Updated June 11, 2025

I’m a product builder and tinkerer who loves turning ideas into real things — whether it’s a piece of software, a 3D-printed project, or a half-baked invention in my workshop. Feel free to email me or check out what I’m up to right now. I’ve spent my career in tech working in both product and engineering leadership roles, so connect with me on LinkedIn if you’d like to chat. ### Say Thanks If you liked something I made or blogged about, you can say thanks by buying me a coffee. Please don’t feel obligated. Thanks! Buy me a coffee ### Disclaimers This is a personal blog. All opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not represent those of my employer. I am a member of the Amazon Associates program and I may earn from qualifying purchases made from this site.

Updated June 13, 2025

Home | Feed (RSS) | Feed (Atom) | Feed (JSON) | About Me * * * Welcome to my blog ------------------ Years ago, in a software development conference, someone said that every keypress that you make contributes to entropy, so if others don't benefit from them, they're essentially wasted. Therefore, you need to expose the fruits of your labor to others, the more people, the better. This is my attempt at doing so. Here you will find some opinion pieces, commentary on technology and some of the stuff that's happening in the world, as well as some tutorials. Furthermore, I might document some software breaking in all sorts of curious ways, because there's a lot of that in my life. If you want to know more about me, you can visit My Homepage. * * * Title Published **More PC shenanigans: my setup until 2030** 2025-06-13 **It works on my Docker** 2025-05-16 **Windows bootloader: it just works** 2025-05-11 **What is ruining dual GPU setups** 2025-05-09 **Software licenses and hyperscalers** 2025-05-03 **Less free will is good, actually** 2025-04-12 **Two Intel Arc GPUs in one PC: worse than expected** 2025-04-10 **They took Skype from us, Teams sucks** 2025-04-07 **The SSH tunnel is dead, long live Tailscale** 2025-03-03 **Zombie software and haunted tunnels** 2025-03-02 **America In 2030: The Hateful Ones** 2025-02-25 **You might not need font subsetting** 2025-02-19 **Gitea isn't immune to issues either** 2025-02-18 **Docker error messages are pretty cryptic sometimes** 2025-02-17 **My blog doesn't need quality, it needs to look like it's from the 90s** 2025-02-16 **Was UserBenchmark right?** 2024-11-19 **The AI art discourse and programming** 2024-11-08 **Throw your message into the void** 2024-10-26 **iPhone, Android and WhatsApp are broken** 2024-05-28 **Keycloak and mod\_auth\_openidc is broken** 2023-10-20

Updated June 14, 2025

I’m current working through the course in _Walking in this World_ by Julia Cameron… however, work-related activities have kept me very busy these past few months, so I’m behind on posting my reflections. Some books on my bedside table at the moment are: * _Who Knows?_ by Raymond M. Smullyan * _The Mind is Flat_ by Nick Chater – most recently updated on the 14th of June 2025 * * * (This “Now” page contains notes on what I’m doing and thinking about currently. The page was inspired by the AboutIdeasNow site. According to AboutIdeasNow’s about page, Derek Sivers invented and publicised the idea of **/now** pages. See nownownow.com for a collection of sites with a **/now** page.)

Updated June 13, 2025

_Last updated on June 13th, 2025_. After a year of work, the Forms Engine contract at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has come to an end. Due to several factors, Agile Six has no further work lined up for me and I have been furloughed. I am currently looking for work as a Senior Ruby on Rails Software Engineer. If you know anyone hiring, send them my way. Meanwhile, I am still the ring announcer for KCXW. _Xtreme Freedom_ is coming up on July 19th. Buy your tickets at kcwrestling.com. My wife and I are still in Kansas City, Missouri. I compete in a karaoke league, eat a lot of BBQ, and recently marched in the 2025 KC Pride Parade. _Dante, a mature tuxedo, and his younger brother, Hazel, an immature tabby_ This page was inspired by the nownownow.com project.

Updated June 11, 2025

Hi, I'm Fred Hohman ------------------- I'm a Research Scientist at Apple I design and develop interactive interfaces to help people **understand machine learning models** and data-driven systems. Besides building tools, I also create **data visualizations** and write interactive articles to simply communicate complex ideas. I received my PhD from Georgia Tech where I worked with Polo Chau and Alex Endert. My dissertation on interactive interfaces for interpretability won the _ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award_ and was supported by a _NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship_. I have collaborated with designers, developers, artists, and scientists while working at Apple, Microsoft Research, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, and Pacific Northwest National Lab. Latest research for fans of human-computer interaction, data visualization, and machine learning. Guidance and best practices to help designers and developers create great experience for any Apple platform. My dissertation contributed interactive interfaces to enable machine learning interpretability at scale and for everyone. Enhanced reading experiences that demonstrate what's possible when dynamic media are effectively combined. A born-digital, experimental magazine dedicated to showcasing the expository power of the web.

Updated June 13, 2025

> I am following the `About Ideas Now` manifesto. > The `About` page holds the _past_, the `Now` page the _present_, while the `Ideas` page the _future_. ### Work-wise From July 2025 I will be embarking on a new adventure! _More details coming soon…_ ### 🖥️ At the computer * Improve `Rust` proficiency. #### `ggirelli.info` * Add an accessibility statement (see this page) * Move data for lunr index to separate page and asynchronously read it via AJAX. * Use GitHub actions to Syndicate microblog posts. * Use GitHub actions and webhooks to quickly post microblog posts.

Updated June 13, 2025

* * new! For Hire! * Projects * Portraits * Blog * About * Now Updated on 2025/06/13 Waiting for our family to grow ------------------------------ My partner and I are expecting our second child to be born any day now :) To say I’m trilled is an understatement. Looking for work ---------------- My contract got caught in a round of layoffs, so I am now hunting for a new job. I’ve put together a Hire Gosha! website for job hunting purposes, check it out, spread the word, and please let me know if you (or anyone you know) need a senior full-stack engineer who can ship fast. Making progress on Parts ------------------------ Together with my partner, an Internal Family Systems therapist, we’re building Parts, a parts mapping tool for IFS therapists and their clients. We have made a lot of progress on Parts, and we are going to be asking the people who have signed up to the waiting list to start testing it soon. I’m excited to see if this project will fly! Exploring programming languages ------------------------------- In addition to getting comfortable with Clojure and ClojureScript, I’ve been poking at some other programming languages recently, mostly of the functional and strongly typed variety. The most fun of those has been Haskell. I’ve written a little Scheme interpreter in it, which has been a really enjoyable experience. I’d like to get a chance to use Haskell more! Studying computer science and math ---------------------------------- I’ve been very slowly making my way through the legendary computer science textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (2nd ed.), by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman. Although my progress is slow, it is also immensely satisfying, and I hope that brushing up on comp-sci fundamentals (and math — I’ve been going through fundamental courses on Khan Academy) will in the future allow me to tackle harder, more interesting problems in computing. * * *

Updated May 30, 2025

Works in progress ----------------- I haven’t published yet—that’s coming soon—but I’ve written a bunch of short fiction and have a couple novellas in the pipe. Briarcliff ---------- `Working title // Final draft` A moody horror short about one man’s desperate sacrifice to a prehistoric supernatural force. This piece is an experiment in narrative by elision, drawing inspiration from video games’ heavy use of environmental storytelling. Crossroads ---------- `Working title // In progress` A hopecore novella about a down-on-her-luck artist who takes a job at a supernatural boutique. The shop is a community for outcasts: an immortal, curmudgeonly bookseller; a neurotic fire sprite; a pair of klutzy sibling witches; and one exhausted manager somehow holding it all together, despite the sins of the shop’s demonic angel investor. The vibes are cozy, and our artist finds family and community there, but Crossroads also holds a secret—_we don’t talk about the hellmouth in the basement_—and that secret could threaten everything. The Blizzard ------------ `Working title // In progress` Shiloh loved nothing more than the thrill of the open road, but the sirens giving chase from behind and the black blizzard looming ahead were a bit more thrilling than she’d bargained for. The Deep -------- `Working title // Temporarily shelved` A cosmic horror story about a deep sea salvage dive that encounters a threat beyond human understanding, and a secret organization that will do anything to keep that threat hidden. This piece is a claustrophobic katabasis into the deep, filled with interpersonal tension, existential dread, and even (somehow) malevolent mathematics. Tribute ------- `Working title // In Progress` A grim supernatural flash in which a traitor meets his diabolical fate. This piece was written for an upcoming live reading.

Updated June 13, 2025

I am currently: * hosting the IndieWeb Carnival during June (and you should contribute)! * working with an awesome digital experience team. * raising a preschooler with Eleanor. * watching and listening to the Amazin’ Mets ⚾ broadcasts. 📍 ABQ NM USA ------------- (Forecast by OpenWeather) Been living in the Duke City since 2023. 📚 Reading ---------- I use Literal and The StoryGraph to keep track of my reading. 🎧 Listening ------------ My last.fm account keeps track of music I listen to throughout the day. Stats are fun. I’m also scrobbling to Libre.fm as much as I can. This page uses a few third-party widgets and APIs to display my current status, weather, books, and music. _Last manually updated June 13, 2025._ Inspired by Derek Sivers’ nownownow.com. This page has its own profile, too.

Updated June 12, 2025

Recent Posts ------------ ### Ghidra Is Best: Android Reverse Engineering Jun 12, 2025 3 mins read Ghidra Graph Theory Reverse Engineering Ghidra is the best Android app RE tool. It just seems like it’s not, because the loader has easily fixed quirks. Let me demonstrate. Continue reading * * * ### AyySSHush: Tradecraft of an Emergent ASUS Botnet May 28, 2025 EXTERNAL LINK Netsec Reverse Engineering Using an AI powered network traffic analysis tool we built called SIFT, GreyNoise has caught multiple anomalous network payloads with zero-effort that are attempting to disable TrendMicro security features in ASUS routers, then exploit vulnerabilities and novel tradecraft in ASUS AiProtection features on those routers. Continue reading * * * ### You Want a VPN for Your Phone, Because Apps. May 16, 2025 7 mins read Ios Android Netsec VPN: phone, not desktop. WiFi: N/A. These statements are correct. Or at least as correct as is applicable to the general user in the scope of the following contextual blog which generally recommends that: Continue reading * * * ### Graph Theory for Reverse Engineers May 15, 2025 8 mins read Graph Theory Reverse Engineering Or “everything actually is a nail, you just need a bigger hammer” Graph Theory is a really neat subject matter relating to the modeling of pairwise relations between objects. When you understand graph theory, everything steadily becomes a graph theory problem, because pretty much anything can be. Continue reading * * * ### Step One: How2 Z3 Apr 4, 2025 8 mins read Z3 Reverse Engineering This article is a long time coming. z3, the constraint solver, is commonly used in crackmes and CTF challenges. Wherever possible, I just lift to angr for symbolic execution and bruteforce that way, since z3 is basically math bruteforce anyways. Regardless: Continue reading * * * ### Talk: Bluetooth Low Energy Unmasked: High-Impact Insights From Scalable Device Hunting Mar 27, 2025 1 min read Conference Talk Districtcon Bluetooth Remy shares his experience building custom hardware for a scalable Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) survey, discussing problems encountered, and providing a replicable solution that the audience can implement for approximately $100 (no soldering required). Continue reading * * * ### Local, Private, AI Code Assistant Mar 3, 2025 3 mins read Ai Llm Recently, products like Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot have sprung to the forefront of my social media. I’ve ignored these for quite some time, but a coworker recommended that I try out after I was fighting a particularly gnarly public codebase that had opaque documentation and involved a LOT of state machines. Continue reading * * * ### Your LLMs Were Backdoored Years Ago. Feb 4, 2025 3 mins read Ai Llm Plagiarism is an ethical violation. Always has been. As such: “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision”. Continue reading * * * ### Binary Ninja IOS App Reversing Jan 20, 2025 2 mins read Reverse Engineering Binja Ios Recently I ran into a headache of Out-Of-Memory errors when using Binary Ninja. Specifically, this was in relation to dissassembling a Mach-O aarch64 binary from an iOS app grabbed from decrypt.day. Continue reading * * * ### The Xiaohongshu 小红书 REDnote 小红书国际版 "Backdoor" Jan 16, 2025 8 mins read Reverse Engineering Ios Android Ghidra Binja The popular social media app “TikTok” is likely facing an iminent ban in the United States in the coming days. This has resulted in a mass migration to the Chinese app 小红书 (meaning “little red book”), Xiaohongshu, or simply “REDnote”. Continue reading * * * #### See all

Updated May 17, 2025

My slash page for stray ideas that I want to make/do. * Crossword/word puzzle zines * Crocheted Batsu Miku from the Project Sekai Movie * My personal accounting concepts wiki to organize my thoughts and how I connect various accounting concepts I encounter in my studies. I'm thinking of perhaps using Nutshell to link some concepts together. * Learn Toki Pona * Browser extension for the tab hoarders that sends you to a random open tab Page last updated: May 17, 2025

Updated June 10, 2025

winther blog ------------ / /blog /about /now /ideas /postroll /guestbook This is for work in progress stuff and loose ideas. Possible future blog posts -------------------------- * An essay of sorts on spaghetti westerns and why I love them * Simple analytics of nginx logs with awk * Something about Calvin & Hobbes * Memories of my early web days * Commentary tracks on movies * Art is more than just content Technical todolist ------------------ * Make a dark theme for the blog * Migrate my other blogs from Jekyll to Zola * Containerize the sciencefiction.dk CMS Part of the /about and /now concept from aboutideasnow.com Updated June 10, 2025