Hi, I'm Wolfgang Faust.

I do a lot of different things. Some of them I even do on the Internet! Here are some of the things I've done.

Software

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yaml-multiline

Find the right syntax for your YAML multiline strings.

paper-hn

Hacker News front page in the style of a print newspaper.

identfavicon-quantum

Firefox extension to automatically generate favicons for sites without one.

bicolorled

Library for driving a bicolor LED with Arduino.

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Creative Endeavours

Sometimes I write stories, usually inspired by /r/WritingPrompts.

Fiction?fiction‽ You want to marry someone from fiction⁈⁉” Not only was my father using unusual forms of punctuation, but he had also started turning a most interesting shade of purple. I will admit that this wasn't entirely unexpected, though I hadn't anticipated that he would break out the entire type case in the process. “I cannot have the heir to the entirety of 920Biography, genealogy, insignia married to someone from fiction!

I've also drawn some comics, though not recently.

Technical Writings

The Triplebyte data download doesn’t give you all your data

In May of last year I decided to start looking for a new job, and started by taking Triplebyte’s quiz. Having passed that, I spent the next three months going through the rest of their process, from a two-hour remote interview all the way through to final negotiations with the company whose offer I selected. Throughout the process they were extremely competent and helpful, and at the end of it all I had only good things to say about them. Read more »

On the removal of price caps for legacy domains

(A mirror of my public comment on ICANN’s proposed renewal of the .org registry agreement, which included a widely-protested provision to remove the 10% limit on the price increases that the registry could charge for registrations and renewals.)

Like many others who have already submitted comments on this proposal, I have grave concerns about the provision to remove the price caps on registry fees for .info and .org top level domains. (I refrain from commenting on .biz as I do not own any such domains nor do I personally frequent websites using this TLD, but my concerns are applicable there also.) I say this not only as the owner of several domains (for whom these potential price increases have a direct monetary impact), but also more generally as a user of Web sites and Internet services. There is already growing social concern about the centralization of access to information with large corporations, who increasingly mediate the average person’s experiences and interactions on the Internet. The Domain Name System provides a valuable part of the antidote to this problem: it allows individuals to set up their own corner of the Internet as they wish, largely unbeholden to anyone else; and allows anyone else to easily locate it on demand. This latter aspect is what makes pricing of domain names critical: because the domain name is the identifier used to locate a site or service, abandoning it breaks the ability for others to find it easily, and moving domain names requires rebuilding all links and trust from scratch, a long and tedious process which can never be fully completed. If a registry is allowed to raise fees in an arbitrary and unbounded manner, many of these registrants will decide that the expense is no longer worth it and abandon the registration–or even be forced to as the costs become unaffordable.

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RAAF Syko machine manual

The Syko machine was a British strip cipher used during WWII for encoding radio communications between aircraft. There's not much information on the Web about these machines; a scan of the Syko Manual (PDF, 2.4MB) is available but it's rather hard to read as it's an old document and has had extra annotations added. In this post, I have transcribed the entire document to make it easier to read and find information about how the Syko machines were operated. Read more »
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