Last week, the organization manufacturing the viral e-reader of the “order from aliexpress” flavour announced that they will be discontinuing the popular device in their product lineup, the X4 model. Conveniently, I had ordered one a couple of weeks ago, and have been working on putting it through its paces.

The Perseid meteor shower is a meteor shower that generally is cast from within the area around the constellation Perseus, thus the name. This meteor shower generally peaks around August 12th, which it did this year as well. The meteorites consist of the dust and detrius that is left behind from when the comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle; basically, around this time of year our orbit vacuums up a bunch of comet dust, which then burns up in the atmosphere and gives us a pretty light show.

So there’s a Canadian peripheral manufacturer that 3d-prints various types of input devices, from trackballs (Ploopy Classic) to, new as of this year, the “Ploopy Bean”. If you’ve ever used a Thinkpad, especially mine where I have the trackpad disabled in BIOS, you’ve experienced the unique experience of using the Trackpoint, a signature feature of the IBM and now Lenovo Thinkpad.

On June 06 a reddit post was made to a number of subreddits (r/netsec, r/pcmasterrace, r/mechanicalkeyboards) alleging that the Attack Shark R85 HE operates as a BadUSB device when plugged in and attempts to install a trojan, and perform infostealer operations such as stealing a LastPass vault and Microsoft credentials: r/pcmasterrace. Naturally, I had to see for myself so I immediately ran to amazon.ca to grab my own.

Early this month, on May 2 2026, IGN — a major videogame review and journalism site had their twitch account compromised in a credential leak. Late in the evening on May 2, a self-proclaimed “white-hat hacker” (leveraging leaked credentials is no longer white hat, don’t touch shit you don’t have permission to touch) utilized this leaked restream.io credential to stream on their twitch platform and “inform” the outlet that their credentials were leaked. If you’d like to read about it, I wrote about it here: IGN Twitch Hack: How Leaked Restream.io Credentials Hijacked a Major Media Channel on the Specops Software blog.

In light of… current events occuring south of Canada, I felt it was prudent to start doing more work on things like wireless mesh networking. As such, I wanted to work on getting my first Meshtastic (or meshcore, but we’ll do meshtastic for now) node setup to get some coverage for my neighbourhood.