blog.lvmbdv.dev on Ata Kuyumcu's Blog

Rebuilding my blog with machines, for machines

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I rebuilt this blog recently. Not a redesign. The old posts are still here, same URLs, same markup. What changed is that every page now carries a full structured data graph and every element is annotated with microformats. Most of the new posts were co-written with an AI that has a checklist of things it is not allowed to sound like, plus a set of voice rules. The AI drafts, I edit. The structured data handles the other side: helping machines understand the content.

Autopsying a SanDisk Extreme SSD

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was planning a backup setup and dug an old SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD out of a drawer. Plugged it in, nothing.

Well, not nothing. dmesg saw a USB device. sg_inq got a polite response from the bridge chip, but the kernel logged “Media removed, stopped polling” and the block device reported zero bytes. The USB-to-NVMe bridge chip was alive and as chatty. The SSD behind it was gone.

The SanDisk Extreme has a reputation by now. You probably know it if you follow hardware news. I didn’t just want to read about the failure though, I wanted to see it.

Balancing an MMO economy with a black market

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Albion Online has a cool design constraint that sounds absurd when you say it out loud: every item in the game is player-crafted. There are no NPC vendors selling gear. The world produces nothing on its own except raw resources. The whole sandbox is built on top of that constraint.

But Albion also has mobs that drop loot. You go fight a heretic, you sometimes get a T4 bag. So somebody has to have crafted that bag. Where does it come from?

Hardening a fresh Linux install

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been running a small Hetzner VPS for a while now and every time I spin up a new one I find myself re-deriving the same baseline. This is that baseline, written down so I stop re-deriving it and so you can steal it. It assumes Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on a Hetzner VPS, but most things hardly change over the years, or between platforms. None of this is exhaustive, there’s no AppArmor profiling, no AIDE, but it gets you to a point where you won’t be embarrassed if someone runs nmap at you.

Building custom commands in Bevy

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Bevy is an ECS-based game engine built in Rust. Extension traits are a pattern in rust that allows you to add methods to an existing type defined outside of your crate. You can probably guess where I’m going with this.

In bevy, any system can access the Commands structure to issue commands manipulate the World. The most common one would probably be the Commands#spawn method which lets you spawn an entity with the components you specify. You can pass a structure implementing the Bundle trait to this method. Luckily, tuples of none to many components implement this trait thanks to macro magic, so you can just call the method like:

Setting up remote backups with Restic

Tue, 22 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Restic is a program that greatly simplifies the process of encrypted, incremental backups. Backblaze B2 is a pretty cheap cloud storage service that restic happens to support as a data storage backend. The first 10 GB of storage is free, which is plenty for storing configuration files and some source code.

Working through the SICP exercises

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I started reading through “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” and thought it would be a good idea to publish my progress here. Here are my solutions for the first ten exercises in the book.

I did a few things at STM CTF 2018 Prelims

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Here are a few challenges I chose to write about from the preliminary for STM CTF 2018 which will take place in Ankara at Oct 31. I want to thank the STM team for a fun and smooth CTF experience. I started competing in CTFs about half a year ago and I heard good things about STM CTF 2017. I hope I can attend this year :)

I did a thing at Harekaze CTF 2018

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I participated in DKHOS alongside bloodlust (formerly yubitsec) this year but this post is not about that. While we were waiting for DKHOS to start at midnight, we decided to warm up with another CTF that was going on at the time. That CTF was Harekaze 2018.

I did a thing at TU CTF 2017

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It was called “The Neverending Crypto”. I don’t remember what difficulty level it was listed at, probably the lowest :) Here is how it went.

You are presented with an address and a port number. When you connect, you are asked to enter a string. The string you entered is encrypted and sent back to you. After a few tries, I realize it’s encrypted with a Caesar cipher.