Investigating a proprietary early-2000s abandonware ebook format

This article concerns a Windows software product which featured the ability to compile HTML websites and multimedia content into a standalone EXE file. The last release of this product was in 2003, and the product website has ceased to operate from 2012. Content was stored… »

Python re-implementation of Cryptomator encryption scheme

Cryptomator is an open-source file-based encryption system. Encrypted data is stored as files which can be easily uploaded to arbitrary cloud storage services, and there is a one-to-one relationship between plaintext and encrypted files. In order to increase privacy, filenames are encrypted and there is… »

WHO and CDC weight-for-age charts with additional centile lines

Below we present weight-for-age charts in a standardised format based on data from the World Health Organization (birth to 2 years) and United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2 to 18 years). A full complement of centile lines is provided, namely the 3rd,… »

Spoofing Android device model via Smali patching

I recently came up against an Android application which gates certain functionality behind detecting a ‘compatible’ Android device – which mine was not. My usual approach, on a rooted device, would be to use XPrivacyLua to spoof the device information returned to the application, but… »

Efficiently reading a CSV of floats in Rust

In hpstat, we are often required to read large CSV files consisting of a header of string column names, followed by data consisting entirely of floating-point numbers. Profiling reveals that a naïve approach based on generic CSV parsers is inefficient at this task.

Consider… »

Constructing a working copy of SCORE 4 – software preservation

SCORE is a historical music engraving program written by Professor Leland Smith and developed from 1987 to 2002. It was known for its high-quality results compared to other software available at the time, and its output inspired the Leland music font developed for MuseScore. The… »