Compressed Thoughts

A Journey Through Some Rough Lenovo Firmware

How I diagnosed a bad NVMe drive on a laptop over several hours., Jan 18, 2025

I recently had the displeasure of working on a Lenovo Yoga C740 which had stopped booting into its operating system (Linux Mint). What should have taken 30 minutes, ended up taking me probably around 8 hours.

Confidentiality in the Digital Age

A primer on message and file encryption, using common, open, and secure standards., Oct 24, 2024

This post is going to focus on teaching the basic functionality for the "GPG" software, specifically how to; encrypt, decrypt, sign, and verify text/files. But first, why? I have two motivations for writing this. The first is just a general desire to share some cool knowledge I have with other tech people that may be interested, but the second is due to feeling more and more like the time and place in which I live requires such knowledge to continue living a safe and peaceable life. While I won't elaborate on that second point, it is my primary motivation behind sharing this knowledge.

Homework

Obviously homework sucks, but why is it so hard to do?, Feb 23, 2020

I think I can count all the times I did homework in high school, on one hand. It usually didn't affect me, though it certainly wasn't to my advantage...

Teachers Get No Respect

*Insert Rodney Dangerfield reference* - but seriously, the way some teachers get treated is absolutely despicable., Feb 17, 2020

As I ease into College life, and think back to the last 12 years of schooling, I notice something that I had already realized, but never really thought about. I've had many great teachers, I've had some bad ones sure, but 9 times out of 10, the teachers I had were at least good teachers and nice people. But apparently some people don't agree with that sentiment.

Old Code

Ever look at your old code, and think: what the actual ****?, Feb 10, 2020

I've been programming for ~5 years now, and sometimes I like to go back to old projects. Either to, take a look at what I did, port them in some way to a better platform (or just for the sake of renewing them), or even continue working on them in some cases! But there's one big problem that always pops up...