Yifan Gu

- some random dude

Recent Posts

Janky NTP – Setting System Time Using HTTP

I often find myself fighting with using NTP on linux machines – usually something goes wrong: maybe ntpdate isn’t there, or for some reason UDP is blocked, or maybe for some reason it just doesn’t want to do it. Here’s my janky version of ntpdate that overcomes those issues: Here’s ChatGPT explaining this bash one-liner […]

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File System as Partition Table

If you squint really hard – a partition table is basically a filesystem with only a handful of files – a partition table of, say, 4 partitions, is conceptually pretty much the same as a filesystem with only 4 files in it – the filesystem labels are the filenames, and the partitions are just the […]

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CRT Miniature Arcade Cabinet

Hey I did a thing – a raspberry pi powered miniature arcade cabinet – with an actual real 4-inch monochrome CRT. Next step – port WASM4 to RPi0 (or wait for someone to do that).

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Fixing Analog Stick Input in PPSSPP

PPSSPP is one of my favorite emulators. First introduced to me when I was still in high school, it is my go-to (or, only?) choice if I want to revisit some old PSP games. Though I ran into an issue that I was not able to run, only walk, diagonally in Metal Gear Solid: Peace […]

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Home Automation – Kubernetes Style

I’ve been using Smartthings as my smart home hub for a while. And I’d like to migrate to something that’s open source (or more importantly, self-hosted). There’s been a few horror stories out there that make me worry about the potential “hostage” situation. (e.g. manufacturers charging a monthly price for the service, or flat-out discontinuing […]

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