later or opened the site in a private window, the tests would randomly go on sale to around $10-$20. So make sure to catch them when their on sale.

Just like with Messer's tests, Dion's tests are written to emulate the style of wording of the real exams. Dion does this less gracefully than Messer, as many of questions can be entire paragraphs of length only to end up asking a very straightforward question that one could answer ignoring the rest of the information provided by the question. Dion also likes to reuse questions from older exams, even if they are not applicable to the current exams. If you feel like a lot of the stuff in Dion's tests weren't covered in your studies, just know that that's normal. The scenarios in Dion's PBQs are more accurate to what you would find on the real exam, but suffer from the problem of usually being simple multiple choice or select all that apply questions. Before I took the exams, I was scoring in the 80% range, although I've heard many passed when they were in the 70s. So I'd say aim for the 70s and above.

ExamCram

I received a digital copy both the ExamCram A+ book and Network+ book for free from my library. Be sure to check your library to see if they have any study material available (although beware that a lot of material may be outdated). I did not read the entirety of either book. I would mainly read through sections that I felt like I did not understand all to well from Messer. That is the benefit with any book as opposed to any other medium, they typically allow you to go much more in-depth into a topic. I probably would've done just fine without this book, but it was free so ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

Google

This one should be straightforward. If there is something in your studies that you do not understand and none of your material adequately explains it, just google it. The benefit of googling something is that you will usually find people with practical IT experience explaining something, and they will often explain the practical application of some topic. This can be nice because of a lot of CompTIA study material tend to explain the concept behind something which can make it difficult to comprehend it's use in the real world. Another benefit of googling is you can find out how much stuff your studying is bullcrap. For example, you probably will not have to know maximum distance 1000BASE-SX multimode fiber can support off the top of your head.

The Process

In this section, I will detail my study process, start to finish.

The very first thing I would do is go through the entirety of Professor Messer's vidoe course. Throughout the course, I would take notes on anything that I thought would be worth noting. I would typically get through a section a day. If I encountered something that looked like it might be somewhat tedious to learn, I'd try to get it down that day. For example, when I encountered all of the port numbers, I rote-memorized them the day I went through that section so that I would not have to put learning them off to some later date. I did the same thing with subnetting, WiFi standards, printer troubleshooting, and some others that I can't remember right now. After I finished a section, I would consult the exam objectives to see if Messer covered everything. If anything was missed, I would consult either the ExamCram or google.

Once I had finished Messer's videos, I would then start digitally transcribing my notes. Transcribing my notes gave me the opportunity to see if there were any topics that I did not understand very well.

Once I had finished my notes, I would then start employing a study strategy that I call "dumping." Basically, I would choose a random section in the exam objectives. Then I would go through each topic in that section and write everything I knew about it. If I was able to write a paragraph of information on that topic, then that meant I probably knew the topic well enough for the exam. If I was struggling to explain a topic, then that meant I did not understand it well enough and I mark it down as a topic I would need to study more thoroughly in the future. During this process, I would also add topics to the exam objectives themselves if I thought they were relevant. For example, I added the bootrec command to section 1.2 on the 220-1102 exam objectives (the one concering Windows CLI tools), because the bootrec command is important to know for many boot problems CompTIA wants you to know how to deal with.

Throughout this process, I'd also make sure to get some hands-on practice. You don't have to get hands-on practice for every topic on the exam. For example, here is some of the hands-on practice I got when I was studying for my Network+:

I used Linux on my main desktop, so I got to have a lot of practice with using CLI tools and software that CompTIA tests for. Playing around with the tools gives you a much better idea of what they do and their practical application then what reading about them can do.
I also set up a very cheap homelab. I had an old Dell Optiplex micro that I converted into a home server sitting next to my router. I installed FreeBSD onto it and began setting up various network services such as DNS, DHCP, FTP, and Syslog. I also learned how to use some networking utilities like SSH, nmap, ifconfig, etc. If you have some old computer laying around your house that you do not use like a laptop, you can easily convert it into a home server by installing some Linux distro on it.
I created plans for my own homelab network. I never actually bought the equipment or anything, but creating the plans for one still taught me a bit about networking equipment, layout, and design.

While I was employing this study strategy, I would also take practice exams from either Messer or Dion to gauge my readiness for the real exam. The moment that I felt any sort of confidence that I could possibly pass the exam, that would be when I would schedule the exam. In 2/3 of my tests, I would schedule it 3-4 weeks later. Due to money problems, I had to wait until I had money to schedule the other exam, so I scheduled it a week later in that case.

The Exam Itself

Due to the candidate agreement CompTIA has you sign before you take the test, I can't disclose any questions that appeared on my exams. But I'll try to explain what the exams were generally like without violating the candidate agreement.

The exam can have a maximum of 90 questions, but I believe all of my exams had around 70-75 questions. I had 4-5 PBQs in all of my exams. Many speculate that the more PBQs you have, the less multiple choice you get.

I'll give some advice on the PBQs. The advice that everyone gives that I agree with is that you should skip the PBQs and save them for the end of your test. I think people tend to exaggerate the difficulity of the PBQs and make it seem like they're impossible to prepare for. In my experience, the PBQs are basically just slightly more difficult questions testing your knowledge of the exam objectives. As long as you know the exam objectives, they should not be terribly difficult. The most difficult PBQs you can get are ones that have you do stuff at the command line. I only had those on my Network+ exam, and they also weren't as scary as they seemed as you can type a help command that shows you a list of what commands are available to you. All you really have to do is just remember what the commands do.

As for the multiple choice questions, again, I believe people to tend to exaggerate their difficulty. In my experience, most of the questions weren't too obtusely worded. There were definitely some that felt like compelte bull, but I never felt like I was at any risk of failing the exam because of those questions.

Exam-specific stuff

Here I'll briefly write about some stuff you should know for each exam.

220-1101

Know you're printers and how to fix them. Know the troubleshooting methodology. Know your exam objectives.

220-1102

Know your macOS. Know your Windows administration programs. Know your malware removal procedure. Know your exam objectives.

N10-008

Not relevant anymore :-/. Know your troubleshooting methodology. Know your routing protocols. Know your exam objectives.

End

So that's all the advice I have to give about taking the tests. I might at some point write about how effective the certifications are for actually getting a job. But I'll probably save that for when I get more experience in the IT industry.

1st

2024-10-17T19:00:00Z

1st

This is my first post on this website. I guess the 'Posts' part on my site could be considered a blog of sorts. This section is is for whenever I feel like writing about something I'm interested in that I feel someone else might like to read. It might be related to tech, it might not. Who knows. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

1-1sam

newver

newver

noss 2.00

noss 2.00

LLM Poison

LLM Poison

Links

My site now has an Atom feed

My Site Now Has an Atom Feed

quixftp

quixftp

New(ish) Site

New(ish) Site

Edit: 2/1/2025

Manuals for Raku Programs

Manuals for Raku Programs

TLDR

The Problem

The Solution

Conclusion

My (Inexperienced) Experience with CompTIA Certs

My (Inexperienced) Experience with CompTIA Certs

Time

Studying

CompTIA Exam Objectives

Professor Messer Video Courses

Professor Messer Tests

Jason Dion's Practice Tests

ExamCram

Google

The Process

The Exam Itself

Exam-specific stuff

220-1101

220-1102

N10-008

End

Links

1st

1st