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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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I’m tired of talking to AI

I found GitHub repositories that were spreading malware. I asked AI what to do about it, but it gave me nothing useful. So I opened a discussion on GitHub. Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me. I called it out and the comment was deleted. Then another person replied. It was the same AI answer again.

I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me.

Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.

I’m tired of talking to AI.
I want to talk to real people.
But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

BlogTelegramBlueskyX

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Apostrophe and quotes

American style uses double typographic quotes “ ”, British style uses single typographic quotes ‘ ’, and technical documentation uses straight quotes " ". In American style, punctuation goes inside the quotation marks; in British style, placement follows meaning. But even in American blogs and technical books, punctuation is often placed by meaning rather than inside.

The apostrophe is either straight ' or typographic ’. For articles and posts, the typographic apostrophe is recommended. But if you look at popular news outlets or blogs from large tech companies, you’ll often find straight and typographic apostrophes and quotation marks mixed even within the same article. Some AI agents can’t use typographic symbols and replace them with straight ones.

Straight quotes are always easier to type than holding 3 keys for typographic ones. On top of that, with straight quotes the opening and closing mark is the same character, while typographic quotes use different ones. Smart auto-replacement to typographic symbols can be set up on a laptop, but most apps ignore that setting. If you write in different languages or for different styles, smart replacement will not help. You can set up a script to replace them before publishing articles, but if the article contains code examples, you can’t replace them there. You can also replace them manually before publishing, but when replying to comments you end up with straight ones again. Some fonts render the straight apostrophe beautifully, but you control the font only on your own site. Some websites automatically convert typed text into typographic marks, but if you paste text, they leave the straight ones in.

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Looking for a VMware or Proxmox Alternative? Let's Talk VMmanager

On May 28, join us for a live technical demo of VMmanager — our virtualization management platform built for hosting providers and infrastructure teams. We'll walk through cluster setup with Ceph, VxLAN networking, white-label customization, and automation patterns that cut routine ops by 30-40%. If you're evaluating alternatives to VMware or Proxmox, or just curious about how we approached these challenges, join us.

Sign up now to lock in a 20% discount on any plan of any ISPsystem product of your choice, and grab our white paper How to Reduce Your Time-to-Market completely free.

Here's what we'll cover:

  • HCI out of the box. See how to spin up a HA cluster by combining servers and Ceph—no complex setup, with live VM migration out of the box.

  • White Label. Your brand, your interface. Fully customize the panel so your customers only see your logo and styling.

  • Automation. Cut routine tasks by 30–40% with automated network config (VxLAN, IPAM), IP management, and backups that run without babysitting.

  • IaaS & SaaS-ready monetization. Move beyond selling raw VMs. Offer pre-configured apps with one-click deploy and keep more margin in-house.

Who should tune in:

  • Hosting providers considering alternatives to VMware or Proxmox

  • CEOs & technical directors looking to reduce operational costs

  • DevOps leads tired of maintaining custom automation scripts

  • System architects planning infrastructure expansion

The details: 

May 28 

📍 Europe (CEST, UTC+2): 4:00 PM 

📍 US East Coast (EDT, UTC-4): 10:00 AM (New York)

📍 US West Coast (PDT, UTC-7): 7:00 AM (Los Angeles) 

Can't attend? Register anyway —we'll send you the recording and materials.

👉 Register here

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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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Article

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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Article

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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Doubts about what I’ve done

I have doubts not only while making a decision, but also after I’ve made it. I publish a post, and the next day I already want to change the wording. I put an unpromising project on hold, and a month later I want to continue working on it. I come up with a cool name for a product, register the domain, and claim the social media handles, but a week later I no longer like the name. I publish an essay, and a year later I want to delete it so no one can see it anymore.

No matter how many hours I spend thinking things through and making a decision, the doubts won’t go away. I just make decisions knowing that I may no longer agree with them in the future.

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Multilingualism in startups

When launching a startup, don’t make it multilingual until you have stable revenue and a team to support it. You can’t know whether the startup will become profitable, so early on, your time is better spent finding PMF and acquiring users. AI can write scripts to manage translation files and help with text translation, but the quality will still be poor. Users might as well use the browser’s built-in translator.

If you build the service in 10 languages right away, you’ll struggle to maintain it. Every interface change means updating translation files across all languages, even though most of your users will likely understand an English interface anyway. But if you’re building for a specific country, build it in that country’s language and don’t add English. Even two languages at the start are worse than one. With a single language, you can keep text directly in the code instead of splitting it into separate translation files.

BlogTelegramBluesky

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Article

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...
Article

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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Article

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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Article

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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Article

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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Article

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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