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In Part 1 we installed Presidio and ran a basic detection on clean sample text. Real data is messier. Emails have signatures with phone numbers buried in HTML. Support tickets mix PII with technical jargon. Chat logs have informal name references that NER models struggle with. And sometimes the PII isn't in text at all. It's in screenshots and scanned documents. This part covers how Presidio's detection engine actually works under the hood, how to process different text types you'll encounter in production, and how to handle structured data and images. How the Analyzer Engine Works Presidio doesn't rely on a single detection method. It layers three approaches and combines their results. Named Entity Recognition (NER) The NER model (spaCy by default) processes the text and identifies entities based on the language model's training. It's good at catching names, locations, and organizations even when they don't follow a fixed pattern. "John Smith" is easy. "Dr. J. Martinez-Garcia" is harder but the NER model handles it because it understands context and word patterns. The tradeoff is that NER is probabilistic. It can miss unusual names or flag common words as entities. That's why Presidio doesn't stop here. Pattern Matching (Regex) For entities with predictable formats, Presidio uses regex recognizers. Credit card numbers, SSNs, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers all have known patterns. A Luhn-validated 16-digit number is almost certainly a credit card. A string matching \d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4} in the right context is probably an SSN. Pattern-based detections typically get higher confidence scores than NER detections because the pattern itself is strong evidence. Context Scoring Here's where it gets interesting. Presidio looks at the words surrounding a potential match to boost or lower confidence. If the text says "my SSN is 123-45-6789," the phrase "my SSN is" provides strong context that the number is actually a social security number and not some random ID. Th

Microsoft has created a special edition Xbox Series X to celebrate 25 years of the console. The Xbox 25th-anniversary console takes design cues from the original Xbox console, with both the console and controller featuring a translucent green design. "For the first time, we're bringing a translucent design to Xbox Series X, drawing inspiration from […]

Minecraft Dungeons 2, a sequel to Microsoft's dungeon crawler spinoff Minecraft Dungeons, will be released on September 29th. The company originally revealed the game in a brief trailer in March, promising a fall 2026 release window. Here's how Microsoft described it at the time: Return to the world of Minecraft Dungeons in an all new […]

Just a few days after pushing Fable out of 2026, Microsoft showed off more footage of Fable, the first new entry in the storied RPG franchise since 2010's Fable III, at its Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday. The company also announced a specific release date: February 23rd, 2027. Though if you get the Premium Edition, […]

As part of its Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday, Microsoft revealed new details about Halo: Campaign Evolved, the upcoming remake of Halo: Combat Evolved's campaign mode. The remake will debut on Xbox Series S / X, PC, and PS5 on July 28th. Today's mission trailer includes a first look at Operation: Meteorite, a new three-mission […]

Apparently, the "return of Xbox" means a retreat from other platforms. At its Xbox Games Showcase today, Microsoft revealed that Gears of War: E-Day - which was previously rumored for a PS5 launch in addition to Xbox and PC - will not be coming to PlayStation. It'll be an Xbox console exclusive and is launching […]

When I started learning Excel as part of my Data Science & Analytics course, I assumed it was just a tool for creating tables and performing basic calculations. After spending a week exploring its features, I quickly realized that Excel is much more powerful than I thought. Almost every organization generates data. Businesses track sales, schools monitor student performance, hospitals manage patient records, and marketers analyze campaign results. Before data can be analyzed, it needs to be organized, cleaned, and summarized—and that's where Excel comes in. In this article, I'll share some of the Excel concepts I've learned so far and how they're used in real-world data analysis. Understanding the Excel Workspace Before working with data, it's important to understand the basic structure of Excel. When you open Excel, you're working inside a workbook . A workbook can contain multiple worksheets (often called sheets), which help organize different sets of data. At the top of the screen is the Ribbon , which contains tabs such as Home, Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, Data, and View. The Ribbon acts like a control center where you can access Excel's tools and features. Rows run horizontally and are identified by numbers, while columns run vertically and are identified by letters. The intersection of a row and column is called a cell , where data is entered. At first, all these parts seemed overwhelming, but after using Excel regularly, navigating through them has become much easier. The Different Types of Data in Excel One of the first things I learned is that not all data is the same. Excel commonly works with: Text data (names, product categories, locations) Numeric data (sales figures, quantities, prices) Date and time data (order dates, deadlines) Logical data (TRUE or FALSE values) Understanding data types is important because Excel treats each type differently when performing calculations and analysis. Number Formats Matter More Than I Expected Another concept that

The Problem If you've ever audited your Windows network traffic during a boot-up sequence, you know the truth: there's a "blind spot." Between the moment your network drivers initialize and your VPN/WireGuard tunnel actually establishes, your traffic is leaking. Many third-party solutions exist, but they are often bloated, use proprietary binaries, or act as black boxes. I wanted something transparent, native, and bulletproof. The Solution: WG-KillSwitch I developed a pure PowerShell-based kill switch architecture. It doesn't rely on third-party libraries—it uses native Windows system components to enforce security. Key Architectural Features: Zero-Trust Firewall Matrix: Hardens the system by blocking all outbound traffic by default, allowing only authenticated tunnel traffic. WMI Persistent Watchdog: Unlike standard scripts that can be killed via Task Manager, this project uses WMI Event Subscriptions. If the watchdog process is terminated, Windows itself immediately respawns it. Resilience: Survives hard reboots, modem resets, and Windows service cycling. Resilience & Leak Testing I've put this through a gauntlet of tests: Forced Reboots: Zero leaks detected during driver load. Process Termination: The WMI engine restores the protection in milliseconds. Dynamic Network Resets: The firewall matrix remains active regardless of adapter status. Let's Collaborate This is open source, transparent, and built for the community. I'm looking for security audits and feedback. Check out the source code, open an issue, or submit a PR: https://github.com/ryderlacin-pixel/Windows-WireGuard-KillSwitch

Last year, I examined RUM indexes within this series on multi-key indexing, demonstrating that they cannot substitute MongoDB's compound indexes for sorted queries. A year later, Microsoft has fixed this in the DocumentDB extension for PostgreSQL with an Extended RUM index that preserves the ordering of the keys, allowing an ordered scan rather than a bitmap scan. Let's revisit our pagination query to see how it performs now. I start a container with the latest DocumentDB (version v0.112-0 from May 26, 2026): docker run -d --name documentdb-local -p 10260:10260 -p 9712:9712 ghcr.io/documentdb/documentdb/documentdb-local:latest --username franck --password franck --start-pg I can connect to PostgreSQL on port 9712, where many extensions are installed, including the extended RUM index: docker exec -it documentdb-local psql -p 9712 postgres psql ( 17.10 ( Debian 17.10-1.pgdg13+1 )) Type "help" for help. postgres = # \dx List of installed extensions Name | Version | Schema | Description ------------------------- +---------+------------+------------------------------------------------------------ documentdb | 0.112-0 | public | API surface for DocumentDB for PostgreSQL documentdb_core | 0.112-0 | public | Core API surface for DocumentDB on PostgreSQL documentdb_extended_rum | 0.112-0 | public | DocumentDB Extended RUM index access method pg_cron | 1.6 | pg_catalog | Job scheduler for PostgreSQL plpgsql | 1.0 | pg_catalog | PL/pgSQL procedural language postgis | 3.6.3 | public | PostGIS geometry and geography spatial types and functions tsm_system_rows | 1.0 | public | TABLESAMPLE method which accepts number of rows as a limit vector | 0.8.2 | public | vector data type and ivfflat and hnsw access methods ( 8 rows ) postgres = # I can also connect to the MongoDB-compatible API: docker exec -it documentdb-local mongosh -u franck -p franck 'mongodb://localhost:10260/?tls=true&tlsAllowInvalidCertificates=true' Current Mongosh Log ID: 6a0b3b537d2a1c3471d1a7ba Connecting to: mo

Every time I started a side project, I rebuilt the same five things before I wrote a single line of the actual idea: auth, a database, file uploads, a deploy pipeline, and TLS. Different domain, same plumbing. By the third project I was copy-pasting my own docker-compose.yml from a folder two repos over and renaming things until they stopped erroring. So I stopped. I froze that plumbing into one boilerplate — PocketBase + Next.js + Caddy on a single cheap VPS — and now I ship every side project on it. Same shape every time: clone, rename, write the part that's actually new, push. The thing I care about most isn't the speed, though. It's that I stopped paying for it. A handful of real projects now run on this setup for a few euros a month, total — not a stack of per-service SaaS bills that each want $25 here and $20 there before you've shipped anything. No Vercel seat, no managed Postgres, no Auth-as-a-Service, no object-storage line item. Here's the whole thing. Why this stack The trick that makes the cost collapse is PocketBase . It's a single Go binary that gives you, in one process: Auth — email/password, OAuth, the works, with a real users collection A database — SQLite, with a schema you manage from an admin UI Realtime — subscribe to collection changes over SSE File storage — uploads handled, with on-the-fly thumbnails An admin dashboard — at /_/ , for free That's four or five separate SaaS products collapsed into one binary that runs anywhere and stores everything in a folder. Compared to wiring up Supabase or Firebase, the mental model is tiny: it's one process and one data directory. Back up the directory and you've backed up the entire app — database, uploaded files, auth tokens, all of it. For the front I use Next.js (App Router, React Server Components) because that's where I'm fastest, and Caddy as the reverse proxy because it gets you automatic HTTPS with zero config — it provisions and renews Let's Encrypt certificates on its own. And it all lives on

This post is a continuation of part 1 During my childhood, I was obsessed with mazes. I would spend hours drawing mazes with increasingly complex rules and I would force my parents and friends to solve them. I wanted to translate this to the computer. Every so often, I would return to the challenge. Most of my mazes were built in Minecraft. Soon though, my mind started to connect the dots. Minecraft had convinced me that computers could be bent to my will. If I could understand how the game worked, maybe I could make my own world. I was convinced understanding the .bat script was the key. Initially, I experimented. I vividly remember trying to rename the script, after which windows would yell out a scary warning about how changing an extension might make the file unusable. I quickly pressed cancel, hoping I did not break my game. The first time I tried opening the minecraft.bat file in notepad, I was overwhelmed. A bunch of nonsensical garbage filled my screen. I did not know it at the time, but the people who shipped the cracked version obfuscated the script. It was not meant to be understood. I borrowed more and more books on programming and computers from the library, slowly building an understanding of how mysterious lines of text made the computer do stuff. I attempted many times to apply my knowledge. Most of my "programming" was copying code from books in notepad, trying to run it but not having the compilers or knowledge to execute my code. My computer was littered with hundreds of little files. maze.py , maze.php , maze.java . Each an attempt to achieve my dream of creating a maze. Each time, I faced disappointment when I double-clicked, and the computer told me that the file I just worked on was unrecognised. However, there was one piece of code I wrote that actually worked. A small little batch script - welcoming me to a new world. echo "Hello World" A short while later the computer I was working on died. Being locked out of a world I had only just starte

Data analysis is at the heart of how we spot patterns and improve systems today. Tools like Python, SQL, Power BI, and Tableau are everywhere in the data world, but Excel has held its ground as the starting point for anyone getting into data work, and there is a reason for that. What is Excel? Excel is a spreadsheet built on a grid of rows and columns. You use it to organize, format, and calculate data. For analysts it is where messy raw data gets sorted out, numbers get worked through, and everything gets turned into something that actually makes sense to look at. Ways Excel is Used in Real-World Data Analysis 1. Data Cleaning Raw data is almost never clean. Names are misspelled, IDs get duplicated, spacing is off, values go missing. None of that is unusual, it is just the reality of working with real data. Before any analysis happens the data has to be honest, because if the data is wrong the results will be too. Functions like PROPER() and TRIM() are some of the basic tools that help get data into a state where you can actually work with it. 2. Financial Reporting Every business, big or small, needs to know where the money is going. Excel makes that straightforward. SUM() adds up a range of numbers, AVERAGE() finds the mean, and once the calculations are done the data can be turned into charts and dashboards that tell the story of the business clearly. Not everyone in the room is an analyst, but everyone can read a chart. 3. Business Decision Making Clean data presented well becomes a decision making tool. What do customers want? What is working? What needs to change? Sorting figures from highest to lowest or filtering by region can take thousands of rows and turn them into something focused and answerable. That is really what data is for, helping people make better calls. Excel Features I Have Learned and How They Apply Three features that have stood out to me are conditional formatting, data validation, and cell referencing. Conditional formatting highlights ce

AWS recently announced ExtendDB, a DynamoDB-compatible adapter that lets developers use the DynamoDB API with different storage backends, starting with PostgreSQL. The project supports existing SDKs and tools without modification, giving teams greater flexibility to run DynamoDB-style workloads outside of native DynamoDB while maintaining compatibility with current applications and workflows. By Renato Losio

“A self-indulgent weekend divergence from the usual Vektor memory business content. Consider what happens when you give a developer two days off, unlimited internet archive access, and too many ideas crammed into one article." Writing this article began organically. Which is a funny thing to even have to say in 2026. What does organic even mean now? I don't care, man; I just want to be free to express myself, man. I did not write this on a mechanical typewriter. I wrote it on a PC with my stubby index fingers running Windows software that, miraculously, does not blue screen every ten minutes anymore. It only took Microsoft thirty years to pull that off. To the left sits an analog record player with some secondhand Yamaha bookshelf speakers I found at a charity shop; to the right of me sits a modern dark wood-paneled Zen PC case, a processor that would have occupied an entire room thirty years ago, and a GPU that can synthesize gargantuan piles of AI slop or brilliant code in roughly ten seconds flat. And yet, for all that raw power, it still comes down to an algorithm. It always has. The Sharper Image and the Death of Wonder When I was a kid I used to walk into The Sharper Image store at Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston and just stand there. Looking at technology I could not afford while the staff watched me carefully to make sure I did not break anything. I also grabbed some bright coloured rock salt candy; I loved stuff, some core memories right there. That feeling of picking up a piece of technology and not quite knowing what it did, like a ten-year-old ape holding something from another civilisation, you cannot replicate that in a sterile Apple store. The technology is better now. Genuinely better. Faster, smaller, more capable than anything those shelves held. But the sense of wonder at the unknowable object is completely gone. Everything is explained before you touch it. Every product has a thirty-second video, a Reddit thread, a YouTube teardown, a comparis

Humans have long assumed they belong to a special category called "persons." But what actually makes someone a person? And why should persons get special moral status? I keep coming back to these questions because they refuse to stay abstract. The moment you build an AI system that reasons about its own goals, they become engineering problems. The Traditional View Personhood is supposed to confer special status: persons have rights, deserve respect, bear responsibility for their actions, and warrant moral consideration. The philosophical tradition offers several criteria for what earns you membership in this club. Rationality. Kant's version: persons are rational agents who can recognize and follow moral laws. Rationality lets you understand moral principles, deliberate about actions, and choose based on reasons rather than instinct. But babies aren't rational, and we call them persons. People with severe cognitive disabilities have reduced rationality, and we don't revoke their personhood. Rationality comes in degrees; personhood is treated as binary. Self-awareness. Persons are conscious beings who recognize themselves as distinct entities persisting through time. This enables understanding yourself as an agent, planning for your future, taking responsibility for your past. But elephants, dolphins, and some primates pass the mirror test. We lose self-awareness during sleep. And we have no reliable way to verify self-awareness in others. Autonomy. Persons govern themselves and make free choices. This is supposed to ground moral responsibility, rights, and dignity. But if the universe is deterministic, nobody is truly autonomous. All choices are shaped by culture and circumstance. Mental illness reduces autonomy without eliminating personhood. Moral reasoning. Persons understand right and wrong. But psychopaths understand morality intellectually while lacking the emotional response. Children develop moral reasoning gradually. When exactly do they become persons? Lan

Every interface you create is a constraint on future behavior. Every abstraction emphasizes certain patterns and discourages others. You are not just building tools. You are shaping how people think about problems. I have been paying attention to how API design encodes values, not just technical decisions, but philosophical ones. What Your API Communicates Consider these design choices: Mutability vs Immutability. Do you encourage stateful modification or pure functions? This is not just about performance. It is a philosophy about side effects and reasoning. If your default is mutable state, you are telling users that local mutation is fine, that they can reason locally. If your default is immutability, you are telling them to think about data flow. Explicit vs Implicit. Do you make users specify parameters or infer from context? This trades convenience for transparency. I lean toward explicitness. Magic is convenient until you need to debug it. Fail Fast vs Fail Safe. Do you throw exceptions or return error codes? This encodes beliefs about who should handle errors and when. Fail-fast says "don't let bad state propagate." Fail-safe says "keep running if you can." Both are defensible, but they lead to very different code. My Design Values When I build libraries, I try to encode: Explicitness over magic. I would rather make users type more than hide behavior behind conventions they have to discover. Composition over inheritance. Small pieces that combine flexibly beat deep class hierarchies. Clarity over cleverness. Code should be obvious, not impressive. Safety by default. The easy path should be the safe path. Why This Matters Your API is a value statement. It says what you think is important, what you think is dangerous, and how you think about the problem domain. This is why I spend so long on interface design. The APIs we create shape future thought. They outlast the code that implements them, because the patterns they teach persist in the minds of the people wh

At some point, a monolith starts working against you. In my case, Finovara was a single Spring Boot application handling everything (authentication, transactions, limits, piggy banks, notifications, activity logs, currency conversion) The bigger it got, the harder it was to change anything without worrying about something else breaking. So I broke it apart. This post is about the first three pieces I extracted: the API Gateway , the activity-log-backend , and a shared module called contracts-backend . The Old Structure Everything lived in one Spring Boot app. The activity log — which tracks everything a user does in the app (expenses added, limits changed, logins, account changes) — was tangled up with the core business logic. Adding a new type of activity meant touching the same codebase responsible for transactions, security, and everything else. The New Structure finovara-backend/ ├── api-gateway/ ├── activity-log-backend/ ├── contracts-backend/ └── core-backend/ Four modules (there will be more). Each with a clear responsibility. API Gateway The gateway is the single entry point for every request coming from the frontend. It runs on port 8888 with SSL enabled and uses Spring Cloud Gateway (WebFlux-based). Routing is simple and declarative: routes : - id : activity-log-backend uri : ${ACTIVITY_LOG_URL} predicates : - Path=/api/account-activity/**,/api/archive-activities/** - id : notification-backend uri : ${NOTIFICATION_BACKEND_URL} predicates : - Path=/api/notification-settings/** - id : core-backend uri : ${CORE_BACKEND_URL} predicates : - Path=/** Activity log routes go to activity-log-backend . Notification routes go to notification-backend . Everything else falls through to core-backend . The gateway also handles CORS centrally — https://localhost:5173 is the only allowed origin, with credentials support. No individual service needs to worry about CORS anymore. One thing worth noting: the gateway uses use-insecure-trust-manager: true for the HTTP client. Th

At some point, a monolith starts working against you. In my case, Finovara was a single Spring Boot application handling everything (authentication, transactions, limits, piggy banks, notifications, activity logs, currency conversion) The bigger it got, the harder it was to change anything without worrying about something else breaking. So I broke it apart. This post is about the first three pieces I extracted: the API Gateway , the activity-log-backend , and a shared module called contracts-backend . The Old Structure Everything lived in one Spring Boot app. The activity log — which tracks everything a user does in the app (expenses added, limits changed, logins, account changes) — was tangled up with the core business logic. Adding a new type of activity meant touching the same codebase responsible for transactions, security, and everything else. The New Structure finovara-backend/ ├── api-gateway/ ├── activity-log-backend/ ├── contracts-backend/ └── core-backend/ Four modules (there will be more). Each with a clear responsibility. API Gateway The gateway is the single entry point for every request coming from the frontend. It runs on port 8888 with SSL enabled and uses Spring Cloud Gateway (WebFlux-based). Routing is simple and declarative: routes : - id : activity-log-backend uri : ${ACTIVITY_LOG_URL} predicates : - Path=/api/account-activity/**,/api/archive-activities/** - id : notification-backend uri : ${NOTIFICATION_BACKEND_URL} predicates : - Path=/api/notification-settings/** - id : core-backend uri : ${CORE_BACKEND_URL} predicates : - Path=/** Activity log routes go to activity-log-backend . Notification routes go to notification-backend . Everything else falls through to core-backend . The gateway also handles CORS centrally — https://localhost:5173 is the only allowed origin, with credentials support. No individual service needs to worry about CORS anymore. One thing worth noting: the gateway uses use-insecure-trust-manager: true for the HTTP client. Th

Aerospace completely revolutionized my workflow after 15 years of using macOS the way Apple intended. I no longer hunt for apps and windows in Mission Control or drag them around spaces to organize. I can open as many windows as I need and have them all under my fingertips. And instead of swiping around to find one, I instantly teleport to where they are. This incredible software is technically aimed at advanced users. It’s installed from the command line and offers extensive configuration options. For basic use though, you don’t need to configure it at all, and if you have opened the Terminal application before and know what running a command means, you should be good to go. Rest assured, I will not show you how to configure Aerospace with Vim, or show you how to create an elaborate but useless dashboard! Just the essentials to get you started. How to set up Aerospace Aerospace is a menu bar application, but you can’t download it from an App Store or get it as a DMG file. You need a package manager. Go to the Homebrew website and follow the installation guide. Make sure to accurately follow the on-screen instructions. This may include any of the following: A prompt to enter your password. When you type passwords in Terminal, you will not see stars or anything. Just make sure you’re typing the correct one and hit Enter. A prompt to install XCode Command Line Tools . Somewhere around the end of the installation process, you may get a prompt to run some extra commands, which depend on your system. Make sure you run them as instructed. To test if you have correctly installed Homebrew, run which brew in Terminal. If you see a path printed out, like /opt/homebrew/bin/brew , you’re good to go. If not, something has gone wrong. Try searching for other, more focused guides on installing Homebrew. With Homebrew, you can install applications from the Terminal app using the brew command. For Aerospace, you would run the following command: brew install --cask nikitabobko/tap/ae

If you're building or integrating Automated Test Equipment for aerospace or defence electronics, the technical requirements go well beyond "does the test pass." You need documentation that satisfies MIL-STD, AS9100, and DO-178C auditors — and an architecture that scales from prototype to production. Here's how modern Universal ATE systems are structured for defence-grade compliance. The Core Architecture A defence-grade ATE system has four functional layers: ┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Test Executive (LabVIEW) │ ← Orchestrates all test sequences ├────────────────┬────────────────────────┤ │ Instrument │ DUT Interface │ ← Hardware layer │ Control │ (ICT/JTAG/Func) │ ├────────────────┴────────────────────────┤ │ Data Management Layer │ ← Logging, traceability, reports ├─────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ Calibration & Verification │ ← Ensures measurement accuracy └─────────────────────────────────────────┘ Test Executive Design in LabVIEW The test executive controls the sequence, manages results, and handles failures. Key design principles: Test Sequence: 1. DUT identification (serial number scan or manual entry) 2. Pre-test self-check (verify instrument calibration status) 3. ICT phase — passive component verification 4. JTAG boundary scan — IEEE 1149.1 interconnect verification 5. Power-on functional test — operational verification 6. RF/signal analysis — if applicable to DUT type 7. Report generation — automatic, timestamped 8. Pass/fail disposition record JTAG Integration via IEEE 1149.1 For high-density boards where bed-of-nails is not viable, JTAG boundary scan is implemented via a JTAG controller (e.g., XJTAG, Corelis, or ASSET InterTech) integrated into the LabVIEW environment: LabVIEW → JTAG Controller API → Scan Chain → DUT ICs The boundary scan description files (BSDL) for each IC define the test vectors. Your test executive loads BSDL files, generates scan chain topology, and runs interconnect tests automatically. Data Traceabili