Aspy's Blog

I'm a bitch to big tech

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

BEWARE: This is totally gonna be a kinda “old man yells at cloud” post. It’s gonna be totally unstructured and messy.

In the past decade or so tech has gotten much more advanced, but paradoxically worse at the same time, in my opinion. My first phone was the iPhone 5s. Nice little brick that got the job done. I don’t remember exactly when hardware became more eh. iPhone 8 maybe? For software? maybe since the early days of Windows 10. 2015, or 2016? Back when they started telling Windows 7 users to update.

Exporting data from Arcane Bot

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Arcane Discord bot (often used for leveling in servers) offers no way to export level data for switching to another bot.

It’s quite simple, in a round-a-bout way.

Don’t tell anyone from Arcane, or they will ban you, but otherwise, they have no way of telling ;)

Why?

I wanted to switch Discord bots for level roles. Specifically to https://xela.dev/ (Amazing team, by the way)

YouTube Music iOS Scrobbling: Part 2

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I had wrapped up the last post about this (YouTube Music Scrobbling on iOS) suggesting FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler. While this is a great tool, with YouTube Music specifically it had a few issues due to how the YTM API works. If you are interested, you can read the issues, #156 and #158. The first being songs are sometimes scrobbled multiple times to Last.fm, the second issue being YTM invalidating the token every 30 minutes or so.

My Gripes with Bun's Binary Lockfile

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This isn’t a deep dive into the workings of Bun, and I haven’t worked with it at all really. This is just my opinion on it after stumbling across a project that uses it, and playing with it a bit.

The project I’m gonna be referencing its usage in YTMusic API by Zechariah

First thing I do is bun install which seems to update the lockfile for whatever reason. Sometimes this is normal. Lets take a look.

Stale Friends

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As of writing, I have 627 friends on discord. Six. Hundred. Twenty. Seven

One may ask, how can I maintain so many friendships? It’s quite simple: I don’t. So then why are they still on my friends list?

I have all these friends online, but some I don’t even talk to anymore. Haven’t talked to in years. Some I’ve even forgotten and don’t recognize.

Intel WiFi with AMD Processors

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This short post begins with my constant problems with network on my desktop. For a long while it’s had issues due to its placement in my house. My room is quite far from the router, and has no Ethernet jack. WiFi drops constantly, so I bought a Ethernet over power line adapter–one of those things that you have 2 of, once at the source and another where you want Ethernet. The problem with these is they can be quite slow. Bleh.

YouTube Music Scrobbling on iOS

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Part 2: https://blog.aspy.dev/youtube-music-ios-scrobbling-part-2/

I’ve been scrobbling to Last.FM for a while from Desktop. Originally using YTMDesktop from the YTMDesktop org on GitHub I eventually switched to th-ch’s YouTube Music app, both of which had support Last.FM. However, this left a gaping hole in scrobbling, and that is mobile.

While there are apps to do this for Android (Which I will not list, as I am not an Android user, and don’t want to recommend something I don’t use) iOS does not have any such apps in the app store. Even if they were available to sideload, Apple makes sideloading a massive pain.

PowerEdge R430 Setup

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have recently acquired a PowerEdge R430 from a company called SpicketRiver Electronics. (Ebay link) I simply cannot recommend them enough. They are the same folks I got the R910 from, and when I had issues with both this server and the R910 their support was simply astounding.

The server costed about $90 USD from them. Upon receiving it, I found a minor issues. the status LCD panel seemed to be shattered, and the DVD drive panel missing, which was not shown in the listing.

(Legally) Getting PlotSquared for Free

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I like to help people host small servers, often for free for small friend groups. To me at least, it doesn’t make sense to pay the €15 for small servers. (PlotSquared can be purchased on Spigot)

If you are hosting medium to larger sized servers and can afford it, you totally should support the software you use!

https://github.com/IntellectualSites/PlotSquared

Regardless, the choice is up to you. This also allows you to use bleeding edge git builds.

Avoid UGREEN Products!

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Update, 12/20/25

In the time since I’ve posted this, I worked at Salem Techsperts for about a year. I’ve found that UGREEN is actually a moderately reputable brand, and I just got unlucky getting a defective unit. Additionally, Mozilla FakeSpot no longer exists. In fact, at this time, my main charger cable (not brick) is a UGREEN USB C cable.

Laptop RAM Woes

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Laptop RAM is a pain point for me. I’ve inexplicably never had a RAM upgrade work right out of the box for a laptop… Maybe I’m just unlucky. I’ve never had this happen on desktop though.

Part 1: HP Envy x360

This starts with an HP Envy x360 Laptop (15m-dr1012dx). The device came with 12GB of DDR4 RAM at 2666MHz. (A 4GB and 8GB stick)

What Is This Blog For?

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When I made this blog back in April of 2022, I just used it for random rants, and that is still what I intend to use it for. However, posting on it was a pain as the old one used Docsify. Wasn’t a problem with Docsify though, as the name implies, its for documentation, not blogs. You can see the old implementation here. At one point I even talked about switching to Ghost in a post, and decided not to. Later down the line, on the 27th of October 2023, I decided to switch to Ghost. No regrets.

I Pirated a Movie I Bought. And You Should Too.

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.

— Marvin Heemeyer

This first started when I went to buy an HD movie. Hitman: Agent 47 to be specific. I love the Hitman series. I’ve bought and played them all on Epic Games.

The movie trailer, in case you are interested.

Disable AdBlock Plus first run popup using suppress_first_run_page

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is pretty quick and easy

{
 "supress_first_run_page": {
 "Value": true
 }
}

Spaces, newlines, and tabs do not matter. Capitalization does. More details on this process are here, and how to get to extension settings is here Why this exists? No documentation on disabling AdBlock Plus’ first run page exists. I believe this is maliciously intentional.

On a tangent, did you know its AdBlock plus is practically useless anyway? They’ve been bribed by almost every major advertiser to whitelist their ads.

Deploy uBlock Origin for better control over your organization’s ad blocking policies.

The Annoyances of First Run Pages on Extensions

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some extensions can justify it, but not many

In my school district, we force deploy Adblock Plus to all student and staff devices. We do this because many ads in this day and age can be downright malicious to end users. In addition, they can impede the usage of sites.

While I don’t like Adblock Plus for many reasons, (Later post perhaps) this is downright awful on some devices, mainly the ones we have in carts, which reset every time they are closed, to wipe student logins. Standard practice for shared Chromebooks. The issue arises where Adblock Plus has a “first run” page, which runs every time the extension is installed. This page has an unnecessary loading page (Chrome already handles installing extensions, this is just useless) and after “loading” it then proceeds to beg for donations.

Struggling to update an HP BIOS on Linux

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My laptop is an HP Envy x360 DR1012DX - I can’t promise this will work on your device.

After only finding a .exe as a BIOS update option on the HP driver list for my laptop, I had to find a solution for Linux.

This might be a short post, as I just want to document the way I did it for anyone else that might be struggling to do this.

R910 Adventures: Updating the BIOS

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am hoping to begin a series of working on the R910. These articles will range from very short to pretty long. Anyway, Lets get started!

Getting the BIOS

I have started by creating a USB stick formatted with FAT16, as this appears to be the only format the BIOS updater can read. The BIOS is available at the Dell Website, and I have downloaded it to the USB and named it BIOS.exe (Despite being a Windows executable, this seems to be the file format the updater wants)

SH1MMER: Chromebook unenrollment exploit

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Warning: Tampering with a device you do not own is a Federal crime. Charges can be pressed

SH1MMER is an exploit to unenroll Chromebooks from enterprise management.

Upon investigating, I found it affects the new Chromebooks my district just bought, so this blog will try to detail the process we do to secure them more. It’s not perfect, because SH1MMER is a hardware exploit from what I understand, and there are currently only software patches.

SS14: FOSS Gaming on Linux

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Space Station 14 can be compared to Among Us, to someone who has never played, If you thought Among Us was hectic, it is nothing compared to SS14. Oftentimes, imposters are the least of your concern, and the worst is other players incompetence in running the place.

So what is this?

Space Station 14 is a hectic imposter/management game where you take on the role of someone trying to keep a failing station going, all while things are made worse by sabotage or incompetence. There are several roles you can choose from:

The Pains of Optane

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is not a guide on how to recover data from Optane, I was never able to figure it out

Now don’t get me wrong, Optane seems pretty cool - coming from the video Intel gives about it. My laptop came with it installed, and I had no issues with it! But when it comes to getting data off it - oh boy… you are in for a treat.

Making DuckDuckNo in Solid.JS

Mon, 09 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Making DuckDuckNo in solid was quite challenging.

It pushed my skills a bit, which made for a lot of fun. It uses the google search API because to DuckDuckGo API is garbage, and offers only the “instance answers API” which seems to made more for voice assistants, useless in this case. since I had to switch to google, I had to start using an API key, which meant I needed a backend to conceal the API key. hence, The backend repo which simply acts as a middleman, making results from the google custom search api easier to use, and removing unneeded parts (they may be added in the future when I feel like it.) Its all for jokes of course, I’m just surprised I was able to get duckduckno.com

My Plans for a new laptop

Sun, 08 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

For a month or so I’ve been thinking about getting a new laptop. Originally, the plan was to save around $7k for a ThinkPad P15 with maxed out specs. (Probably an i9, 64GB RAM, and a Quadro, similar to the one my college gave me.) However, after putting more thought into it, I may instead get a laptop for around $2k, as its far more feasible and just makes more sense.

The convoluted plans for the future of this blog

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

For the past few days I’ve been working on converting the entire blog to Solid.JS. I haven’t really made much progress and its kinda disappointing. I started making the website routes and what not, but after that I realized I really didn’t even know what I wanted the blog to look like and kinda got stuck there. I also tried setting up a system of automatically making routes to pages I upload but it seems that isn’t feasible which is also a major setback as that was supposed to be one of the key features. What really put the final nail in the coffin for me was the fact that I couldn’t really just render markdown, meaning I couldn’t just write and publish, I’d have to make actual HTML for each page.

Converting Aspy.dev to Solid.js

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to update my main site, aspy.dev to some React for quite a while as it was starting to become a huge pain to manage it. You can actually view the old code here and you will probably agree its a massive dumpster fire.

Either way, I brought it up in a discord server with a lot of developers on it, and I was recommended Solid.js. it was actually incredibly easy, to my surprise. Furthermore, the modularity of everything made developing and updating elements used across the entire site super easy. For example, the navigation bar now has its own file that I just import everywhere I want to use it!

I got an RTX 3060

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The other day I was going to my local Micro Center looking to pick out a laptop to buy in a few weeks. However, when I was there, I found they were fully stocked with RTX GPUs.

So immediately I knew I had to get one. I had about $440 on me at the time, but the GPU I wanted (the cheapest one there at the time, an Asus RTX 3060)was about $520 (including the 6% tax in MA)

First Entry

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today is April 3rd. I am setting up this blog to keep a log of some cool things I do I guess- well not really cool but IDK.

I’ve been in the psychiatric hospital since Monday, and I’m supposed to be discharged tomorrow. Cannot wait to go home!

From what I’ve heard Psychiatric hospitals are awful, but I’ve had a pretty good experience here. It’s quiet at night and the staff are amazing. Most importantly, I’m allowed to use my phone and laptop. There are certainly some specific rules, like I can only use the laptop in the interview room, and I can only use my phone in the common room. they have to charge it for me as well. most of the day here is free time, which I wasn’t expecting. I find the anti suicide measures here interesting, for example, the hooks here if you put too much weight on them they slide down. all the doors are controlled by electronic locks and the bathroom doors are kinda like gymnastic mats. The door handles here are actually over $1000 each at the time of writing! The shower here is controlled by a single button (It seems to be capacitive possibly) but you cannot control the temperature. The shower was generally too hot. The meals were pretty good for commercial/bulk meals. Pizza night was pretty good.