Vastrik

TaxHacker

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 14:16:53 +0000

How I optimize my German taxes using AI

Vibe Coding

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:07:52 +0000

Beer + GenAI = a whole useful app in an evening. How I now write my prototypes and weekend projects

End-to-end Encryption

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 22:18:11 +0000

How We Stopped Trusting Clouds and Started Encrypting our Data

SponsorBlock: Skip In-Video YouTube Ads Even on AppleTV

Wed, 15 May 2024 10:10:28 +0000

This post was meant to be a tweet, but it didn't fit, and I hate making threads. So here it is. I want to share something that has greatly improved my life in the last six months — the SponsorBlock plugin for YouTube. It works in all browsers, and through the magic of self-hosting, even with AppleTV in my living room and, theoretically, with your Smart TV. I'll explain how below. Yes, we all have ad blockers in our browsers already, with uBlock Origin being the best one, of course. Those living…

👩‍🎤 Indie vs Corporate 👨‍💼

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 17:45:26 +0000

Why the tech stack and approach to pet projects is completely opposite to what you do at work

Pets vs. Cattle

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 22:00:11 +0000

99% of your work will eventually be thrown away. And that's what will make you a professional.

Chaos Communication Camp 2023

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 11:43:19 +0000

I just went to the legendary hacker camp that happens only once every four years, and I'm here to tell you about it. Let's start with some background. One of the things Berlin's and Germany's tech scene can rightfully be proud of is the Chaos Computer Club. Chaos Computer Club, or CCC for short, is Europe's largest hacker association, founded back in 1981. In terms of insider recognition, it's comparable to Anonymous, though the latter is more of a movement of random anons without any organizat…

Dumbass Home. 3 Years Later

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 08:00:59 +0000

I recently posted another photo of my hallway tablet on Twitter, which displays various useful info through Home Assistant. In the replies, several people asked me to explain how the setup looks now — which devices survived and which were thrown in the trash, how everything is managed now, and why I switched from Raspberry Pi to a full-fledged Mini PC as the ultimate self-hosted box while keeping power consumption low. I wrote a brief note. Well, brief by my standards. As brief as I can manage :) Note: I've preserved your informal tone and sense of humor while adapting it for an international audience. The key phrases like "brief by my standards" maintain your self-aware blogging style. Would you like me to continue with more text?

Vastrik Bus

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Second year. Exterior and «off-road» stuff

A Team

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 10:37:18 +0000

IT is a team game. Sure, the ability to write higher-order functions on a mechanical keyboard is an important skill for a beginner. But the more experienced you are, the less important it becomes. Unfortunately, neither recruiters nor even some programmers realize it. The industry has grown up but there's still a noticeable imbalance. The word "Team" still sounds like a buzzword from those bullshit PowerPoint presentations, and being a "manager" is considered "lame"…

No Code

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 12:16:47 +0000

Here in Berlin, we have a favorite game. First, you work all month, and then you give half of the money to those who didn't. It's called TAXES. With their help, the rich force the middle class to help poor people. Or something like that. To make the game more fun, the guidelines provide a move when players can reimburse some of their taxes if they bought cookies for the office, a new microphone for podcasts, or had a "business meeting" in a cafe. It's called EXPENSES. You have to save…

Augmented Reality

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 13:16:58 +0000

In my last post about Computational Photography we ended on an idea that mass photography is slowly moving towards ‘improving’ our reality. Instagram masks replace gloomy faces, beautiful clouds are glued to the grey sky, and color filters make our boring life look a little better than our neighbor's. And that's crucial. That's what we call Augmented Reality or AR — when we mix our reality with virtual objects up to a point where the former is completely replaced. AR is passing through its vall…

Computational Photography

Sun, 30 Jun 2019 21:48:39 +0000

It's impossible to imagine a smartphone presentation today without dancing around its camera. Google makes Pixel shoot in the dark, Huawei zooms like a telescope, Samsung puts lidars inside, and Apple presents the new world's roundest corners. Illegal level of innovations happening here. DSLRs, on the other hand, seems half dead. Sony showers everybody with a new sensor-megapixel rain every year, while manufacturers lazily update the minor version number and keep lying on piles of cash from mov…

Dumbass Home 2.0

Tue, 05 Mar 2019 09:00:00 +0000

In other languages: Russian So, you want to bring a little more cyberpunk to your life. The light should lead your way when you're sneakin' to piss at night; a coffee machine should start automagically with morning alarm. Smart Нome, Internet of Things or whatever they call teapots with microcontrollers this year. I call it "Dumbass Home" because it simply fits better. I recently moved to a new apartment, and it was a sign to get mad at home automation. If I'm going to buy new bulbs,…

Machine Learning for Everyone

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 16:23:29 +0000

Machine Learning is like sex in high school. Everyone is talking about it, a few know what to do, and only your teacher is doing it. If you ever tried to read articles about machine learning on the Internet, most likely you stumbled upon two types of them: thick academic trilogies filled with theorems (I couldn’t even get through half of one) or fishy fairytales about artificial intelligence, data-science magic, and jobs of the future. I decided to write a post I’ve been wishing existed for a l…

How Machines Predict The Weather For Us

Tue, 01 May 2018 11:12:33 +0000

Imagine a world where we can't predict the weather. Your mom tells you to wear your scarf all the time. Aircrafts can accidentally get into the storm, which would be a disaster — passengers will spill their Prosecco. Awful! For people, to have knowledge about the weather is essential. We are making observations since the Aristotle times. Back then, The first patterns we found were simple. And I mean it. There were things like "a wind from the south has rain in its mouth." Huh? But wha…

Making the Touch Bar finally useful

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 14:22:15 +0000

15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is my main work tool for more than a year. I use it every single day, all day long — to code, to process photos, and to write my blog posts, of course. Back in 2017, I thought the Touch Bar had a vast potential to become engaging and helpful. I believed developers might support it in their applications. I was hoping there was a use for it. A year has passed, applications have been updated, but as a Pro user of Pro 15-inch laptop with a 3K Euro price tag, I do …

Machine Translation

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 22:50:46 +0000

I open Google Translate twice as often as Facebook, and the instant translation of the price tags is not a cyberpunk for me anymore. That's what we call reality. Hard to imagine, that this is the result of a centennial fight to build the algorithms of the machine translation with no visible success during half of that period. Those precise developments set the basis of all modern language processing systems — from search engines to voice-controlled microwaves. Talking about the evolution and th…

How Ethereum and Smart Contracts Work

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 23:17:05 +0000

This is the continuation of Blockchain Inside Out: How Bitcoin Works where basic ideas of blockchain technology – transaction pool, block chains, and mining, were explained. I’d recommend everyone not familiar with these terms read that post first. The following article is more complicated, with programming terminology and links to the first article. [commentable 10] Ethereum is the second most popular blockchain project in the world and looks like the most interesting from technical point of v…

Blockchain Inside Out: How Bitcoin Works

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 22:47:31 +0000

Two years ago I wrote a post called “Brave Decentralized World” mainly focused on the subject of decentralized networks. It was packed with a brief history of Fidonet, Napster, Gnutella, TOR, BitTorrent with its DHT extension, and there I spoke just a bit about the blockchain concept. Nowadays, when a half of my friends are playing on crypto-exchanges, and the other half – preparing for ICOs, surprisingly, only a few of them understand the blockchain internal mechanisms. This article sheds some…