Chameth.com - posts like blogging-and-the-imaginary-quality-bar, g15-ram-upgrade, why-you-should-be-using-https

Blogging and the Imaginary Quality Bar

2025-09-18T00:00:00Z

Recently I realised that I’ve developed a self-imposed quality bar for blog posts. They need to be a certain length, and have a certain substance to them. They need to be generally useful in some way I can’t quite define, to some imagined future audience. They need to have images to break up the page, and opengraph data for when they’re linked to on social media. But… maybe they don’t? Those things all make sense for longer “article” type posts, but not so much for a personal blog.

I’ve done some fiddling so that I can make posts without all that extra stuff. We’ll see how it goes. The posts won’t be distinguished on the site (yet?), but I have set up separate RSS feeds for just short form posts and long form posts in case subscribers are radically opposed to one or the other. Now I can start blogging like it’s 2005 again. But hopefully with a bit less cringe.

I’ve been staring at this post in my editor for about five minutes. The urge to make it longer, more thorough, more article-like is really strong. This entire paragraph is only here as a compromise with myself so I can actually save and commit the post.

The Curse of Knowledge and Blogging

2025-05-16T00:00:00Z

Finding a picture to go with a blog post about blog post ideas is hard, OK?

The single worst part about blogging for me is trying to come up with ideas for what to write about. Not because they’re hard to come up with, but because every idea seems too basic or not worth talking about. Seems.

It’s not just me, either. My friends will occasionally describe some interesting problem they’ve dealt with, and I’ll chime in with “you should blog about that”. Almost invariably the response is something like “it’s not that interesting”.

There’s a cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge¹. Basically, once you know something you can’t accurately reconstruct your previous state of mind from when you didn’t know it. You can struggle to do something for hours, piecing together scraps of information, using all kinds of specialist knowledge, and as soon as you’re finished it all seems so basic why would anyone want to read about that?

Other mental obstacles

Of course, nothing involving people is as simple as having one cause and an obvious solution. Even when I get over the “it’s too basic” road bump, there are other issues. Looking back over some of my posts, I get a horrible cringe-y feeling and the question of “why would anyone be interested in reading that?!” arrives unbidden. Even though I know that I’m interested in reading similar posts written by other people. I’m hesitant to attach labels to everything, but imposter syndrome says hi.

I think there’s also a cultural issue at play. British people tend to be somewhat reserved and downplay their accomplishments, especially when compared to people from the US². When I worked for a certain multinational ~~ad conglomerate~~ search engine company we actually had training on how to do performance reviews and speak about ourselves more like our US counterparts.

Put all these things into a cauldron, add a lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing, mix it all up, and you get a brain that despises the idea of blogging about anything. Great.

Dealing

So, now the problem is well-defined, what do we do about it? Clearly I am the best person to be offering this advice, given it’s been four months since my last blog post.

The best counter to the Curse of Knowledge that I’ve found is keeping notes, like a lab notebook. If you finish something and have dozens of links to different resources that you had to piece together, it’s probably something interesting and worth talking about even if it doesn’t seem like it any more. Or maybe you didn’t need a lot of references, but you had to write a lot down to make sense of something, or needed to draw diagrams to solve a problem. Again, probably interesting.

The other issues I’ve mentioned are not so easy to overcome. I’m also not going to try and perform therapy in the form of a blog post! What I personally do is keep a list of topics to write about (that have already passed the “probably interesting even if my brain doesn’t agree” check), and occasionally when the stars align I’ll feel like plucking one off the list and turning thoughts into words.

A call to action

If you’ve got a blog and haven’t written anything recently because you “don’t do anything interesting”, go write something! I promise that someone will be interested. Hell, feel free to send me a link and I’ll be interested for you.

If you don’t have a blog then why not start one? There are lots of great articles out there about why-you-should and how-you-can. And as a bonus, blog posts about how you set up your blog are super interesting. That’s one post sorted already!

As the open internet is slowly subsumed by massive corporate interests, and gummed up with spam and AI slop, the voice of real humans is becoming more and more important. Maybe we can — one blog at a time — get back to the ’90s internet that was full of individuality instead of today’s which is full of ads and spam?

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

There’s also something called “Familiarity Blindness” that people like to talk about. It’s a much better name. The only problem is that I can’t find any actual published works that talk about it. No-one authoritative defines or mentions it. It just popped into existence a few years ago. Maybe it’s an LLM hallucination? ↩︎
My favourite commentary on this is Stephen Fry talking about American vs British comedy. ↩︎

Upgrading the RAM in a Dell G15 laptop

2023-07-29T00:00:00Z

The Dell G15

I currently use a Dell G15 laptop for work. It has served me well for a little over a year, but recently it has been struggling a little with my day-to-day workload. It came with 32GB of RAM — the highest possible specification at the time¹ — but that is apparently no longer enough for me.

For a recent project, I was working on a Rust library used in an Android app. That meant running the usual glut of Android tools (Android Studio, an emulator and at least one Gradle daemon) alongside a normal IDE (IntelliJ IDEA). Throw in a web browser and a couple of electron apps, and I often managed to use all 32GB.

When you start swapping memory out to an encrypted disk — even an SSD — it doesn’t make for great performance. At first, I tried to work around this by enabling the Linux out-of-memory (OOM) killer, but it turns out that it’s not too good with Electron apps: it will kill the large browser process, but then the small Electron wrapper will just respawn it.

Can it be upgraded or not?

The obvious solution to not having enough RAM is to add more RAM. A quick look in the manual showed this might not be possible, though. The manual includes the following “Memory specifications” table:

Description	Values
Memory slots	Two SODIMM slots
Memory type	DDR5
Memory speed	4800
Maximum memory configuration	32GB
Minimum memory configuration	8GB
Memory size per slot	8GB or 16GB
Memory configurations supported	8 GB, 1 x 8 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz 16 GB, 1 x 16 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz 16 GB, 2 x 8 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz, dual-channel 32 GB, 2 x 16 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz, dual-channel

That unambiguously says that an upgrade from 32GB is not possible. I gave up.

Later though, I was complaining about memory issues to a friend, and he pointed out a Dell forum thread where a couple of people claim to have successfully installed dual-channel 32GB modules. Since the alternative was getting an entire new PC after only a year, I decided to give it a go.

The upgrade attempt

I ordered a pair of Crucial 32GB DDR5-4800 SODIMMs, and after they turned up dismantled the laptop. The G15 comes apart pretty normally: there are uncovered screws on the bottom holding the lower part of the case on. With those removed and some gentle prying, it pops off, and you get access to the battery, GPU and motherboard.

The first thing I saw was this:

The G15 motherboard adamantly proclaiming that it doesn’t want 32GB SODIMMs

Not one but two labels that indicate it will only accept 8GB or 16GB modules. Oh well, what’s the worst that can happen?

Oops?

I dutifully installed the new modules, reconnected the battery and put the case back together. I pressed the power button, and… nothing. None of the usual garish lights that immediately come on, no screen output, just a dead laptop. After reading some more of the user manual, I found that there is a tiny status LED on the side next to the ethernet port. Forcing the laptop to power off and back on again, the status LED blinked a distress code at me: 2 amber blinks, 4 white blinks. The manual says that is — unsurprisingly — a memory fault.

I figured at this point that the manual and labels on the motherboard were probably right. I took the laptop apart again, reinstalled the original 2x16GB modules, reassembled it, and pressed the power button. It didn’t boot. I don’t spend a lot of time fiddling inside computers, but I’ve done it enough that I’m reasonably confident I can’t entirely break a computer while swapping some RAM modules. I took to Googling², and found an interesting article that said Dell laptops don’t like to boot after RAM changes unless you clear the CMOS by popping out the battery for 15 minutes.

I opened the laptop up, and looked around for the CMOS battery. There wasn’t one. Turns out they don’t exist any more. I left the main battery disconnected for a while to see if it would help, and it didn’t.

Unexpected success

I started to get worried: if I couldn’t fix this, I wouldn’t be able to work until I got a new PC, and that wasn’t really in my budget at the minute. I sat reading old forum threads and help guides³, none of which were actually useful. Out of nowhere, though, the laptop booted up.

Naturally, I immediately shut the laptop down again, opened it up, and switched back to the new RAM modules. Then I turned it on again and sat waiting. After about 15 minutes of it looking totally dead, it turned on and showed a BIOS warning about the hardware configuration being changed. It then booted perfectly normally, and all 64GB of RAM was visible and usable.

My theory is that the forum threads were right: Dell laptops are funny about RAM upgrades. But somehow in removing the physical CMOS battery, they’ve kept the same “you have to wait 15 minutes” behaviour just without any indication that’s what’s happening. Regardless, I now have enough RAM even for the greediest of IDEs and Electron apps.

Bizarrely, the maximum spec has decreased to 16GB since then. ↩︎
In the generic sense. I use Kagi these days. ↩︎
On my phone because, y’know, the laptop was busted. ↩︎

Why you should be using HTTPS

2016-06-17T00:00:00Z

The EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere logo

One of my favourite hobbyhorses recently has been the use of HTTPS, or lack thereof. HTTPS is the thing that makes the little padlock appear in your browser, and has existed for over 20 years. In the past, that little padlock was the exclusive preserve of banks and other ‘high security’ establishments; over time its use has gradually expanded to most (but not all) websites that handle user information, and the time is now right for it to become ubiquitous.

Why use HTTPS?

There are numerous advantages to using HTTPS, both for the users of a website and for the operator:

Privacy

The most obvious advantage is that HTTPS gives your users additional privacy. An insecure (HTTP) request can potentially be read by anyone on the same network, or the network operators, or anyone who happens to operate a network along the path between the user and the server.

Users on shared WiFi networks (such as those in coffee shops, hotels, or offices) are particularly vulnerable to passive sniffing by anyone else on that network. If the network is open (as is frequently the case) then anyone in radio range can see exactly what the user is up to.

Integrity

HTTPS also helps to maintain the integrity of your site. With a plain HTTP request, there’s nothing to stop anyone in between the server and the user from modifying the content of the request or the response. This is a frequent tactic used by annoying WiFi gateways (such as the ones you’d find in a hotel), dubious ISPs who want to serve you extra adverts, or just plain old nefarious attackers.

If you’re trying to convey some kind of information to users (and if you aren’t, why exactly are you running a website again?) it seems beneficial to both you and them if the information arrives as you intended, rather than in a modified form due to someone or something tampering with it.

Security

If your website has any kind of authentication, or session identifiers, it becomes extremely vulnerable to an attacker monitoring the traffic and stealing the credentials. This was starkly demonstrated in 2010 when Firesheep was released. This tool allowed anyone to quickly and automatically hijack social media accounts of anyone on the same network who was using HTTP to access them.

Even if your login pages are served over HTTPS, if you send a single session ID cookie over HTTP (such as a page you decided wasn’t particularly ‘important’) then an attacker can probably spoof the user’s session and gain full access to their account. Again, in the case of open WiFi networks that could be anyone in radio range.

Search engine rankings

Some search engines use HTTPS as a signal in their ranking algorithms. Google announced in 2004 that it was using the presence of HTTPS as a small positive signal, but that it may strengthen that signal over time as more and more websites switch to using a secure transport. It’s not unthinkable that at some point in the future there will be HTTPS-only search engines.

But… But… But…

There are lots of excuses for not implementing HTTPS. Most of them are either misguided or outdated.

It’s too expensive and/or complicated

In the past, getting HTTPS certificates was a pain. A number of free suppliers have existed for a while but the process for getting their certificates wasn’t particularly straight forward, and many imposed arbitrary restrictions on the certificate parameters. Even once you had the certificate, you had to fiddle about with your HTTP server configuration to make it work, remember to manually get a new certificate when the old one expired, and lots of other annoying busywork.

With the arrival of Let’s Encrypt, all that changed. You can retrieve and deploy a free HTTPS certificate with two or three commands. Renewal can be handled completely automatically with a single command executed by cron.

There’s no point; nothing on my site is sensitive

You might not think your content warrants privacy, but can you speak for everyone who accesses it? Even content that seems mundane to you — such as travel advice, or technical writing — could be used to build up a profile of a user. If an attacker is monitoring traffic in a coffee shop and sees a user looking at travel advice and weather forecasts for a foreign country, he could use that information to plan a burglary knowing that the user will be away. Similarly, some content which is perfectly mundane to you may actually be very sensitive in other countries with repressive governments. HTTPS makes it much harder for these people to snoop on traffic.

From another angle, if you’re offering any kind of information, instructions, or especially file downloads, there’s a severe risk to users if the content is modified on its way to them. An evil sysadmin could rewrite your travel advice to suggest visiting the local drug dealer’s hangout, or replace your download with a malware-infested version.

HTTPS is slower, uses more resources, etc

Back in 1995 this might have been a valid argument. Enabling HTTPS on a modern server will make an almost negligible difference to performance. If you also enable HTTP/2 (which most implementations only support over HTTPS), it’s likely to actually use fewer resources, and result in a faster, smoother experience for your users. HTTP/2 was designed to work with HTTPS, and designed with modern requirements and networking techniques in mind.

CloudFlare have an excellent demonstration of the benefits of HTTP/2, and it can show speed improvements of 2-3x in a typical environment. On top of being faster, HTTP/2 uses fewer connections which results in less resource overhead on both the server and the client.

So what are you waiting for?

If you run a website and aren’t using HTTPS, give it a try.