As a Canadian living in the US: whenever my family and I go back up to Canada, we always pack our luggage to bring back stuff you just can’t find easily around here. I’ve given a few friends these sage words of wisdom when they visit Canada or when their Alaska cruise takes them through Victoria, so here’s your shopping list:

• Ketchup chips and All-Dressed Chips. You may or may not like them, but they’re popular and different!
• Cheezies (like Cheetos, but super crunchy and delicious).
• If you like chocolate, go down the candy aisle and get anything you don’t recognize 🙂. The chocolate is way better than US chocolate in general - Cadbury especially. My family really likes Crunchie, Caramilk, Smarties, Wunderbar, Crispy Crunch, Coffee Crisp, Eat More, Big Turk. There are often versions of KitKats you don’t see in the US as well.
• If you like mint, there are these things called English Mints that are unique. They are little hard pucks rather than round chewy ones. Sort of like huge Altoids.
• Farm Boy or Dare Maple Cookies (although you can sometimes find Maple Cookies in the US).
• Maple butter (you can sometimes get this in the US, sometimes also called Maple Cream).
• Spicy Genoa salami - the stuff you can get from the deli counter at Safeway is so much better than the spicy salami I can seem to find in the US.
• Butter tarts. They’re like mini pecan pies, but you can eat an entire one in a sitting and live to tell the tale!
• If you’re going to be around an oven in the very near future, Pillsbury Fruit Turnovers (from where premade cookie dough etc. usually is).
• If you like cheese, you can get actually aged (i.e.: 5+ years) white cheddar everywhere. It’s hard to find aged white cheddar in the US aged more than like 18 months.
• There’s a cereal called Shreddies that is super famous in Canada (i.e.: Cheerios famous) but for some reason not out here. When I visited Canada for the first time with my wife and people found out she’d never had Shreddies, they reacted like had just made first contact with an unknown tribe from a secluded forest.
• Poutine (fries + cheese curds + gravy) is amazing: poutine - Google Maps.
• Tim Hortons. Coffee is far better than gas station coffee, better than most restaurant coffee, but not gourmet tier by any means. But definitely get a pack of assorted Timbits doughnut holes. I usually tell them to skip the plain. Plain doughnut holes are just boring.

Enjoy!

Once every 80 years, T Coronae Borealis - also known as the “Blaze Star” - goes nova. When it does this, it brightens from roughly magnitude 9 (likely only visible with telescopes) to magnitude 1 or 2 (roughly as bright as the North Star).

NASA has a great explanation of it, as well as how to find it in the night sky. Astronomy.com also has a great and more detailed article.

If you have a Hiboy S2 Pro scooter, you might have explored whether you can increase its max speed above 20 MPH / 30 KPH. There are resources out there mentioning that you can snip a speed limiter wire, but as far as I can tell they are AI-generated make-believe.

TLDR: You can’t. The top speed is limited by the scooter firmware. But the BTLE protocol that the app uses to communicate with the scooter is very simple and open for experimentation.

Pixel Doodle is a fun little Pixel Editor for Gameboy, emulators, and retro handhelds like the Anbernic RG35XX.

APL is one of the most curious programming languages you’ll ever run across. For example, take a random problem out of Rosetta Code: “Numbers divisible by their individual digits, but not by the product of their digits.”. Here’s a typical implementation in C:

#include <stdio.h>

int divisible(int n) {
    int p = 1;
    int c, d;

    for (c=n; c; c /= 10) {
        d = c % 10;
        if (!d || n % d) return 0;
        p *= d;
    }

    return n % p;
}

int main() {
    int n, c=0;

    for (n=1; n<1000; n++) {
        if (divisible(n)) {
            printf("%5d", n);
            if (!(++c % 10)) printf("\n");
        }
    }
    printf("\n");

    return 0;
}

I wrote some PowerShell to take a look at the lengths of the solution in different languages, and as you would expect - there is quite a difference in verbosity.

I was recently interested in doing some data analysis of a Microsoft Teams transcript - specifically to understand if I was talking too much and not giving other folks the opportunity to speak.

If you’ve ever wondered something similar (or wanted to do data analysis for other reasons), you might have seen the option to download meeting transcripts. The default options are docx files (Word documents) and VTT files:

The VTT files are handy, but turning that data format into something you can process requires writing a mini little parser. Not a complicated one, but something custom nevertheless.

Postman is an extremely popular application for developers testing remote web APIs. It lets you craft HTTP requests, interact with their responses, and go through the history of what you’ve sent and received.

Many of these HTTP requests are authenticated, meaning that the application deals with API keys, login tokens, credentials, etc.

In May, Postman pivoted to be a cloud-only product for many of its features.

Postman’s Security Risk

When you log in to Postman, it automatically syncs all data to their cloud service – including sensitive data contained in these requests. For example, here is the cloud view of Postman when all I’ve ever used was the on-premises application.

Once in a while, I’ll stumble on a question online (or get an email) from a person wondering “Who the heck is leeholm16?”

If you’re reading this post, you’re likely one of them :)

I never know exactly what situation leads people to ask the question, but they’ve invariably started using a forensic parsing tool against Windows PowerShell.lnk or Windows PowerShell (x86).lnk. For example, here is the forensic analysis of the LNK file included in a SANS408 course. It comes from lp.exe by TZWorks.

If you’re looking to play with the cool Desktop Mode on your shiny new Steam Deck, you might have already seen that it is Arch Linux under the hood. Time to get your favourite shell on there :)

Here’s how to get PowerShell running using the community-contributed PowerShell binaries in the Arch User Repository!

## Create a password for root
passwd

## Allow pacman to write to the filesystem, and initialize
## pacman with its trusted keys
sudo steamos-readonly disable
sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux
sudo pacman -Syy

## Clone powershell-bin from the Arch User Repository
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/powershell-bin
cd powershell-bin

## Install prerequisites
## I picked 'All' for base-devel, but it's possible that only
## 'fakeroot' is required for makepkg to succeed.
sudo pacman -S --needed git base-devel lttng-ust

## Install the package
makepkg -i

## Have fun!
pwsh

Watchy is an exciting Open Source E-Paper Watch, based on Arduino and the ESP32 micro controller.

I’ve been a fortunate early backer, and doubly fortunate to have been part of some of the early waves that already have their physical Watchy. The component shortage has impacted the whole industry, and SQFMI is no different. However, the great news is that supply has opened up and SQFMI is currently in the process of shipping another huge wave of orders with more to come next month.