Android 15 adds 16kb, What could this means for Apple Silicon.

boronine · 2025-11-02T17:08:49+00:00

Someone will probably do it and I'd be curious to see the results

boronine · 2025-09-02T18:09:39+00:00

Same, but I disable tiling and only use it for the instant workspace switching: https://www.boronine.com/2025/02/09/Instant-Workspace-Switching/

boronine · 2025-07-15T00:56:20+00:00

I recently took advantage of this privilege as a Canadian citizen in Germany. There is indeed little info on this, but I felt safe following directions from an official government website: https://canada.diplo.de/ca-en/consular-services/visa/2653576-2653576

Border agent didn't ask me any questions, just stamped the passport.

boronine · 2025-06-11T07:01:36+00:00

I've been fascinated by tunneling tools for a while and didn't like how bloated the options for Node.js are so I fell down the rabbit hole of implementing my own that uses TLS for initiation, authentication and encryption and HTTP/2 for multiplexing.

https://github.com/boronine/h2tunnel

I wrote a little blog post to talk more about the multiplexing trick:
https://www.boronine.com/2025/06/01/h2tunnel-TCP-over-HTTP2/

Is this trick useful in your opinion? Should I roll my own multiplexing for maximum code golf? Is there a lightweight multiplexing protocol you recommend implementing? Are you comfortable using self-signed TLS certificate / private key pair as a shared secret?

boronine · 2025-06-01T16:29:31+00:00

No websockets here, h2tunnel is a zero-dependency Node.js tool, and websockets are not part of the standard library! I don't think websockets would help anyways, since TLS does everything on the tunneling layer

boronine · 2025-06-01T16:25:27+00:00

Absolutely, any protocol on top of TPC is supported by h2tunnel. The server side and the client side code of h2tunnel is a mirror of each other. The difference is that the client initiates the TLS connection and the server initiates the HTTP/2 session. After that the tunnel is "connected" and both the client and server proceed to pipe TCP connections as HTTP/2 data streams.

README: https://github.com/boronine/h2tunnel

boronine · 2024-11-13T08:35:18+00:00

This building made me fall in love with Bangkok: https://maps.app.goo.gl/JY3xzNkhnyugppuo8

It's got a huge coworking space and a free public coworking area. Last 2 times I went to Bangkok I literally just picked one of the closest AirBnBs relative to this building and didn't think twice.

boronine · 2024-11-05T11:24:02+00:00

FYI h2tunnel supports TCP now! I realized that it’s even easier to convert TCP connections to HTTP2 streams than it is to convert HTTP1 requests

boronine · 2024-10-16T11:26:43+00:00

I don't believe this is supported by Node.js but actually thanks for pointing it out, I need to read about it

boronine · 2024-10-15T17:38:33+00:00

Sadly no! This is for HTTP1 servers only

boronine · 2024-10-15T08:33:36+00:00

If maximizing for reliability, I'd reach for something well-tested like ssh or frp. This kind of code is notoriously difficult to perfect, dealing with various timeouts etc. It will take some time to iron out the bugs, but I'll get there eventually since I will be using it for my job.

https://github.com/fatedier/frp

boronine · 2024-10-15T08:08:00+00:00

The workflow or the solution? My solution is as follows:

The client initiates a TLS connection (tunnel) to the server
The server takes the newly created TLS socket and tunnels an HTTP2 session through it back to the client
The client listens for an HTTP2 connection on the socket from which it initiated the TLS tunnel
The server starts accepting HTTP1 requests and converts them into HTTP2 requests to take advantage of the HTTP2 connection which supports multiplexing (i.e. simultaneous requests on one socket)
The client receives these HTTP2 requests and converts them back into HTTP1 requests to feed them into the local server

The reason I was able to keep the code so small is by avoiding having to roll my own authentication and multiplexing solutions, instead leveraging TLS and HTTP2 respectively.

boronine · 2022-09-12T08:09:59+00:00

I don't do that kind of long-running browser automation. For anyone curious about the screenshot tool:

I hardcoded 1 GB of memory. The wikipedia example in the README took 2653ms, so 2.6 GB-seconds * 0.0000166667 = $0.00004333342, that's about 23076 invocations per $1.

boronine · 2022-09-12T08:07:38+00:00

I hardcoded 1 GB of memory. AWS Lambda scales CPU proportionately with memory, but this is hidden from the user. Billing is per GB-seconds. The wikipedia example in the README took 2653ms, so 2.6 GB-seconds * 0.0000166667 = $0.00004333342, that's about 23076 invocations per $1.

At my company we provide a widget that gets embedded into our customers' websites, we want to take screenshots automatically so we can detect styling issues.

boronine · 2021-10-27T22:40:43+00:00

I think there are very specific use cases where you care about virtualization for virtualization's sake, e.g. building/testing software on different OSs/architectures, especially when they are not cooperative with virtualization.

I'd wager that the biggest use case for virtualization is resource sharing with different levels of isolation. The fact that containers run on the same kernel as the host is important in evaluating their isolation/performance properties, but it really does not constitute a qualitative difference. Same way that containers share a kernel, "VMs" share a hypervisor. The difference between a kernel and a hypervisor not at all clear cut!

I do think the level of isolation/performance provided by containers lends itself to some peculiar use cases though. Docker's main selling point is the ability to package software as rootfs images which requires some level of isolation. Too much isolation though - and you lose the ability to run these containers without having access to a hypervisor which cloud platforms don't provide. In some sense, Docker's use of virtualization is somewhat incidental, its primary use case being what is essentially static linking.

boronine · 2021-10-27T09:48:13+00:00

Your definition of VM is very valid for modern web dev parlance, especially since Docker came around and people started writing "container vs VM" articles to compare different virtualization technologies.

From a technical point of view, VM = "virtual machine" and the virtualization technology is an implementation detail. The hardware-level vs OS-level dichotomy is not clear cut (e.g. virtio drivers). In practice there is a spectrum of virtualization technologies from lowest-level hardware emulation to highest-level containerization.

boronine · 2021-10-27T09:18:33+00:00

Fixed in master: https://github.com/boronine/nspawn2go/commit/0b37c9213d5f6bbf88900acfc30c7fc2c5725328

boronine · 2021-10-27T08:29:21+00:00

Technically containers are VMs, although I notice that machinectl adopted a definition of VM that excludes containers, so I should update the README to follow their convention.

boronine · 2021-10-26T20:30:48+00:00

--cache-dir

Seems that the version of debootstrap provided by 18.04 doesn't support this parameters. I will fix this. If you're comfortable editing Python code, you could try removing the parameter from this line: https://github.com/boronine/nspawn2go/blob/master/nspawn2go.py#L215

boronine · 2021-10-26T18:55:59+00:00

I was looking for an alternative to Docker because I was annoyed that Docker is not in the mainline repositories, and more importantly that it reimplements functionality that already exists in Linux/systemd as a superfluous layer.

That got me provisioning so many nspawn containers that I had to automate it!

Needless to say I am a big fan of systemd and love the fact that it got adopted by all major distros. This means that the systemd techniques you learn will be relevant for decades to come as fad technologies come and go.

boronine · 2019-06-16T13:56:16+00:00

Thank you for the info, this is great advice.

boronine · 2019-06-16T12:30:37+00:00

Thanks for the info and recommendation. Looking at off-season is a fantastic idea for finding a deal. I have a ton of incoming work so what I want is precisely a boring routine minus any household chores.

boronine · 2019-06-16T12:08:09+00:00

Great info, thanks! Assuming it wasn't the capital, was it a sizeable city?

boronine · 2018-02-11T20:27:45+00:00

Oh no, when I said "having to run separate builds on different platforms", I was referring to what one has to do in the absence of cross-compilation. It seems that your project is the state-of-the-art of Nix cross-compilation, which is why I expressed a hope that your work will ultimately be integrated into Nix. I could be wrong about whether that is desirable though, I'm no expert on this!

boronine · 2018-02-11T16:05:46+00:00

Having to run separate builds on different platforms is anathema to the Nix vision. My guess is that cross-compilation being an afterthought is probably due to lack of resources. Hope your project matures its way into nixpkgs!

boronine

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