Nicolas Chan’s Blog

Update: After I requested review using the search console on July 29, 2023, Google sent an email on August 1, 2023 saying that “bell.plus no longer contains links to harmful sites or downloads. The warnings visible to users are being removed from your site.” I am still worried the issue with the NextAuth default sign in page persists. It’s unclear whether this was a manual review or automated scan....

In my apartment I control my lights using Zigbee2MQTT, Mosquitto (MQTT), and openHAB all running on Kubernetes. Here’s the how and why for this over-engineered nonsense. But why? You could probably get similar features with various smart home hubs. Philosophically, I am opposed to my lights relying on services outside of my control. My goals are: Everything can run locally and if the internet is down. No hard dependencies on third party services....

I don’t have a password on my WiFi. The internet is the 21st century library. Everyone should have access to a public library. Similarly, everyone should have access to public internet. I have more bandwidth available than I need, so sharing my extra bandwidth is the neighborly thing to do. For more details, openwireless.org aligns with my views. Isn’t that dangerous? There are some risks but we can manage them:...

I started using the Dvorak keyboard layout in middle school. Here are my thoughts as a full-time Dvorak typist ten years later. Observations I’m not much faster than my peak Qwerty speed, if at all (≈110 WPM). This isn’t super fast, but my typing speed usually exceeds my thinking speed so it’s enough for me. My Qwerty speed has degraded (currently around 70 WPM) since peak (>100 WPM). This is not bad considering how rarely I use it....