Aaruni's Blog v 3.0

I have always been obsessed with computers. Unfortunately, as a child, I never could pick the top of the line parts for any of my computers. They were either hand-me-downs, or decked out to meet my needs, which, at the time, fell well short of my wants.

A Truly Grand Upgrade

I got my first full time job in 2023. The first thing I did with these newfound funds was buy furniture in my new apartment. The second thing I did bought a monster of a computer. A shiny new ryzen processor, double the memory I used to have, and, for the first time since 2008, in a desktop form factor. Before this, I had a relatively beefy Asus ROG gaming laptop, mostly for the high end CPU and good build quality. My new computer was 3 to 7 times faster!

Claiming Things

In November 2020, I was able to get my hands on a System76 Lemur Pro (lemp9). The thin and light laptop boasts a phenomenal battery life of 10+ hours of light typing work (at the expense of underwhelming performance, even when plugged into the wall). Recently, in a private group, when discussing laptop battery life, I pointed out that you don’t necessarily need ARM silicon or macOS to get more than a couple hours of battery, and that my laptop with intel and Linux can still deliver around 9 hours of battery life when doing light work. My claims were ridiculed and I was asked to do a “real test” of battery life to substantiate my claims.

Authentication

Authentication is any process that verifies and validates the identity of a client. Any login process is a type of authentication. Traditionally, authentication is done via a username and a password.

Multi Factor Authentication

Multi factor authentication (MFA) uses multiple factors to establish identity, instead of a single one, as in the classical case. These factors can be

• Something you know (e.g., password)
• Something you have (e.g., a phone)
• Something you are (e.g., biometrics)
• Somewhere you are (e.g., GPS coordinates)

With a sane setup, for the vast majority of daily activities, 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) is sufficient.

One Time Password

A One Time Password (OTP) is, as the name suggests, a single use password. It is most frequently used as a second factor in a 2 Factor Authentication scheme. It provides the “something you have” factor: the device providing the password.

Time based One Time Password

A Time based One Time Password (TOTP) is a One Time Password which uses the current time to generate the One Time Password. This means that TOTPs do not need a working network connection, and can still make a valid OTP on demand. Mathematically, a TOTP is just a function which takes two inputs, a seed, and the time. If the seed is shared ahead of time, as a pre shared secret, TOTP can be, and is used, as a complete and secure replacement for classical forms of OTP.

7.1 Headphones!

You just got an new headset. Its expensive and brilliant and it says 7.1 surround sound on the box, and you swear you can hear the difference. Unfortunately for you, that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!

The numbers in the surround sound standards refer to the number of physical channels there are for the sound output. 7.1 means you have 7 channels for sound, and a subwoofer for base. The channels in this setup are Front-Left (1), Front-Center (2), Front-Center (3), Surround Left (4), Surround Right (5), Rear Left (6), Rear Right(7), and a low frequency subwoofer (.1). Your fancy new headphones, on the other hand, only have two physical channels: left and right. But what about the stark difference you swear you can hear v/s your previous set of cans? All of that is software magic.