Banks and financial institutions in Canada make a lot of money. In the first quarter of 2026, the big 6 hit $19 billion in profit, up from $14 billion the year prior[1]. They have refined their businesses to be well-oiled machines, yet fraud and unauthorized transactions are increasingly a thorn in their sides. Not...

If you are using uv to manage your python dependencies, you may run into difficulties when trying to execute a script from within a cron job, as the virtual environment has to be activated first. If you came for a quick answer, the solution is below. The key points are that you should use the full path to the uv...

Many of my friends have recently started getting involved in blogging or podcasting, in what I would argue is a larger trend towards shifting away from Instagram photos into longer form content. Some are looking to collect payment so that they can dedicate more time to something they are passionate about. Looking...

On March 5th, 404Media published Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester, which generated a lot of discussion both online and in the comments of the article itself. This is a complex case, but I want to state some things before diving in. First, the headline appears to be quite misleading....

Nothing is more gut-wrenching than realizing that there is an error in a dataset that was used to make a critical decision. Team members may start scrambling and ask questions like: Does this change the conclusion of the analysis? Will people think the entire analysis is wrong? How did this mistake happen, and who...

Self-hosting an e-book library was always on my radar, but there never seemed to be a solution that checked all the boxes. Mainly, I wanted the ability to read books from my Kobo (not sure if they are only a Canadian thing, they are similar to a Kindle in many ways), and be able to still borrow books from the...

About a year ago, I was sitting at a coffee shop late at night, meeting some new people. Inevitably the topic of passions came up, and I stated that I was pretty passionate about tech. “Ah, so you’re a tech bro” was one response, and I almost chuckled. In so many ways I would consider myself the opposite of a...

When working on data pipelines with python’s pandas or polars, you will often produce data artifacts for others to use, either as csv files or excel files. It can be a real hassle to exit the terminal to view these files. Two handy tools allow you to preview either the input or output files you are working with,...

Earlier this year, I migrated my static sites off of Vercel and on to a VPS in Europe. At $5 CAD per month after exchange, it isn’t a bad deal, but I’ve also been paying attention to the Canadian scene to see what products are coming to market that might help small businesses or bloggers. Worktree has been on my...

We’ve always been able to search for details about famous people on the internet. “When was Albert Einstein born?” has always returned “March 14, 1879”. However, Google’s AI mode will also happily answer questions about every day people, summarizing key details about their life, and using obituaries to find linkages...

Mkdocs is a very popular library for writing static documentation sites with python, and Material for Mkdocs is the de-facto standard theme to apply. With over 71,000 people stating they use the theme, it was a success both in how it was able to generate sponsers for an “insiders” track, and in general usage. Now,...

Privacy and security are too complex. One of the more complicated elements is a concept called encryption, which gets tossed around a lot, even in products that implement it quite differently. In a lot of privacy policies, companies will state that they “follow industry standard practices, encrypting data at rest...