Tristan's Blog

I write about interesting things I'm thinking or working on. Mostly I talk about programming but I also digress into power user computer tricks, hardware and random things I'm interested in.

All Posts

Posts in bold are ones I put significant effort into and endorse as still interesting and high quality.

2023

December

• 02 Dec 2023 » All my favorite tracing tools: eBPF, QEMU, Perfetto, new ones I built and more

January

• 02 Jan 2023 » Production Twitter on One Machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast

2022

November

• 06 Nov 2022 » My DIY ergonomic travel workstation with aluminum and magnets

May

• 15 May 2022 » Latency testing remote browsing: Why display streaming is hard

2021

May

• 09 May 2021 » Making reverse engineering tools for DEF CON Quals

March

• 14 Mar 2021 » Implicit In-order Forests: Zooming a billion trace events at 60fps

2020

September

• 04 Sep 2020 » Hard to discover tips and apps for making macOS pleasant

August

• 15 Aug 2020 » Reverse engineering an AI spaceship game at DEF CON CTF

July

• 19 Jul 2020 » My tier list of interesting YouTube channels

May

• 20 May 2020 » Measuring keyboard-to-photon latency with a light sensor
• 17 May 2020 » Fragile narrow laggy asynchronous mismatched pipes kill productivity

April

• 18 Apr 2020 » Teleforking a process onto a different computer!

2019

November

• 02 Nov 2019 » Numderline: Grouping digits using OpenType shaping

July

• 29 Jul 2019 » Shenanigans With Hash Tables
• 27 Jul 2019 » Two Performance Aesthetics: Never Miss a Frame and Do Almost Nothing
• 26 Jul 2019 » Writing a Beat Saber Patcher for the Oculus Quest
• 14 Jul 2019 » Models of Generics and Metaprogramming: Go, Rust, Swift, D and More

June

• 19 Jun 2019 » Glitchless Metal Window Resizing

April

• 29 Apr 2019 » Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml
• 18 Apr 2019 » Writing a Compiler in Rust

March

• 03 Mar 2019 » My Tungsten Cube

2018

August

• 16 Aug 2018 » DEF CON 26 CTF Writeups: reverse, doublethink, bew, reeducation

May

• 13 May 2018 » Winning the DEF CON Quals CTF! Writeups: Easy Pisy, Flagsifier, Geckome

2017

December

• 29 Dec 2017 » Fixing My Keyboard's Latency
• 09 Dec 2017 » CVDisplayLink Doesn't Link To Your Display

November

• 10 Nov 2017 » Eye Tracking Mouse Control Ideas

June

• 17 Jun 2017 » Designing a Tree Diff Algorithm Using Dynamic Programming and A*

April

• 06 Apr 2017 » Things I've Learned Doing Internships

March

• 04 Mar 2017 » My Text Editor Journey: Vim, Spacemacs, Atom and Sublime Text

2016

December

• 03 Dec 2016 » Disassembling Sublime Text

July

• 16 Jul 2016 » Advanced Hackery With The Hammerspoon Window Manager

April

• 03 Apr 2016 » Simple Binary Formats and Terrible Hacks

March

• 24 Mar 2016 » Eye Tracker Reviews: Pupil Labs, Tobii, Eye Tribe, XLabs

February

• 02 Feb 2016 » A Reverse Engineering Adventure: Eye Tribe's USB Protocol

2015

November

• 19 Nov 2015 » Amazing Profs of Waterloo 2015

March

• 30 Mar 2015 » Wikipedia Link Graphs and Terrible Hacks
• 14 Mar 2015 » Idea: A Viral Industrial Charity
• 07 Mar 2015 » Configuring Spacemacs: A Tutorial

2014

December

• 02 Dec 2014 » Using Mjolnir: An Extensible OSX Window Manager

September

• 08 Sep 2014 » Designing and Building a Keyboard: The Body

June

• 25 Jun 2014 » A Tour of the Ruby Standard Library

2013

December

• 09 Dec 2013 » Hacking Math Homework

September

• 30 Sep 2013 » Typing Faster

May

• 17 May 2013 » The Best Search Engine For Programmers
• 01 May 2013 » Too Many Projects, Not Enough pro

April

• 10 Apr 2013 » The Best Programming Game

March

• 29 Mar 2013 » Contributing to Eclipse

February

• 06 Feb 2013 » Ottawa Ruby Lightning Talks

January

• 24 Jan 2013 » Hacking English Class

2012

November

• 19 Nov 2012 » Using Slate: A Hacker's Window Manager for Macs
• 14 Nov 2012 » Magic PNG Thumbnails
• 04 Nov 2012 » Simple, accurate eye center tracking in OpenCV