Writing
Things I build, and what actually happened.
Good intentions, bad outcomes
Open House had three ECG projects in different skins. The hospital consult explained why — a long needs brief, prior art mostly on student push, a hard "don't copy," and a course that still pays for devices that merely work. You get uniqueness as decoration on mediocrity.
The device has to work
One project meeting said the quiet part of Singapore schooling out loud: the device has to work. Not explore. Not compound. Work. That is not one rubric — it is the national scoreboard.
Project Panama: they sold virtue, then they hid the knives
Anthropic sold itself as the moral lab. Exhibit 21 shows they ran a secret programme to destructively scan the world's books. I grew up treating knowledge like it had a pulse. I am boycotting Claude.
What to subscribe to in August 2026
ChatGPT and Grok are the same class — ChatGPT a tad smarter, Grok faster on search. Add Gemini for pictures. I am boycotting Claude after Project Panama.
Alvarmethod: one teacher, one mind — how the loop actually helps
A longer field note on turning Eero Alvar’s AI learning loop into portable skills — probe in the real quiz UI, a mermaid DAG, one-step teaching, and the pictures that lock a step in.
Sixty-four repos, one thread: what my GitHub history says about how I work
I read all 64 public repos as one career: COVID-era hackathon bots, NTU research games, then a 2026 run of on-device Mac AI — macwispr, voice-evolve, a 4.73B MoE trained on a Mac Studio, and the reverse-engineered Cursor API.
Block YouTube Shorts. Keep YouTube.
Three years of trying to kill the Shorts slot machine without losing the library. The fix was solving an HTTP problem at the right layer: one Cloudflare Gateway regex on the /shorts/ path.
n8n speech-to-text automation with ParakeetASR
Audio files to text automatically: NVIDIA's Parakeet model via RapidAPI, wired into a 3-node n8n workflow with a web upload form. 12x cheaper and 3380x faster than Whisper.
We placed 2nd at a university hackathon while still in junior college
Bits and Bolts 2019: a JC team (Himanshu, Ojas, Vasanth) walked into a university-level hackathon as underdogs — and took 2nd place. Proof that the bracket doesn't decide who ships.
The 7,877-site credential heist that started inside my GCP project
March 2026: three unauthorized VMs on the Noverse GCP project ran the Bissa malware toolkit — 7,877 sites, 11,250 env files, 50+ countries in ~16 hours. How it was found, killed, and reported.
When the internet knocks on every SSH port
Chippy’s June 2026 security pass: mass SSH brute force, soft VPS posture, and the boring fix list — including emails when people had to move.
AirPrint via an AI agent: xiiaozet + Canon MG2580S
Hermes/Chippy mapped a dual-Wi‑Fi home, a dumb xiiaozet JetDirect dongle, and Gutenprint/CUPS so a Mac can print to a Canon MG2580S for real.
One writing surface
Story + field notes in one feed. Home stays the loadout screen.
My story — factory floor to founder
Long-form origin: survival, NA→JC, NS, TeachX, parallel companies.
Introducing Enhance: a digital twin of my university, from cameras it already has
I built a campus digital twin for NTU — room occupancy from existing cameras, image analytics, image-to-3D — running entirely on a laptop. The school wasn't interested. I still think it's cool.