A Look Back at My COVID-Era Home Gym
During my teenage years, I was quite into weightlifting. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I decided to buy some equipment and build my own little home gym. Yes, this is a rather unusual article for my blog! But since I'm about to sell all this equipment, I thought it would be nice to document what I owned and preserve a little memory of that period. There are two common barbell and weight plate hole diameters: 28 mm and 50 mm. The latter is the standard used in most commercial gyms, as well as in powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting. These plates are designed to fit Olympic-style barbells, which typically weigh 20 kg and measure 2.20 meters in length. This type of equipment is generally designed to handle very heavy loads, making…
journalHow I Almost Fell for a Leboncoin Phishing Scam
Yesterday, I was uploading listings for some fitness equipment I bought during the COVID period on the French equivalent of Craigslist (not https://www.craigslist.org/area/paris lol, but leboncoin.com ), which I was using for the first time. So, 13 listings and about four hours later, I received an offer, which I accepted. And boom: in Leboncoin’s rather terrible chat interface, a very professional-looking sales notification suddenly appeared: For someone who doesn’t know how the platform works, someone who has never used it before, or who has only ever been paid in cash during an in-person sale, this can look completely legitimate. After digging a little deeper, you find out that Leboncoin has what is essentially an escrow-like wallet system. The buyer can send the money through Leboncoin, where it is temporarily held…
journalA CV, a Phone Number, and a Data Leak
The other day, I was searching for the name of a friend on Google, and his personal Curriculum Vitae appeared as the second search result, just after his LinkedIn profile. It was a plain CV. And right in the first pieces of information, his phone number, address, and personal email appeared. So I asked him if he had intentionally uploaded his CV to this website. “Absolutely not!” That is what he answered. In fact, the page where his CV was uploaded was dedicated to static resources, and there was absolutely no way to see the name of the company that had uploaded it, because the domain name shown in the URL was just that of a hosting platform. So I searched for an ID found in the URL, typed it…
journalMy Overengineered YouTube Thumbnail Generator
Following up on my YouTube channel creation from the previous article, on Mon. 25 May 2026 14:02:06 CEST, I wanted to write a program to automate the generation of my thumbnails. Since my face will be shown on my YouTube channel, i've studied YouTubers thumbnails that have their face visible, such as LowLevel. Anatomy of YouTube Thumbnails And I came to the following conclusion: The composition is simple -> arround 3 or 4 elements The Background -> minimalistic enough, just one color tone The upper body with (shoulders + face) -> The viewer sees the creator’s face before clicking, so the video feels less surprising once it starts. In theory, that can help retention. Note that we do not want the PNG of the YouTuber upper body + face beeing…
journalA Practical Linux Setup for Recording Technical Videos
On Sun May 17 21:35:37 CEST 2026, I decided it was time to start a YouTube channel to promote my articles. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/@control-room-11 I already had a (very) messy YouTube experience. I was absolutely brainwashed by the LukeSmith Wave at the time. With my Patched DWM ( larbs config for the initiated ;) ). I had just plugged a cheap webcam into USB 2.0, without tweaking any firmware-level settings to make the image look decent. In this article i will share the evolution of my setup across the ages as a practical guide so you can reproduce and understand each confs according to your needs. This article is aimed at beginner Linux users who want to build a simple but controllable video-creator setup. FFmpeg CLI - Practical…
journalclap-de-fin
Voici les liens des vidéos comme promis: PS: ce poste fais suite à ce message posté sur ma chaine: Copy Cette chaîne n’est plus active. Je me concentre désormais sur mon contenu technique anglophone ainsi que sur mes nouveaux projets. Les anciennes vidéos en français restent disponibles en archives non répertoriées ici : https://julienlargetpiet.tech/articles/clap-de-fin Merci à toutes celles et ceux qui ont regardé et soutenu cette chaîne. Si vous souhaitez me contacter, vous pouvez m’écrire à cette adresse : j.larget-piet@proton.me ♥ Support
journalJournal - April 2026
Days 19 19 First Entry, this is a test. ♥ Support
journalStatix, llama.cpp, and a Night of Autonomous Blogging
This article is about this repo: autoBlog There is a particular kind of joy in software engineering that does not come from polished products, investor slides, or framework trend cycles. It comes from taking a few simple parts, each understandable on its own, and connecting them until something unexpectedly alive emerges. That is exactly what happened here. The starting point was not "let's build an AI startup," nor "let's automate content at scale," nor even "let's use a large language model." The starting point was much simpler and much more honest: I already had Statix, my own publishing system, with its own CLI. I had full control over content publication. I had a local machine. I had curiosity. And one evening, a thought appeared that was too tempting not to…
