python

With the inexpensive cost of electronic components online, I am amassing quite a library of modules and parts to build whatever little contraption my silly little brain dreams up. Lately I've been working on a portable GPS unit using an ESP32, with an off the shelf GPS module and 1" OLED screen. 

Quite often I'm in the woods and I know where I am, but I don't know where I want to go. Thus, navigating back home safely is important if I feel like simply walking into the forest alone. I wanted a simple GPS unit where I could calculate distances and display a map of my location, with beacons displaying waypoints and markers.

Over the last month or so, I have a fully-featured unit that can display the current longitude, latitude and latitude,  calculate distances between two points, displays a vector map, and a settings menu allowing the user to enter low power mode and change display settings. 

I have a habit of diving headfirst into projects that are fun but maybe not super useful. A project I worked on a few months ago  MuStack MicroVM (msmv) —a project that took far more effort than necessary to create something that, in all honesty, I’ll probably never use again. But hey, at least it works, right?

So, What Exactly is msmv?

At its core, MuStack MicroVM is a minimalistic Linux virtual machine build system. Think Docker, but without all the convenience and with way more manual labour involved. It's designed to create lightweight, secure, and isolated virtual machines for testing environments. Perfect if you're someone who enjoys the thrill of complexity, like building a ship in a bottle—but digitally. Plus, I'm a sucker for naming projects with an acronym.

Here's something fun: Enable HTTPS browsing on IE5/Windows 98 with a Flask proxy that handles SSL and rewrites web content.

For whatever reason, I have a Windows 98 virtual machine in UTM (which is fantastic on Apple Silicon) that I like to boot in to and take a trip down memory lane. It's fun, and painful at the same time. But, the modern web has moved on from Internet Explorer 6 (and Internet Explorer in general, but we're not celebrating that in this post). Lost in the dust, Internet Explorer of the Windows 98 days doesn't quite work anymore. IE6, released in 2001, came with support for SSL 2.0 and 3.0, and later updates added support for TLS 1.0. At the time, this was sufficient. The web was a different place, less sophisticated in both the technology it used and the threats it faced (generally speaking, of course).

I've been a fan of free code to cloud deployment services (PaaS) like Railway.app and Fly.io to launch my fly-by-night ideas. They both offer generous free tiers that will allow you to run your code (Node, Python, etc) on their platform and host it for whatever use. The downside of all these different PaaS companies is that they call come with their own CLI that you must learn, with different syntax. Regardless, deploying from Git is easy enough and in fact simpler. Anyway.

I've been working on a new project that I think I'll turn into a SaaS eventually. A part of the project uses Google OAuth to login to the user dashboard. Setting up a new application in Google Cloud Platform is easy enough, make your keys, set your permission scopes and voila; instant Google SSO for your custom application. A part of this is specifying your redirect and callback URLs.