Henry J Schmale's Blog

A Blood Orange and Meyer Lemon Sour for Christmas 2022 December 24

I found blood oranges and Meyer lemons at my local farm market. Blood oranges are these very deep dark red fruits that taste more like oranges than one would think. It’s also smaller. A Meyer lemon is a sweeter lemon with a softer skin. These fruits are both really good, but what if these were combined into one drink. Since citrus fruits were given as gifts in Pennsylvania Dutch families I’ve decided this would be a good time to talk about this concept.

Mastodon and the Fediverse 2022 December 22

I’ve recently got fed up with the standard centralized social media, so I joined Mastodon. Everything was feeling incredibly fake as of late. It’s hard to build real connection on the large sites. This is my experience joining the fediverse and tildeverse. I’ve always been interested in old school social networks like BBS, and the whole lore that surrounds them, so I decided to get more involved with Mastodon as hosted by SDF. I’ve had a shell account with them since 2016 and I’m sustaining member too. It’s nice to try out their other hosted applications.

Lovecraftian Gin Story 2022 November 12

I was sitting in the bar. It was a dark and dreary affair, the kind of place you find yourself in after the world has crumbled. The furniture was old and wooden. It was straight up medieval. There was a crackling fire going, but it was starting to die down. All I saw around me reminded me of that fateful shadow over Innsmouth. Such a tragic shame that whole affair.

The Secret to Better Soups 2022 November 06

cooking

I’ve been on a bit of a soup kick lately, in the past 2 weeks I’ve made 2 big pots of different kinds of soup. Both have turned out good, and have been filled with very rich and deep savory flavors. I have to give a lot of credit to the content I’ve been consuming and watching on youtube of older french cooking techniques. I credit the results to 2 very interesting ideas. The soups I’ve made have been a pepper potato chicken soup, and a beef short rib with beans soup.

Building a Go Application Inside of AWS CloudShell 2022 September 29

I’ve been learning a little bit of golang as of late, and I wanted to run it on AWS Lambda. I had a couple errors come up about my libc, and learned that I need to build my applications on Amazon Linux, so they can run on lambda. I didn’t want to set up a CodeBuild just to play with a few toy example programs or setup a couple docker containers. In fact we don’t even need to since AWS provides CloudShell, a complete shell environment available to every user of an AWS account.

Building a Nutrition Macro Calculator Spreadsheet 2022 August 11

I really want to lose some weight this month, but nutrition is hard, and it can’t run on instinct. So I made a spreadsheet to calculate calories and macros. I’m not a dietician or a nutritionist so my diet numbers should definitely not be trusted. I just followed examples and combined them to build my diet. What can be trusted is how I loaded the information from official government sources, and how I did my research.

Rise of Gru - Waterfall to Steam Door Physics 2022 July 06

“Minions: The Rise of Gru” was pretty good, and tells the origin story of Gru and his formative years. That’s all well and good, but the waterfall trap scene was the most interesting piece of the movie to me. The movie opens with some villains attempting to steal this mystical artifact from a temple. In order to get into the temple the villain must reorient these dragons which blow fire to clear away the falling water by turning it to steam. Is this even possible, and if so how much heat would it take, and why wouldn’t the opener be singed by the overwhelming temperatures?

The Lightyear Movie and Resilient Organizations 2022 June 27

“Lightyear” was a very fun movie. It’s not a timeless classic, but I enjoyed it. There were some serious issues with it, and the overall organizational structures. I expect better from Pixar on their research, after all they made one of my all-time favorite movies “Wall-E”. They got in an actual doctor of fishes in to explain how fishes move for “Finding Nemo.” As always there will be unmarked spoilers.

My New Picnic Bench is Better Than Any Other Outdoor Furniture 2022 June 06

I bought a picnic bench to really enjoy the outside this summer. Over the last weekend, I picked up an unfinished wooden one from Lowe’s, and finished it myself. I got it for several reasons, and wanted to show it’s empirically better than any other patio furniture. I also just want to show off how good it looks in the yard.

Computing Most Chatty People in IRC 2022 May 03

Recently I was trying to figure out who was most active on the IRC server I frequent. IRC by it’s very nature leaves log files so that you have a record of your conversations in your control. So you can perform some processing on them to determine various statistics. This is a one liner to compute that.

2D Metaballs Demo using Marching Squares 2022 April 04

Metaballs are organic looking blob like balls that merge and split apart based on their distances from each other. They can be defined as a single function or a summation of functions across the x and y plane. By computing the contours, a very cool picture can be produced in real time as shown below. However, computing the entirety of the function plane to a high degree of precision is very expensive. To make it less expensive and produce a good high quality contour marching squares can be used. It samples 4 points of a function and interpolates where a threshold value occurs to draw the outline. I was inspired by Reducible’s video on how computers can draw weird shapes.

Superman - Man of Tomorrow 2022 April 02

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a movie review, but I just finished yet another DC animated movie, that I think deserves another chance from critics. It’s “Superman: Man of Tomorrow”. You might think it’s another generic superman movie, and you would be right, however I need to applaud the use of Lobo and Parasite, two of my favorite rogues in Superman’s gallery. Both are really fitting villains for him to face.

Interactive Encryption and Decryption using RSA 2022 March 14

I had a bit of inspiration recently with Fermat’s Attack on RSA and decided to make an RSA demonstrator. It shows all the steps in performing an RSA encryption using 2 known primes. It might be useful during a CTF when trying to determine small RSA keys by hand. I’ll eventually post a follow up for implementing that attack for small p and q.

POV-ray Dice 2022 February 22

I saw a captcha with dice thread on hacker news. The general idea of the captcha was to find the picture of dice with the right sum on it. I was wondering how hard it would be to generate several thousand of these dice images, and how long it would take using POV-ray. POV-ray is the Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer. It takes a text based description of the scene built using various primitives like spheres and boxes to produce a ray traced image. The POV-ray language is Turing complete and allows some really advanced programming features, such as macros, loops and conditionals, which I take full advantage of for this scene. The dice are even transparent.

Implementing a Table Create & View Update in Athena using AWS Lambda 2022 February 01

I have a DynamoDB table that is automatically exported as JSON to compute some reports. I wanted to automate the table creation process and load steps. Amazon Athena allows querying from raw files stored on S3, which allows reporting when a full database would be too expensive to run because it’s reports are only needed a low percentage of the time or a full database is not required. It’s billed by the amount of data scanned, which makes it relatively cheap for my use case.

My notes on what packages I absolutely need to install to maintain this site. 2022 January 27

I recently got a new laptop and decided to move to Manjaro, an Arch Linux derivative. I had some frustration with setting it up, and getting the tools I need to maintain this website installed. Documented below are the steps I took to solve it.

Archive of posts from 2022