OTC CatchUp #271 Summary

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OTC CatchUps are weekly informal sessions involving project showcases and technical discussions. They are held every Saturday from 10:30 PM IST. Join in!.
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OTC CatchUp #271

Author: Harsh Kapadia

Date: 18-01-2026

Duration: 2 hrs 34 mins

Topics Discussed

Bhavesh Kukreja shared the video I tried coding with the oldest version of Python and the repository github.com/smontanaro/python-0.9.1.
Harsh Kapadia shared
- You should read Open Source code
- Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 keynote highlights
- Creating a 48GB NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU | Brother Zhang’s Repair Shop (ft. 张哥)
Kunal Singh shared
- His portfolio site
- MailGlider
  - Product that he built - 'essentially Canva for e-mail' is how he introduced it
- Meta Tags Toolkit
  - Darshan Rander shared OpenGraph in the same vein.

Projects Showcased

Darshan Rander showed us the start of his new project that aims to provide an easy and quick way for a user to navigate to their frequently visited websites by typing goto/<website_abbreviation> (e.g. goto/yt to visit YouTube) in the browser’s address bar.
- Although he has a PoC ready, he is searching for easier ways to accomplish the task. He is mainly struggling to find an easy and replicable way to run the redirection server at port 80 (so that the user doesn’t have to specify a port in the URL like goto:5000/yt and can directly use goto/yt to navigate to YouTube) without the server requiring root privileges. Darshan, Kartik, Kunal and Harsh discussed various options including using setcap to give the server binary the required capabilities, using authbind, and using a reverse proxy like Nginx or Caddy to forward requests from port 80 to the server running at a higher port.
  - Kartik Soneji shared
    
    How can I open port 80 so a non-root process can bind to it?
    
    Allow non-root process to bind to port 80 and 443?
  - Kunal Singh shared i made my own search engine (kind of)
- As an aside, the browser recognizes that goto is his server as he is running the goto server at 127.0.0.2 and has mentioned that name to IP address translation in the hosts file in his OS that is checked by the browser before sending a request to a DNS server.
Jaden Furtado showcased a big overall update to his ship simulation project. The UI is much more fleshed out with many more features that he added, including an interface that provides access to a Linux terminal that’s running on the ship and that can be used to simulate what can happen to a ship if a hacker gains access to the ship’s systems.
- Jaden’s talk at NULLCON Goa 2026: Cruise Control: The time we took control of a few dozen ships
- Vessel.js

Attendees

Bhavesh Kukreja
Darshan Rander
Harsh Kapadia
Hritik Jaiswal
Jaden Furtado
Kartik Soneji
Kunal Singh
Pranav Prasanna Dani
Pratik Thakare
Ayush
GAMILTRON
Janvi Matani
Krupal
Mohammad Kaif
Only Anime
Rishi Setpal

Meet Screenshot

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