novos - Posts

Connect an Original Chromecast to a New Wi-Fi Network without Google Home

Unknown — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I remember when the Chromecast first came out. It truly felt like a little magical device that allowed me to put anything I wanted on the TV. It was cool and captivating. Since then, I've used that original device for all sorts of things and I still find uses for it often.

After moving recently (and with a new Wi-Fi network), I went to set up my favorite little streaming device and found that Google no longer supports the device. As such, it isn't even possible to set it up with Google's own app.

Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately), there are quite a few users out there that found the same problem. A bit of searching led me to this Reddit thread. Folks have been trying older phones, different apps, and various workarounds just to get a working device back on their network. Some things worked, some didn't. Many have given up. A shame too because the hardware still works.

A comment in that thread linked to jjdb210's guide on EMCOT which was quite helpful. They reverse-engineered the web API hosted on the device and documented the steps for configuring the Chromecast Wi-Fi without Google Home.

For convenience, I wrapped those steps into a Bash script. It gets the device's public key, finds your network, encrypts the password, and sends and saves the configuration. A little "hacking" to do something that used to be routine.

The script uses curl, jq, and openssl, and assumes you've already reset the Chromecast and connected your computer to its setup Wi-Fi. The guide covers the setup details and firmware differences; the script prompts for your network password and handles the requests from there.

I've open-sourced it on GitHub. Improvements, PRs, and input from others are always welcome. Good luck to anyone trying to do the same thing - hope this helps you. 🙂 Maybe we can keep a few more of these little devices going.

cheers -
scm

Introducing a Best-Practices Rust Workspace GitHub Template

Unknown — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

tl;dr

I've created a Rust workspace GitHub template that has best practices implementations and scaffolding with as few "opinions" as reasonable. It's intended to be near-zero effort to get up and going and is scalable.

As I get further involved with Rust development both personally and professionally - I've found I need an easy way to onboard new projects with best-practices as "batteries included". Rust (and cargo) already do an incredible job of bringing modern software practices into development and tooling. I needed a template that enforced these and has base implementations (or scaffolding) for most libraries and applications. I'll certainly be using it for my Rust projects and I hope that it's a help for you too!

Features

Only Rust- or cargo-ecosystem tooling
Robust Continuous Integration (CI)
- Fast and parallel
- Dependency auditing
  - Unused dependencies
  - Vulnerability checks
  - Licenses
- Static analysis for security and auditing
  - via zizmor
- Local development matches as much as possible
Strict workspace-wide linting configuration for safety
Automatic versioning and releasing
- Commits should adhere to Conventional Commits
- release-plz
Modern and fast testing
- nextest
- cargo-llvm-cov for coverage
Benchmarking
- criterion
GitHub templates
- CODEOWNERS
- Dependabot
- Pull request template
- Bug report template
- Feature request template
- Security policy
- Code of conduct
- Contributing guidelines
Sensible default dependencies
Project defaults
- LICENSE file

Technologies

cargo for all Rust project functions, naturally
Make as interface for project actions

Assumptions

The template uses release-plz for version control and releasing. It requires Conventional Commits for commit messages to know how to bump the version (using Semantic Versioning).

The template assumes that main will be the default git branch.

This template has been tested for local dev using macOS. Other operating systems may work or could easily be extended to include them.

Future

I'll continually be updating this template as I use it and new best practices come out. All feedback is welcome (PRs preferred) and I certainly hope you will contribute too.

cheers -
scm

Hello Universe

Unknown — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings 👽

It is time to finally launch my personal website. This project is something I've wanted for quite some time and have been on-and-off working towards in the last year. I anticipate it being a somewhat sporadically-updated collection of tech discoveries, unique procedures, or undocumented behavior; side projects; personal anecdotes; and various general musings. Depending on how things go, I may host other content here as well.

There are many like it but this one is mine.

novos

Why 'novos?' I've always liked creating new words for new concepts. 'novos' is the combination of 'nova,' as in 'supernova' or 'hypernova,' and '-os,' as in 'ethos' and 'logos.' The notion is an energetic expansion of knowledge and reason, guided by curiosity and exploration. Maybe a bit silly but representative of where I see this project going.

Onward

Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts. Surely, there will be very little traffic as this project gets started so it'd be great to hear from you. I've got a few topics in the pipeline that I'm excited to share here.

cheers -
scm