Nolan Woods
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thewoods.blog
Nolan Woods
@thewoods.blog
Bioinformatics, mechatronics, programming, masochism, and the occasional hot take.
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chatstream.i2labs.ca
thewoods.blog/chatstream/
ChatStream
A client side only embedded chat overlay for various streaming platforms
thewoods.blog
October 24, 2025 at 12:06 PM
# kill %1 || kill 1
When it REALLY needs to die.
July 10, 2025 at 12:03 PM
I have never been more stressed out about writing 200 lines of code than my DNSSEC NSEC validation function 😭

Also, DNSSEC isn't as SEC as I initially assumed.
June 10, 2025 at 10:58 AM
Have you ever wanted to stream video directly from one OBS Studio instance to another? With this one little trick it is trivial to set up!
thewoods.blog/obs-to-obs/
Streaming OBS directly to another OBS instance
Sometimes you need to aggregate multiple video streams, this is how
thewoods.blog
May 26, 2025 at 4:04 PM
I am planning a dev stream while creating a linux distro from scratch, any advice? (no this isn't going to be a Debian/Arch variant)
thewoods.blog/projects/lin...
Custom Linux Distro
I have been exclusively using Linux for well over 15 years now, bouncing from various popular distros like Ubuntu, Arch, and Mint. This experience has come to a critical mass in my understanding of th...
thewoods.blog
April 28, 2025 at 8:47 AM
When not to create a new web service. Seriously, stop it. I have had this argument too many times so I just wrote it all down: thewoods.blog/svc-lib/
When not to create a new web service
From a business perspective, web services are the thing to do these days. From an engineering perspective they are not necessarily the right choice.
thewoods.blog
April 25, 2025 at 2:55 PM
Decapitating GPT (no not that GPT, GUID Partition Table). I needed to do some direct manipulation of disk images and created a GPT header parser using nothing more than hexdump: thewoods.blog/gpt-header/
Decapitating GPT
Using hexdump to parse GPT headers
thewoods.blog
April 25, 2025 at 2:53 PM
Have you ever just wanted to buy a decent website template rather than build your own for the 100th time? Every time I go looking I am miserably disappointed by the code quality and data factoring of "professional" templates. If you make website templates, PLEASE READ: thewoods.blog/ssg-templates/
A begging letter to SSG template developers
A plea to properly design SSG templates and their content
thewoods.blog
April 25, 2025 at 2:50 PM
If you work in data science, or more specifically with the Galaxy data pipeline platform, I have some great tricks for you! Most notably conditional branching in workflows: thewoods.blog/Galaxy-tips/
Tips and tricks for Galaxy
Some interesting concepts and techniques within Galaxy pipelines
thewoods.blog
April 25, 2025 at 2:46 PM
Spent some time writing a base64url encoder/decoder in Javascript that is as terse as possible while still being somewhat readable: thewoods.blog/base64url/
base64url encode/decode
URI friendly data encoding is not yet supported natively in browsers
thewoods.blog
April 25, 2025 at 2:43 PM
If you ever have to deal with a private git repo and Terraform there is a handy trick to pre-authenticate git before Terraform slams its head into the auth prompt: thewoods.blog/GitHub-Actio...
Preconfigure git with credentials
Configure git to use credentails when cloning a private repository
thewoods.blog
April 25, 2025 at 2:41 PM
I wanted to take a vacation to Yellowstone. To plan ahead I did some data analysis of the park fill times so I wouldn't be left stranded at the gate: thewoods.blog/Yellowstone-...
Yellowstone National Park Fill Times
Avoid the rat race when visiting Yellowstone National Park
thewoods.blog
April 25, 2025 at 2:34 PM
Did a write up a while back for a O(1) algorithm to calculate an offset in a domain through recursive subdivision. This is handy for producing a series of colors that start as distinct as possible: thewoods.blog/Recursive-Su...
Recursive Subdivision
A simple, closed form, equation to recursively subdivide a domain
thewoods.blog
April 25, 2025 at 2:18 PM