reachtim

Technical

Things I worked out, written down.

Most of these started the same way: I lost a week to something — a PDF that wouldn’t validate, LaTeX that refused to paginate, a server I couldn’t see inside — and wrote up whatever finally worked, mostly so I’d be able to find it again.

They’re from 2014 to 2020, carried over from the old blog. I’ve left the code alone, so a few of them show their age. The ideas hold up better than the version numbers do.

  1. LoRecon: LoRa Reconnaissance on a $20 Board

    A passive LoRa sniffer for cheap ESP32 hardware — what it sees, what it can’t, and why default encryption keys are the interesting part.

    Security

  2. The contextmanager Decorator

    Quick overview on usefulness of the contextmanager decorator and creating context managers from generators.

    Python

  3. Reading Binary Data with Python

    Two ways to read binary data into a Python data structure.

    Python

  4. Include HTML in LaTeX

    How to include HTML content in your LaTeX documents.

    LaTeX

  5. Testing PDFs with Python

    Methods for testing PDFs using Python.

    Python

  6. Manipulate PDFs with Python

    Methods for manipulating and extracting information from PDF documents using Python.

    Python

  7. SAS and LaTeX Together: The StatRep Package

    How to use StatRep with SAS-generated LaTeX output for reproducible research.

    LaTeX

  8. Create Keywords Metadata From Index Terms

    How to harvest index terms in DocBook XML to create keywords for HTML.

    XML

  9. BAM! A Web Framework "Short Stack"

    Use BAM (Bottle, Apache, and MongoDB) to create a quick website.

    Python

  10. How To Pad a PDF to an N Page Signature

    How to use LaTeX to force a PDF to have a multiple of n pages.

    LaTeX

  11. psutil and MongoDB for System Monitoring

    How to use psutil and MongoDB for monitoring system health.

    Python