Est. 2002
x2q is a personal blog that has been online since 2002 — 24 years of notes on software, Linux, payments, home labs, cooking, and the side projects that keep appearing.
The card networks expanded the issuer identifier on a payment card from 6 to 8 digits. For anyone doing BIN/IIN lookups it means a 6-digit prefix is no longer guaranteed to identify a single issuer — you often need 8 digits to disambiguate. Here's the what, the why, and the practical fallout.
When a server won't start because the port is taken, you need the PID holding it. ss is the modern one-liner; lsof and fuser are the alternatives. Here's how to find the process and free the port.
Years ago I ran transcription through the Google Speech API. In 2026 you don't need a cloud API for that — whisper.cpp runs OpenAI's Whisper models locally on a laptop, CPU or GPU, with no keys and nothing leaving the machine. Here's the full path from clone to transcript.
B-roll is the cutaway footage that makes an edit breathe — and onboard POV footage from a single camera has none. I tried five ways to manufacture it from one ATV ride: CV auto-mining of the real footage, generative stills (SDXL-Turbo → RealVisXL img2img), AI Ken Burns via Depth-Anything-V2 parallax, true generated motion via Stable Video Diffusion, and optical-flow slow-motion. All local on a 12 GB card. Here's what each is good for, and the gotchas.
63 DJI Phantom 4 Pro frames over Randers, two stitching pipelines. OpenCV's Stitcher is fast and hands-off but leaves a wavy horizon and ragged edges; Hugin + enblend is slower but gives a dead-straight horizon, seamless blend, and a clean rectangle. Hugin wins.
bchunk (binchunker) splits a .bin/.cue CD image into .iso for the data track and .wav files for each audio track. The canonical tool for turning a mixed-mode BIN/CUE into something you can mount or burn.
In 2013, sitting on a balcony in Playitas, Fuerteventura, I built binlist.net as my first ever Go project — a free HTTP API for looking up the issuer of a credit card from its first six digits. It hit 1 million queries/day by 2015. Thirteen years later it's still free, and its commercial sibling iinlist.com is the one we run the business on.
FriendlyElec's CM3588 NAS Kit turns an RK3588 compute module into a 4-bay NVMe home NAS with 2.5 GbE. About 10 W idle. Debian on mainline kernel, ZFS on root, Samba, Tailscale.
fcrackzip is a small, old, command-line tool that recovers passwords on classic-ZipCrypto-encrypted .zip files. Brute-force or dictionary, runs everywhere, still useful in 2026 — with hashcat/john as the modern follow-up when it isn't fast enough.
pdfcrack is a small, single-threaded CPU tool for recovering lost PDF user and owner passwords. Fine for 40-bit RC4 and small dictionary attacks; for 128/256-bit AES PDFs, migrate to pdf2john + hashcat on a GPU.
x2q started back in 2002 as a plain ~cc homepage on the university server, while I was a computer-science student (stud.scient.) at Aalborg University. It was the usual student mix: Linux notes, write-ups of semester projects, and whatever I happened to be tinkering with.
Over the years it moved off the university server, through a few different engines and domains, and became x2q.net — but the habit never changed: notes to my future self, published in the open. You can still see the very first version at cs.auc.dk/~cc/ in the Internet Archive.