stene.xyz

about me

I'd describe myself as a technology enthusiast. I've found myself messing with most modern technology bubbles fairly early into their lifecycle - I got in early-ish with cryptocurrency (but didn't make much money out of it), was big on IoT (until seeing a barbeque that needed software updates), and was years ahead of the current AI hype with my Copilot self-driving software (which does, in semi-rare cases, work!).

I've always wondered how things worked and what led to them, so naturally I love open source. I'm a huge fan of the free Unix-likes in general, but I love OpenBSD. I have gone on (and will continue to go on) long rants about the fragmentation of Linux as an ecosystem compared to the sensible defaults and "single-project" nature of OpenBSD.

After having to do as much tech support as I have, I'm of the strong belief that operating systems and large software packages should still be coming with extensive documentation, and that it should not be possible to do near anything on them without reading said documentation. They don't need to be hard to use, they don't need to be complex, but they need to make the user read the manual. I've learned that people will do anything to avoid paying attention to what the computer is very clearly telling them to do if they feel the machine is at all foreign. I'm guilty of this as well.

I'm a big advocate for backups and cybersecurity. I've seen people pay thousands to clean up after a dead hard drive or a well-placed fake download button. I take a decent interest in cybersecurity. I've reverse-engineered malware, found vulnerabilities in the devices I use daily, and every so often poke into suspiciously cheap devices to see just what they may be hiding!

I tried starting a cell phone company. It didn't go well, but I hope to finish and release it as open source hardware one day. To this day I mess with the prototype, working on the software side of things every so often. It hasn't left my desk since 2020, and it won't until this damned thing is finished.

I like photography. I'm no good at it, I don't have nice equipment (just a $300 eBay DSLR), and I don't really have much to take pictures of, but I like it.

about my website

This is where I pretend to run a thriving technology enterprise. I've got a handful of (free!) online services, the two best being drop, a free temporary file host, and scribe, a free (permanent) web host. This is where a lot of my bigger projects, experiments, and demos find a home! I've made efforts to reduce it to the big ones - jailbreaks for a flip phone I like, the aforementioned free online services, things like that.

This site actually has a functioning authentication system (it's secure as far as I can tell, but you're welcome to take a look for any issues. I'll PayPal you $50 if you find any big ones) that's currently only used for scribe - eventually I'll have a full account management page, some more functionality, maybe even exclusive features for people I think are cool.

This site is also my first use of automated tests! Watching them pass is quite satisfying. I'll have to write tests more often.