SergUA Blog

It's frustrating to hear people claim Apple deliberately slows down old phones to push upgrades. The reality is that when everything is optimized to the limit, there's no way around it. Let me explain why — with a story from my experience programming microprocessors.

A video for those who use AI in programming but don't follow every update, and want to catch up on new capabilities they might have missed. (In Ukrainian language)

A tool for converting images to ASCII animation

2026-03-16

Regular ASCII art loses a lot of detail. But in animation, each subsequent frame corrects errors from previous frames — and the image ends up much more detailed.

Password validation via entropy without making users suffer

2026-02-25

"Minimum 8 characters, lowercase and uppercase letter, digits, special character" — that's not security, that's bureaucracy, like filling out a government form. The password aaaaaA1! technically passes, while "LoremIpsum LoremIpsum LoremLorem IpsumIpsum" doesn't. So instead, I calculate entropy: it measures the actual difficulty of brute-forcing, not just ticking boxes for security theater. A long simple password can be stronger than a short "complex" one. Bonus — a funny error message that makes rejection a little less painful.

Better Stack — free uptime monitoring that's actually good

2026-02-18

I tried a few services for monitoring if my site is up, and found the perfect service - betterstack.com. It only allows pinging 10 endpoints, which is not much compared to competitors. But it's really well-engineered. I used it before for pinging my services, and then I went to add another one and noticed you can create a status page. On your own domain: status.sergua.com - check it out. Free! Takes 5 minutes to create, try a few options and add a domain. Writing this post took way longer.

Humor: We Don't Need No More Developers.

2026-01-26

In software development, there's a tradition: every 10 years, someone invents something that will make it possible to develop software without specially trained people — developers. So far, everything is going according to plan. This decade, AI replaced developers. Let's look at the full list.

Are speculators evil? Why everyone actually benefits from them

2026-01-24

People often talk about speculators - they buy when demand is lowest and sell when demand is highest. Profiting from people. Interestingly, they sell when demand is highest - meaning they increase supply at the critical moment. Isn't that a paradox? I have a friend: before the COVID-19 epidemic began in Ukraine, he bought a box of masks and sold them when they cost 7 UAH each. He made a little money on this. And others - lost? At first glance, yes, someone paid him out of their pocket. But actually — no: everyone benefited from this, including those who paid him. Let me explain why.

Replacing the motherboard fan on Bambu Lab A1 mini to reduce noise

2026-01-19

Not that it was necessary, but when you have a disassembled A1 mini 3D printer on your desk with a noisy motherboard fan, and a spare 40x40x10 fan at hand, it's hard to stop. Worth noting that the stock fan is 25x25x10, so the faint of heart should look away.

Deep music recommendation service through similar artists analysis

2026-01-18

I don't like recommendations from regular music services: they're too shallow. So I wrote my own - with deep analysis and weighted scoring. The service takes top-500 artists from Last.fm (or a manually entered list), finds top-500 similar artists for each, then builds a similarity table, aggregates scores, and sorts the results. It's significantly slower, but more relevant.

Git delta — beautiful git diff in terminal in 60 seconds

2026-01-10

I've often heard that git in the terminal is inconvenient to use, but it turns out it's not so much about git itself, but primarily about git diff. Of course, no one uses git like that. Just run a couple of configuration commands and you'll be able to use it, often even better than in an IDE.

Generating short human-readable IDs with error detection

2026-01-02

Have you ever had to enter a long code that you couldn't memorize at a glance and you get lost counting a dozen digits? I always wondered if it's possible to make a number that's both short and easy to read. For example, ABC123-DFG678 is easy to copy, although it's quite long. And you can also make the system detect errors if there were any. I had a few ideas on this topic, so I sat down and did the math.

December 22nd is the real Ukrainian New Year!

2025-12-22

New Year in Ukraine is celebrated on this very day, December 22nd, following the winter solstice. It can't be moved to fit any calendar. Because we celebrate the new sun and the days growing longer. Traditionally, it's the celebration of the goddess Koliada and the birth of the New Sun.

You can print TPU with a 0.2mm nozzle, but you need the right settings. Some can be configured in the slicer, others you'll have to tune manually.

Telegram content isn't indexed by search engines and vanishes in the feed — it's a black hole for any content. People still wonder how Telegram monetizes. It's simply profitable for Russians that we keep writing there — that alone is reason enough to fund its existence.