dunxen.dev — Microblog

First Thorium-232 Spectrum with Radiacode 103

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:42:28 GMT

Over the long weekend, I decided to pick up some thoriated TIG welding rod tips to do some casual gamma spectrometry with my Radiacode 103. I got some pretty decent results with just three tips over a few hours.

Three 2% thoriated TIG welding rod tips against the Radiacode 103.

(Logarithmic) spectrum after a few hours of counting with the Th-232 decay chain peaks visible.

Neat!

On Oxide's Quorum of Trust

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

(Writing this just before midnight seems a little weird, but it’s what was called for while I fiddle with my oscilloscope GUI)

I recently listened to the Oxide and Friends Podcast episode titled Building a Quorum of Trust in the Oxide Rack. I saw “Quorum” and “Trust” and immediately thought, “thresholds!”. I was very pleased to hear that Shamir’s Secret Sharing was employed as I had initially suspected.

I enjoy a good threshold scheme in cryptography. Working in the bitcoin space and learning about FROST/ROAST threshold Schnorr signatures has been oodles of fun.

I’ve been meaning to write a bunch about this, but just take this post as a reason to click through and listen to a great episode I enjoyed and maybe go down the threshold rabbit hole.

Let Humans do Human Things

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been avoiding expressing my feelings on work and life.

More recently, I’ve wanted to expatiate — generating lines upon lines of rants and self-deprecating humour until my fingers ache.

Expect a longer post on this soon.

Korean: -거나/(이)나

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If you’d like to describe what you might be doing during the apocalypse in Korean, your chat with a friend might go something like this:

친

친구

세상의 종말에 뭐 할 거예요?

비빔밥을 먹거나 게임을 해요.

아... 무슨 게임을 할 거예요?

카운터-스트라이크나 스타듀 밸리를 하려고 해요.

메시지

Obviously you wouldn’t be so polite and grammatically perfect with your friend, but one should be courteous about the end of the world.

TIL: Vec::swap_remove

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today I came across Vec::swap_remove in Rust’s standard library for the first time. I guess I am one of today’s lucky 10 000.

If you don’t care about retaining the order of the elements in a Vec, and you’d like to remove an element at a specific index, you can use Vec::swap_remove to remove the element at that index by swapping it out for the last element. This is constant time (O(1)) instead of Vec::remove’s linear time (O(n)).

A Walk with a Podcast

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today I went for a walk of just over 4 kilometres while listening to Oxide and Friends’ Oxide’s $200M Series C episode. The topic doesn’t normally interest me, but I am a big fan of the podcast. I just like to take the silly gang on a stroll with me.

From Musings to Hacker Fab

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Coincidentally after my microblog entry yesterday, I stumbled upon Hacker Fab which has goals including making integrated circuit prototyping as fast as 3D printing. This is exactly the type of project I’d like to challenge myself to do.

A Desktop Silicon Fab

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We have 3D printers, desktop CNC, laser engravers, and even PCB mills as hobbyists. It may be time for chip fabrication to be a home hobby too.