Artikel

Motion-Induced Blindness

What: Three big, bright yellow dots. Not faint, not tiny, not hiding. And yet, stare at the middle for a few seconds and they just… leave. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes two, sometimes all three at once. This one was found by Yoram Bonneh, Alexander Cooperman and Dov Sagi at the Weizmann Institute in 2001 [1]. Their original version was a swarm of blue dots spinning on a 3D sphere, but the spinning grid with the flashing green dot is the one that took over the internet, and honestly it’s the better one.

Optical Toys · EN

Expanding Hole

What: Stare at the black hole. Give it a few seconds. It’s growing, right? Like you’re falling in. It’s not, the image is totally still. It’s by Akiyoshi Kitaoka (pronounced key-TAH-oh-kah), and in 2022 some researchers showed it to 50 people and watched their eyes [1]. The wild part: your pupils fall for it too. They open up, like you’re heading somewhere dark. How To: Stare at the middle and let it build.

Optical Toys · EN

Rainbow Drift

What: Nothing here moves. Not one pixel. Every shape just sits there changing colour, and yet the arrows slide, the fish swim off and the vortex sucks you in. It’s a follow-up to my Reverse Phi Rainbows, same trick, just a whole lot more of it. The whole thing is inspired by jagarikin [1], a Japanese artist who posts these on X, and his running joke is sticking an arrow on everything.

Optical Toys · EN

ETH Study Materials

A collection of study material I created back when I was tutoring Computer Science at ETH Zürich

Pascal Schärli · EN

Sharekey Cryptography Review

During my master thesis I reviewed the cryptography of the end-to-end encrypted Sharekey collaboration app. This post covers the most interesting issues I found.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Breaking Military Grade Encryption to Animate my Name

Getting into the weeds of my flashy website banner, that simulates a padding-oracle attack on AES-CBC.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Quantum Apocalypse?

NIST finalized their first post quantum secure cryptographic algorithms in August 2024. This post provides a gentle introduction and an intuition on the actual impact.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Proton's crypto is not Transparent and not OPAQUE

Proton says privacy "isn't a promise, it's mathematically ensured." I found new ways they could read your data anyway.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Post-Quantum Crypto Won't Fix Your Architecture

Adding PQC to this product was like installing a vault door on a tent. The server could intercept your keys and an RCE let attackers run code on your desktop.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Filen's password onion made me cry

Filen hashes passwords with MD5(MD4(MD2(pwd))). This post shows several cryptographic weaknesses in their protocol and questions if it's even worth doing end-to-end encryption delivered through a webpage.

Pascal Schärli · EN

Unifi Travel Router Review

I recently snagged one of these, and took it on a road trip!

Rich Infante · EN

What's in the Garden? 2026 Edition.

Some plants and things growing in my garden this year.

Rich Infante · EN

Compaq SLT - Battery Power

With off-the-shelf parts, I've hacked together a battery for my Compaq SLT/286.

Rich Infante · EN

Hardware Review: AirCube Pro

I purchased this tiny air quality monitor after seeing it on social media - let's try it out!

Rich Infante · EN

Home Automation Macro Pad (WIP)

A macro pad board I designed for the Seeed MG24, to integrate with my smart devices

Rich Infante · EN

Installing Mac OS X Mountain on my old laptop

I don't use my old laptop anymore. Let's restore it to its original-ish software!

Rich Infante · EN

The Quest for Night Mode

Implementing a Pebble Watch Night Hiking App, and the quest for similar on my Apple Watch.

Rich Infante · EN

Retro Christmas Lights Reviews

Comparing several popular "retro glow" style LED christmas lights.

Rich Infante

Easily create cool random images in python with randimage

I was planning to add profile pictures to my now defunct social-app for musicians Riff on That and I wanted to offer a randomly generated picture as a default option. I had a look around for existing solutions in python and couldn’t find anything to my liking, so I came up with randimage. This is… The post Easily create cool random images in python with randimage appeared first on Renato Budinich .

Renato Budinich · EN

Topic modeling with transformers: farewell LDA

Topic Modeling is an unsupervised learning procedure similar to clustering. In this post I give a brief overview of Topic Modeling, present my library transformertopic and apply it to scraped news about COVID The post Topic modeling with transformers: farewell LDA appeared first on Renato Budinich .

Renato Budinich · EN

COVID news topics

Topic Modeling is an unsupervised learning procedure similar to clustering. In this post I give a brief overview of Topic Modeling, present my library transformertopic and apply it to scraped news about COVID The post COVID news topics appeared first on Renato Budinich .

Renato Budinich · EN

If you take away the hype, blockchains remain mega-cool

I’ve heard some valid criticism of blockchain tech: it is a very inefficient database, there’s nothing substantially new people are doing with it, DeFi is self-referential. All of these have some truth in them. On top of this the industry is over-hyped and inundated by startups with millions in funding and flashy websites with a… The post If you take away the hype, blockchains remain mega-cool appeared first on Renato Budinich .

Renato Budinich · EN

Reimagining LLMs: one industry they will change forever (and no one will complain)

DE is hard and often requires for ad-hoc code changes to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the specific dataset. LLMs could offer a big help in assisting and eventually automating these tasks. The big players to watch out for are those with established low-code DE solutions, especially those already intimate with ML such as anomalo. The post Reimagining LLMs: one industry they will change forever (and no one will complain) appeared first on Renato Budinich .

Renato Budinich · EN

zkPass.org: a technical deep dive

zkPass allows to unlock web2 data for web3 applications, with privacy. Scroll down to get the full technical deep dive. What is zkPass? zkPass is a protocol that uses Zero-Knowledge proofs to let you prove facts about your private Web2 data (from any HTTPS website) to Web3 applications. You can verify your identity, reputation, or… The post zkPass.org: a technical deep dive appeared first on Renato Budinich .

Renato Budinich · EN