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Ekahau Sidekick and RSSI Offset: Physical Limits of the Method and Why Real Client Behaviour Cannot Be Fully Modelled

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time13 min
Reach and readers1.8K

Abstract. This work examines the physical foundations of Ekahau Sidekick measurements and the device offset mechanism from the perspectives of antenna theory, receiver noise theory, statistical signal theory, and the IEEE 802.11 standard family. It is shown that the scalar received signal strength indicator (RSSI) offset constitutes a linear level shift and does not model the true signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the client device, the quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation structure, the rate adaptation algorithm, or roaming behaviour. In addition to five independent physical and systemic sources of inaccuracy, the paper addresses modeling assumptions in Ekahau with respect to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) gain, multipath propagation, airtime estimation, and SNR visualisation. Verified numerical error estimates for representative deployment scenarios and practical recommendations are provided.

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How I wanted two pages for SAMBA and NFS, but ended up with a full-featured NAS control panel with 20+ pages

Reading time4 min
Reach and readers1.5K

Fair warning right away: I'm not a programmer. The code could be prettier, the architecture more elegant. But my goal was different – to make a convenient tool for myself as a system administrator. What came out came out. Don't judge too harshly, it's beta.

How it all started

I had some free time. I had an old Netgear Stora MS2000 lying around – I'd installed Debian 7 and OpenMediaVault on it back in the day. Then a disk crashed, I reinstalled Debian 9, but OMV turned out to be too heavy for this hardware.

Editing configs in the console every time was tedious. And all I really needed was SAMBA and NFS. So I thought, why bother? I'll write a couple of PHP scripts to create and edit shares.

And so Mini Bucket began.

The first two pages – and off we went

I whipped up the first two pages quickly: shares started working. Then I thought, "It would be nice to have a dashboard to see all the stats." A third page appeared – a dashboard with graphs.

Then I figured: since I've got SMB and NFS, might as well add rsync and FTP too. Added them.

Day by day, my "two-page panel" grew into a project now called Mini Bucket – NAS Control Panel.

And you know what? It actually works. On hardware where modern panels simply won't start or slow to a crawl.

What is this thing?

Mini Bucket is a web-based NAS control panel focused on resource efficiency. It runs on:

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MDM — It's Not About Paranoia. It's About Sleeping Well at Night

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time6 min
Reach and readers1.3K

It was 10 PM on a Tuesday. An employee sent a message: "I lost my laptop. Somewhere in the city. I have no idea where it is."

Inside that laptop: access to work tools, internal conversations, probably cached authentication tokens. Potentially a way into systems that had nothing to do with the device itself.

We locked it remotely in a few minutes. No panic. No emergency calls. No incident post-mortem the next morning.

And then we just went to sleep.

That's what MDM actually is — not technology for technology's sake, but the ability to not turn a bad moment into a crisis. The difference between "we handled it" and "we need to talk about what happened."

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How to use ChatGPT and Claude subscriptions in Cursor without paying for API tokens

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time4 min
Reach and readers1.6K

When you buy a $20 ChatGPT subscription, you get access to about $1,000 worth of tokens. When you buy a $100 Claude subscription, you get access to about $2,000 worth of tokens. However, these subscriptions cannot be connected to Cursor directly. The API and subscription request formats are different, so you need a workaround — proxying the requests.

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SpesLab-Gambit: a convenient neural network object annotation program for video surveillance systems

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time3 min
Reach and readers1.5K

Developers of smart cameras, smart DVRs, and neural-network video analytics for surveillance systems need AI models capable of operating in real-world street conditions. Out there, nobody walks around with professional cameras, carefully adjusts angles, sets up lighting, records without compression, or follows the common sense taught in cinematography textbooks.

Of course, Gambit can be used for many other tasks, but its main focus is the convenient collection of material FROM video surveillance systems and dataset annotation specifically FOR video surveillance neural networks.

Gambit is not designed for polished photos and Internet reels. Quite the opposite — it is intended for low-quality surveillance archive footage. At SpesLab, we call this kind of content “wild.”

Download for free...

Neural Prompter

Reading time2 min
Reach and readers1.1K

We are all fascinated by the ability of AI to describe what is happening in front of a video camera, but so far we have not seen anyone answer the question — why? Is there at least one truly practical use case?

At SpecLab, however, we came up with our own application...

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JumpCloud vs Okta: A Practical Guide to Choosing the Right IAM Platform

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time8 min
Reach and readers3.2K

I've run both platforms in a real production environment — 600+ users, 50+ SaaS platforms, an international software company with distributed teams across multiple timezones. This isn't a vendor comparison page. This is what I actually experienced running both, migrating between them, and managing the transition in parallel.

The question "JumpCloud or Okta?" comes up constantly in IT communities. It almost always gets the same frustrating non-answer: "it depends." That's technically true — but let me break down exactly what it depends on, and why.

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Why Low Latency Sports Streaming Is Essential for Live Sports OTT Apps

Reading time6 min
Reach and readers2.2K

The demand for live sports streaming has grown rapidly across OTT platforms, IPTV services, and mobile streaming applications. Today’s viewers expect real-time access to sports events without buffering, lag, or playback delays. Whether it is football, cricket, basketball, esports, or live tournaments, audiences want an experience that feels as close to live television as possible.

Low latency sports streaming has become one of the most important technologies for modern OTT platforms. It reduces the delay between the live event capture and viewer playback, enabling sports fans to watch matches in near real time. For OTT providers, broadcasters, and streaming businesses, low latency delivery improves viewer satisfaction, engagement, and platform reliability.

Platforms that deliver ultra-low latency live streaming can create immersive sports viewing experiences while supporting interactive features such as live betting, real-time commentary, instant replay, and audience engagement tools.

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Did Dawkins Find Consciousness in Claude? And If Not, What Did He Find?

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time5 min
Reach and readers6.9K

Renowned biologist Richard Dawkins recently published an essay exploring the possibility of LLM consciousness following a two‑day conversation with Claude AI.

Let“s first look at why an essay by this particular author caused such a stir in scientific circles, while thousands of ordinary users fail to turn heads when they claim their AI companions are sentient. The latter constantly post endless walls of text from their chats with LLMs, where the density of words like ‘consciousness,’ ‘soul,’ ‘reflection,’ ‘recursion,’ ‘emptiness,’ ‘warmth,’ ‘love,’ and ‘pain’ exceeds all reasonable limits. It is worth noting that the semantic density of these dialogues is practically zero‑but we will return to that later.

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JWT: The Self-Contained Token

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time40 min
Reach and readers4.2K

In Part II we saw that an API key is essentially a long, secret password your software shows to a server. It works, but it has a hidden cost: every time the key is used, the server must look it up in a database to find out what the key is allowed to do, whether it has expired, and whether it has been switched off. A JSON Web Token (JWT) removes that lookup by carrying all of that information inside the token itself. This article explains the problem JWT solves and shows where it sits in the larger story of web authentication.

Part I covered Basic Authentication — sending a username and password with every request. Part II covered API keys — replacing that reusable password with a single opaque secret string that identifies an application rather than a person.

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Data and the EU. Two cases of empowering special services for the sake of democracy

Reading time7 min
Reach and readers5.3K

In early 2026, one new law and one far‑reaching legislative initiative are expected to seriously affect digital freedoms in the EU. The first allows police to collect biometric data and target individuals; the second aims to put all metadata into one box and then use AI to run investigations. Naturally, both laws were adopted under the mantra of protecting democratic values, rights, and freedoms. Xeovo has examined the sprawling regulatory texts and explains what exactly Members of the European Parliament are aiming at.

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VPN Age Checks

Reading time6 min
Reach and readers6.2K

VPN age checks are a new initiative by British authorities aimed at protecting children from “harmful information.” It follows a series of other puritanical ideas, such as banning social media for people under 16, introducing age verification for viewing adult content, and similar measures. Xeovo explains why VPNs do not actually contribute to the criminalization of teenagers — and what the introduction of age checks could lead to.

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Appeal to keyboard makers: Please Stop Adding FN Buttons

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time4 min
Reach and readers4.8K

Most of the famous and popular keyboard manufacturers make full-size keyboards with bad UX!

Yes, I'm talking about you: Logitech, Razer, HP, Dell, Corsair, and almost all other famous brands!

Almost all your modern keyboards miss a single crucial UX thing: separate media and other action buttons!

Instead, they provide a terrible FN button that is actually the UX ENEMY!

Let's kill that FN button together - join the movement!

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How to connect MySQL in your backend project (NestJS + Prisma)

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time3 min
Reach and readers5.4K

Hi, I thought about this problem because on the internet I couldn't find information on how to correctly connect MySQL in a basic backend project. Also, I'll show you how to use it in a monorepo project. In this lesson, we'll be using NestJS and Prisma, as they are the most popular tools in backend development.

Okay, now, create a folder wherever you're comfortable, and open the terminal. In the terminal, type these commands:

$ npm i -g @nestjs/cli

$ nest new project-name

$ cd project-name

The next steps — you can start building anything with your project. But when you need a database, you'll need to import Prisma into your project. It's easy — run this command:

$ npm install prisma --save-dev

As a best practice, it's recommended to invoke the CLI locally by prefixing it with npx:

$ npx prisma

$ npx prisma init

Nice! Now, the following files should appear in your project:

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The Philosophy of Automated Tests: Management, Maintenance and Flakiness

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time7 min
Reach and readers5.8K

My name is Vladimir Smirnov, and I am responsible for testing the trading backend at EXANTE. Development moves fast. Regression suites grow. With them come the chaos and inconsistency of test environments, and a steady rise in unstable failures, known as flakes. Real problems hide behind those flakes. How do we keep our automated tests in acceptable shape without spending too much time on it? That is what this article is about.

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Decoding LLM Clichés: A Fresh Perspective

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time4 min
Reach and readers5.4K

Like millions of others convinced they possess knowledge the world desperately needs to hear, I decided to write a book on prompting. In the process (which, by the way, turned out to be far more difficult than anticipated), I found myself examining LLM clichés. You know the ones. At least, in the comment sections of tech blogs, hundreds of self-proclaimed experts use them to spot AI-generated text.

Anyway, these clichés definitely exist, and many authors now routinely add blocklists of these phrases to their prompts to weed them out. Whether this is actually a good or a bad thing is what I’ll break down below.

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