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Engineering & Code

Engineering & Code explores the full stack of modern tech—from bits and transistors to cloud fleets and formal proofs. Here you’ll find clear, rigorous walk-throughs of software design, embedded hardware, security architecture, and the physics that underpins them, always paired with code, schematics, and reasoning you can put to work.

Containers Are My Proxy Pass Tutor

I have to build and interact with things to understand them. At MIT, we focused on combination of thought and practical action to solve current and future problems and our motto (mens et manus) combines application (hand) and theory (mind). By day, I’m leading adoption of containers and automation technologies to drive big changes in […] read more

Sled for Picture frame

Making perfect miters is hard and doing the math to get the inner rabbit dimension to add up isn’t easy. One thing I’ve learned about making stuff is that jigs make life better. I love making picture frames. Not only do I enjoy saving money, but I love dressing up art. Even a bad piece […] read more

Wiring for 3HP 220V (for Laguna Tools 18|Bx)

I recently purchased a Laguna Tools 18|Bx 3HP 220V 18″ Bandsaw, specifically a MBAND18BX2203, and needed to wire a 220 Volt outlet. I’ve done a fair bit of electrical work (both low and high voltage), but I had a couple questions. Just for the record, I enjoyed this video to make sure everything was setup […] read more

DEFCON 25 Writeup

Nothing delivers the fear of missing out like DEFCON. So much to learn and so little time. Too busy hacking in the IOT village or catching up with old friends to sit in on the talks? Read below to find out what you missed in my talk writeups below. They are listed in chronological order, […] read more

Smooth Move

My twelve year old daughter is working a science fair project on electricity and home usage. As part of her project, we have been taking lots of measurements of the electricity usage throughout our house. This provided a great opportunity to talk about smoothing and for me to publicly work through my resultant confusion. Smoothing […] read more

Human Computable Passwords

The problem Password reuse is one of the most common security vulnerabilities for individuals and organizations. Common approaches to mitigate password reuse include using a password wallet, writing passwords or hints down, or a simple scheme to translate contextualized information (i.e. a site’s name) into a unique password. Most often, users employ a small set […] read more

Three Way Troubleshooting

Tonight, I was rewiring switches to a more modern set of switches. These days I don’t have time to learn by experience, I have to think my way through this. Without experience, I have to go back to first principles. Funny enough, understanding a four way switch is very similar to understanding digital logic and […] read more

New Jersey School Heat Map

This morning before church, I wrote some code to build a contour plot of schools in New Jersey. The “hot” reddish regions have the best schools and the cooler regions don’t. Tech Stuff: How it’s made This wasn’t that easy. Since I had all the code from my previous post, it should have been very […] read more

Coding for a New House

I don’t want to read about it, just take me to your super cool interactive map. We are moving to the greater New York City area this summer where Tim joins the leadership team of Colgate-Palmolive. As tempting as it is to spend all our time on Trulia, Estately or Zillow looking at specific houses, […] read more

Common Mathmatical Libraries: Computation, History, and Trust

A common complaint among engineers is that modern computers obscure the details of the complicated math they produce. We cringe when children are exalted as “knowing computers” from a young age. Bill Gosper and Richard Greenblatt had perhaps the maximum benefit to “learn computers”. They didn’t have wolfram alpha or even spreadsheets, they had to […] read more