I have been building computers ever since my uncle helped me build my first PC at age 13. The fascination of installing, tuning, and then finally using the machine has been a vice that I have been enjoying ever since. I have now built over a dozen Linux and Windows PCs over the years but the ☼perfect hackintosh☼ has always eluded me.For those of you who don’t usually mess with the internals of computers, a hackintosh is essentially a standard commodity Windows PC running the OS X which powers MacBooks and iMacs. Why do people go through such lengths to have OS X? It’s mostly preference, but in my case I’m doing this for my own personal education and curiosity. 
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People always said that my mom makes amazing food. I was so spoiled by the fact that I got to eat her cooking every night that I never bothered to learn how to cook any of her dishes. This included phở– especially phở.Phở broth takes a whole weekend to make from scratch. Why would any bachelor put himself into that position when he could go to a restaurant and buy it? Unfortunatley, it wasn’t until I moved to the west coast that I realized my mistake. My mom grew up in northern Vietnam which cooks the regional variant of phở called phở bắc which is different from the southern varient of phở that most places here in the Bay Area cook. If you want to have phở bắc (and a nice dose of Schimmelmann nostalgia) you need to cook this type of phở yourself.Luckily, my mom visisted and I was able...
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I worked on a hobby project called MMapper back in graduate school that served as my escape from the daily grind. This project is pretty much responsible for my career as an engineer due to how much fun I had hacking on it. I fondly remember how ecstatic I was combining my love for gaming, playing the role as product manager and engineer, and building something useful for my users/fellow gamers.Unfortunately, I abandoned my project back when I started my day job and the years have not been kind to it. I had always meant to migrate the source code from Sourceforge to GitHub and also remove some technical debt by upgrading it to the latest version of Qt but something else would always get in the way. I sat down back in September and decided that enough was enough! Little did I know that it would take more than a weekend to finally get...
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I traveled to Peru over winter break and managed to scratch one of the wonders of the world off of my bucket list! We utilized Alpaca Expeditions (aka the Green Machine) to organize our 5 day hike of the Inca Trail and had an amazing experience full of awe-inspiring sights and exquisite three course cuisine. It’s pretty crazy how much the Chasquis (our porters) can carry given the altitude and then at twice the pace that we were going at. We also used Tarantula Expeditions to explore Sandoval Lake in the amazon forest near Puerto Maldonado where we saw hundreds of species of plants, insects, birds, and animals including leaf cutter ants and giant river otters. I highly recommend this if you’re a fan of animals. I’m still amazed that I saw a bunch of plants and animals that I had only previously seen on PBS. Some things I should mention to people who want to come...
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I purchased a NETGEAR Centria N900 router at a fire sale nearly a year ago. I’m happy with its functionality but was always disappointed that I wasn’t able to flash a community created firmware such as DD-WRT or Tomato onto it. Luckily, the official firmware is forked from OpenWrt and as per the GPL the sources need to be publically available. Armed with those sources, a hacker name shibby managed to create an alternative 1.0.0.52 firmware which includes the dropbear ssh server that we can use to gain root access to the router.
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