Top all-time · #13687
Smoking on a Bike
Personal blog · smokingonabike.com · on HN as coldpiegamesculture
Smoking on a Bike is a personal blog at smokingonabike.com about games and culture. Since 2014, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 48 times, most often “Passkey marketing is lying to you (it's actually really simple)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its argument that passkeys, especially attestation, are incompatible with open-source and Free Software, and for a post on browsers no longer blocking pop-ups.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Passkey marketing is lying to you (it's actually really simple)3 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2025-01-04
- Hacking Super Monkey Ball Part 1 – Banana Bunch Values2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-03-03
- Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-12-31
What Hacker News says?
"Passkeys are incompatible with open-source software" https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-...
Comment linking /2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-is-lying-to-you/
on “We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own”Submitted Using Ghidra to Reverse Engineer Super Monkey Ball for GameCube as a story · 307 points
HN discussionAttestation is simply incompatible with open source. https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-...
Comment linking /2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-is-lying-to-you/
on “ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps”Submitted Passkey marketing is lying to you (it's actually really simple) as a story · 26 points
HN discussionI have to say I'm surprised how many people blog about what I would consider to be "work stuff" on their personal blogs. For me, I keep a strong separation between work and personal life. So my personal blog is about my personal hobbies: woodworking, gardening, cooking, that kind of thing. https://www.smokingonabike.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFYI you can nuke all that crap with a simple browser bookmark: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
Comment linking /2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/
on “No adblocker detected”Submitted Quick Tips for Making the Internet Suck Less as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOpen up your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Notices list. If you're forced to use a shit-tier phone web browser like Chrome or Safari, you can also use the Kill Sticky bookmarklet to clean up most of this crap[1]. If you are a web dev reading this and you've implemented a cookie popup on a website, please do the world a favor and find a different industry to work in. [1] https://www.smokingonabike.com/…
Comment linking /2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/
on “My website is ugly because I made it”Submitted Hacking Super Monkey Ball Part 1 – Banana Bunch Values as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> I've been hoping there exist techniques more systematic than "see what values change between memory snapshots". FWIW this is pretty much the standard method for locating value locations in RAM. It actually works pretty well. Some emulators have tools built in for that, like Dolphin for example. Even old game hacking tools like the Gameshark for N64 used the technique, with an on-console UI. I don't know if any Dre…
Comment linking /2021/01/17/hacking-super-monkey-ball-part-1-banana-bunch-values/
on “Using Ghidra and Python to reverse engineer Ecco the Dolphin”I've been getting into woodworking over the past year or two. It's great fun. It's something I would consider doing as a business, but I think that's a hard road to go down. I wrote a bunch of words on the tools I've gathered: http://www.smokingonabike.com/2017/01/01/hand-tools-for-a-ne...
Comment linking /2017/01/01/hand-tools-for-a-newbie-woodworker/
on “Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?”You could have used an open source client to manage your passkeys as you like, including backing them up in your own storage format. I wrote about it here: < https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-... > I was quite excited about it... until I found out that the Passkey spec authors have warned that client that it may face server-side bans because it lets you manage your own private key how you w…
Comment linking /2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-is-lying-to-you/
on “What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?”You don't need to put up with cookie banners. Enable the Cookie Notices and Annoyances filters in your uBlock Origin installation, and consider setting up a Kill Sticky bookmarklet[1]. [1] https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
Comment linking /2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/
on “I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game”Video games are a good place to start, especially for old consoles like the NES. The impacts of your experimenting are immediately visible, and they're simple devices (though the hardware "APIs" can be pretty unintuitive to a modern programmer), and there's a lot of tooling already built for hacking and reversing them. Try loading up your favorite NES game in Mesen and poke around its debugging tools with nesdev.org…
Comment linking /2021/02/28/hacking-super-monkey-ball-part-2-decompilation-with-ghidra/
on “Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM”If you haven't already, go enable the Annoyances and Cookie banner filter lists in your uBlock Origin installation. It doesn't get all of them, of course, but it does get a lot. For the remainder, the Kill Sticky bookmark is pretty good about knocking them out: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
Comment linking /2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/
on “Popover API”> I would love if the cookie modals on each site became browser-level They are, in a roundabout way. Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banners and Annoyances filters. The modal gets silently nuked in the background and you can carry on with your browsing. Since you never consented, this ought to be functionally the same as Declining the banner. The Kill Sticky bookmark works similarly, for c…
Comment linking /2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/
on “Firefox removes "do not track" feature support”Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banner filters. Fixed. Enable the Annoyances filters too, while you're in there. If you're on iOS, the Kill Sticky bookmarklet does a decent job of cleaning these up without breaking most sites: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
Comment linking /2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/
on “Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe”Installing ad & annoyance blockers is good. Another approach is to nuke "sticky" elements with a simple bookmarklet. It also removes a bunch of other useless crap from modern websites, like those lame floating headers & footers. I wrote about it here: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
Comment linking /2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/
on “Why does part of the Windows 98 Setup program look older than the rest? (2020)”I wrote a pair of articles earlier this year about hacking a GameCube game https://www.smokingonabike.com/2021/01/17/hacking-super-monk...
Comment linking /2021/01/17/hacking-super-monkey-ball-part-1-banana-bunch-values/
on “Reverse engineering software licensing from early-2000s abandonware”The government sites are the first result for both searches on Google for me. https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_1.png https://smokingonabike.com/images/upload/kagi_20250717_2.png
Comment linking /images/upload/kagi_20250717_2.png
on “How I Use Kagi”KeepassXC is a good client that lets you handle your data how you want. I wrote a pro-Passkey blog post here[1] that explains how to do your own syncing, though I later discovered Passkeys are explicitly built to support proprietary software vendor lock in and had to revoke my support. If you are concerned about being able to control your own data outside of the big tech ecosystem, I strongly recommend avoiding pass…
Comment linking /2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-is-lying-to-you/
on “The cryptography behind passkeys”Sure, https://smokingonabike.com/ I blog a couple times a year about my personal projects, mostly woodworking and lately grapevines.
Comment linking /
on “Into the Personal-Website-Verse (2019)”The passkey spec authors think websites should be able to ban clients which allow users to manage their own data[1,2]. It makes me really hesitant to adopt passkeys if my client could get banned because it's open source and lets me control my client how I want to. It appears to be more useful for vendor lock-in than anything else[3]. A shame, since it could've been a cool tech if they had built it to be resilient to…
Comment linking /2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-is-lying-to-you/
on “Things I learnt about passkeys when building passkeybot”It blows me away that none of the web browsers are trying to fix this. We eliminated popups back in the 90s/2000s, but now they're back again and no one cares. Anyway, install the Kill Sticky bookmarklet, it gets rid of all the incompetent webdev crap like popups and those stupid sticky headers/footers: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
Comment linking /2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/
on “Imgur's community was in revolt”Super cool reading your posts :) I grow five vines here in my urban backyard in Minnesota, all UMN varieties. This is their third year in the ground, and the first year I let them put out fruit. It was super fun making jelly with grapes I grew :) I haven't posted about them this year, but here's where they were last summer (year 2): https://www.smokingonabike.com/2019/06/23/minnesota-home-gar...
Comment linking /2019/06/23/minnesota-home-garden-grapes-year-two-summer-2019/
on “Proprietary Grapes Come with Draconian End User License Agreement”Install uBlock Origin and enable its Annoyances and Cookie Banner filters. This will be most effective in Firefox, but will work in other browsers as well. If you're unable to do that for some reason (e.g. iOS), check out the Kill Sticky bookmarklet, which at least lets you nuke these quickly and with consistent muscle memory. It also gets rid of those trashy sticky headers. https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20…
Comment linking /2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/
on “How the Hourglass Won”> almost all of them were alienated and confused by the decisions that the browser made and continues to make. I don't think so. I've never been alienated by it. It's a browser. It does browser things. It's fine. What decisions have confused and alienated you? People in this thread are screaming bloody murder because of a couple pixels on tab bar and a low-contrast gradient. This isn't a rational reaction to a minor…
Comment linking /2025/12/31/web-browsers-have-stopped-blocking-pop-ups/
on “The new Firefox design is here”I'm into hand tool woodworking, and for YouTube specifically, I follow The Renaissance Woodworker, Rob Cosman, and Paul Sellers. I also wrote up a short article aimed at beginners like myself that points to other kinds of resources: http://www.smokingonabike.com/2017/01/01/hand-tools-for-a-ne...
Comment linking /2017/01/01/hand-tools-for-a-newbie-woodworker/
on “Don’t Look Now, but the Great Unbundling Has Spun into Reverse”I did the work ~7 years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy. You can see the source of the level map dumper here: https://gitlab.com/mcmapper/mcmapper/-/blob/master/main.c The high-level procedure was to load up a level, visually scan the RAM contents (the NES only had 2kb of RAM) for the level layout, and confirm that that section of RAM contained the level tilemap by tweaking values and observing that something change…
Comment linking /2021/01/17/hacking-super-monkey-ball-part-1-banana-bunch-values/
on “The Cutting Room Floor”
