Jonas Hietala
An Epic Start
Oh what a mistake. I woke up at 05.00 when my girlfriend woke up, she’s working early today, and...
over a year ago
Oh what a mistake. I woke up at 05.00 when my girlfriend woke up, she’s working early today, and went to the bathroom. After I was done, still pretty tired, I made a big mistake. I checked the current theme for Ludum Dare 29: Beneath the Surface and guess what? Now I wasn’t tired...
Abort Retry Fail
The History of Windows NT 3.1
A Highly Portable Future
a year ago
Willem's Blog
Six months with MCADD
It's six months since our son was born with MCADD, a good moment to reflect upon the experience of...
over a year ago
It's six months since our son was born with MCADD, a good moment to reflect upon the experience of being a parent with some thoughts and tips.
Azad's Blog
Traveling with Apple Vision Pro
The Vision Pro has quickly become an essential item that I take onto every flight. It’s a fantastic...
2 months ago
The Vision Pro has quickly become an essential item that I take onto every flight. It’s a fantastic device to travel with—Be it by train or by plane, it offers an unparalleled opportunity to selectively tune out your environment and sink into an engaging activity like watching a...
Notes on software...
AOT-compilation of Javascript with V8
tldr; I'm working on a AOT-compiled Javascript implementation called
jsc.
Many dynamically typed...
over a year ago
tldr; I'm working on a AOT-compiled Javascript implementation called
jsc.
Many dynamically typed programming languages have implementations that
compile to native binaries:
Python: Cython
Common Lisp: SBCL
Scheme: Chicken Scheme
The benefits of compiling dynamically typed...
Notes on software...
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 3. indexes
Previously in database basics:
1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
2. binary expressions...
over a year ago
Previously in database basics:
1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
2. binary expressions and WHERE filters
4. a database/sql driver
In this post, we extend gosql
to support indexes. We focus on the addition of PRIMARY
KEY constraints on table creation and some easy...
Buck on Software
Don't be foie gras
If 2016-2020 was the golden unicorn age of SaaS, 2021 nearly hurtled us into the foie gras* era.
over a year ago
If 2016-2020 was the golden unicorn age of SaaS, 2021 nearly hurtled us into the foie gras* era.
computers are bad
2023-06-02 the reinvention of owens lake
Programming note: In an effort to introduce an exciting new social aspect to
Computers Are Bad (a...
a year ago
Programming note: In an effort to introduce an exciting new social aspect to
Computers Are Bad (a functional necessity to appease early-stage investor
demands for "engagement")¸ I am launching a Matrix room for CAB readers.
You can join it! Do whatever you do to join rooms in...
Buck on Software
The Software Slog
As a newly minted high school grad I had a brief stint as a wildland firefighter.
a year ago
As a newly minted high school grad I had a brief stint as a wildland firefighter.
Style over Substance
3D-printable Raleno 104 lightbox adapter for camera film scanning
My latest creation is a 3D-printed adapter for the Raleno PLV-S104 (Raleno 104) light. The model...
over a year ago
My latest creation is a 3D-printed adapter for the Raleno PLV-S104 (Raleno 104) light. The model turns it into a lightbox that you can use for digital camera scanning of your negative film. It also contains a holder compatible with the Valoi 35mm/120 film carriers. Additionally,...
Jonas Hietala
Site restyle and update
I’m not sure how I got started but I recently read an excellent book about typography: Butterick’s...
over a year ago
I’m not sure how I got started but I recently read an excellent book about typography: Butterick’s Practical Typography. It’s free and there’s a section Typography in ten minutes if you want the important bits.
He makes a pretty good case for why it matters when he points out the...
Louwrentius
'Gzip with parallel compression support: pigz'
The speed at which files are compressed with gzip is currently almost always
determined by the speed...
over a year ago
The speed at which files are compressed with gzip is currently almost always
determined by the speed of the CPU. However, standard unix gzip is single-
threaded and only uses a single CPU (core).
However, the maintainer of the zlib library has released 'pigz' or 'pig-zee'
whichs...
Applied Cartography
Mass renaming files in fish on macOS
One of many two-liners to come as I migrate things from the old site onto Obsidian:
brew install...
a year ago
One of many two-liners to come as I migrate things from the old site onto Obsidian:
brew install rename
rename "s/.mdx/.md/" **.md
Opsbros
The past lives again!
I found a GameBoy Camera for my GBC and thought it'd be a good idea to extract the photos from eons...
over a year ago
I found a GameBoy Camera for my GBC and thought it'd be a good idea to extract the photos from eons ago and bring them to the era of the internet.
Vitalik Buterin's...
What kind of layer 3s make sense?
over a year ago
Birchtree
I’m Knee-Deep in Turkey
Another week, another fantastically fun episode of Comfort Zone! This week Niléane talked about her...
2 weeks ago
Another week, another fantastically fun episode of Comfort Zone! This week Niléane talked about her new Flight Simulator obsession, we go on a tangent about PC gaming, Chris (who says he’s an iPad guy) brings another Mac to talk about, and I had the gang look
Notes on software...
A write-ahead log is not a universal part of durability
A database does not need a write-ahead log (WAL) to achieve
durability. A database can write its...
5 months ago
A database does not need a write-ahead log (WAL) to achieve
durability. A database can write its long-term data structure durably
to disk before returning to a client. Granted, this is a bad idea! And
granted, a WAL is critical for durability by design in most
databases. But I...
Opsbros
Volumer
I've always wanted a good USB volume control, so I decided to design one.
over a year ago
I've always wanted a good USB volume control, so I decided to design one.
./techtipsy
The optimization treadmill: why I keep changing my computing setup all the time
I have a bad habit of changing my computing setups all the time. I tend to see new gear, then I...
a year ago
I have a bad habit of changing my computing setups all the time. I tend to see new gear, then I get
some new ideas, and then I obsessively think about it for weeks and months until I just buy it.
And then the cycle repeats.
I’ve had time to think about why that keeps happening...
Good Enough
TIL: Don’t forget your Web Manifest file
We’re primarily a web shop. We’re dipping our toes into mobile app development, but our collective...
a year ago
We’re primarily a web shop. We’re dipping our toes into mobile app development, but our collective expertise is in making products and services for the web. And like everyone else, our use of the web has shifted from our desktops and laptops to our phones.
As we’re creating and...
Jonas Hietala
Recent experiences with Netrunner tournaments
After a bit of a hiatus after the Winter Kit Tournament the 16th January I participated in three...
over a year ago
After a bit of a hiatus after the Winter Kit Tournament the 16th January I participated in three tournaments during February - March. After each of these tournaments I started a writeup of them but they fell off my mind a bit but consider this my break with my blogging...
Matt Blewitt
7 Databases in 7 Weeks for 2025
I’ve been running databases-as-a-service for a long time, and there are always new things to keep...
3 weeks ago
I’ve been running databases-as-a-service for a long time, and there are always new things to keep abreast of - new technologies, different ways of solving problems, not to mention all the research coming out of universities. In 2025, consider spending a week with each of these...
Arduino Blog
Vintage rotary phone becomes stylish kitchen timer
It seems like everything that happens in a kitchen requires exact timing. Whisk the batter for three...
6 months ago
It seems like everything that happens in a kitchen requires exact timing. Whisk the batter for three minutes, knead the dough for 15 minutes, bake for 30 minutes, and so on. A timer is a necessity for cooking and baking, but there is no reason you need to use your phone or a...
Notes on software...
Writing a document database from scratch in Go: Lucene-like filters and indexes
In this post we'll write a rudimentary document database from scratch
in Go. In less than 500 lines...
over a year ago
In this post we'll write a rudimentary document database from scratch
in Go. In less than 500 lines of code we'll be able to support the
following interactions, inspired by Elasticsearch:
$ curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"name": "Kevin", "age": "45"}'...
Jonas Hietala
The Arty Timeline
While working on Jonas IceCream Stand I took a screenshot every day and I thought they looked pretty...
over a year ago
While working on Jonas IceCream Stand I took a screenshot every day and I thought they looked pretty cool so here they are:
And now I’m off with New World Order and (for once) I’ve got a really really good idea!
Home on Erik...
Toxic meeting culture
I spent six years at a company that went from 50 people to 1500 and one contributing factor leading...
over a year ago
I spent six years at a company that went from 50 people to 1500 and one contributing factor leading to my departure was that I went from a “maker” to a person stuck in meetings every day.
Notes on software...
Emulating linux/AMD64 userland: interpreting an ELF binary
In this post we'll stumble toward a working emulator for a barebones C
program compiled for...
over a year ago
In this post we'll stumble toward a working emulator for a barebones C
program compiled for linux/AMD64. The approach will be slightly more
so based on observation than by following a spec; a great way
to quickly become familiar with a topic, and a bad way to...
Willem's Blog
Tablet as main computer
I have been using a tablet as my main computer for quite some time now. In this blog post I share...
over a year ago
I have been using a tablet as my main computer for quite some time now. In this blog post I share you my experience on using Surface Pro and iPad Pro to get my work done.
Jonas Hietala
Sat-E
So I entered Ludum Dare 22 this weekend as a preamble for tomorrow’s linear algebra exam. The theme...
over a year ago
So I entered Ludum Dare 22 this weekend as a preamble for tomorrow’s linear algebra exam. The theme this time around was Alone and the game I came up with is about a lonely satellite in space, kinda like Wall-E.
Sat-E
Instructions
Collect junk and other items for you to buy...
Matt Mullenweg
On with Theo / T3.gg
On Thursday, a prominent developer, YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and journalist posted a video titled...
2 months ago
On Thursday, a prominent developer, YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and journalist posted a video titled This might be the end of WordPress. It was very harsh. In that video you’ll hear him say about me, “he’s a chronic hater” (7:55), “seems like he’s been a pretty petty bastard for a...
Home on Erik...
The number of letters in the word for each number
Just for fun, I generated these graphs of the number of letters in the word for each number. I...
over a year ago
Just for fun, I generated these graphs of the number of letters in the word for each number. I really spent about 10 minutes on this (ok…possibly also another 40 minutes tweaking the plots):
More languages!
Arduino Blog
Alumnus Software joins Arduino’s System Integrators Partnership Program
We are thrilled to announce that Alumnus Software, based in India and the United States, has joined...
a month ago
We are thrilled to announce that Alumnus Software, based in India and the United States, has joined our System Integrators Partnership Program (SIPP) at the Gold level. With over 20 years of expertise in embedded software, IoT applications, and Edge AI development, Alumnus has a...
Notes on software...
On NYC, Tokyo and Seoul
I’ve lived in NYC for the past year — moved here after years in Philly
and after growing up in a...
over a year ago
I’ve lived in NYC for the past year — moved here after years in Philly
and after growing up in a rural community a few hours west of
there. My wife is South Korean and last week concluded my second trip
to the suburbs of Seoul to visit her family. We finished up that trip
with a...
Willem's Blog
Improve your sleep by blocking light
I have been wearing a sleep mask in bed, blocking all light. It has been amazing for my sleep's...
over a year ago
I have been wearing a sleep mask in bed, blocking all light. It has been amazing for my sleep's quality. Read along for my findings!
Louwrentius
Script that shows ETA of RAID rebuild / reshape
I made a small script that converts the output of cat /proc/mdstat to an
actual date and time...
over a year ago
I made a small script that converts the output of cat /proc/mdstat to an
actual date and time telling you when the RAID rebuild / reshape is finished.
This is the link to the correct version of the script.
Example:
debian:~# ./raid-rebuild-eta.sh
Estimated time of finishing...
Jonas Hietala
First impressions of Pollen
After having consumed Practical Typography I took a look at the library he wrote to create books for...
over a year ago
After having consumed Practical Typography I took a look at the library he wrote to create books for the web called Pollen written in Racket. I’ve only used it a little but I feel I can give my first impressions of it.
What I like
The first thing I really like is Pollen enables...
Gwern.net Newsletter
November newsletter
November 2020 gwern.net newsletter with links on DL and genomics scaling, dark mode rewrite, 1...
over a year ago
November 2020 gwern.net newsletter with links on DL and genomics scaling, dark mode rewrite, 1 essay, and 1 opera review ('The Ring' cycle).
Old Vintage...
The Living Computers Museum finally isn't
First off, apologies for a quiet month as I've been dealing with family matters which hopefully are...
5 months ago
First off, apologies for a quiet month as I've been dealing with family matters which hopefully are now on a better footing (more articles are in the hopper). Unfortunately, the same apparently can't be said for the once-great Living Computers Museum + Labs in Seattle,...
Louwrentius
Wake On Lan not working with realtek r8168 card
After messing around with different kernels on Debian Lenny, I noticed that my
system did no longer...
over a year ago
After messing around with different kernels on Debian Lenny, I noticed that my
system did no longer respond to WOL packets. The system is using an on-board
Realtek R8168 chip which supports wake on lan.
After searching and reading i found the problem. The system is using an...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Having a safe CEX: proof of solvency and beyond
over a year ago
Home on Erik...
Leaving Spotify
Febrary 6 was my last day at Spotify. In total I spent more than six years at Spotify and it was an...
over a year ago
Febrary 6 was my last day at Spotify. In total I spent more than six years at Spotify and it was an amazing experience.
I joined Spotify in Stockholm in 2008, mainly because a bunch of friends from programming competitions had joined already.
Applied Cartography
You should build this:
A prior iteration of this site had a page called "Project ideas" that listed a bunch of things that...
2 months ago
A prior iteration of this site had a page called "Project ideas" that listed a bunch of things that I'd like to build. This was a good idea and useful in its own right (I got a few people to build companies and projects based on them, and it was a useful avenue by which folks...
Computer Ads from...
Creative Computer Publishes Interview with the Guy Behind the Death Star Trench Run (1978)
An Interview With Star Wars Animator Larry Cuba
8 months ago
An Interview With Star Wars Animator Larry Cuba
Nabeel S. Qureshi
Films + Books, Q1 2023
What I watched and read
a year ago
Jonas Hietala
An Elixir based payment processor for the Coinparty hackathon
Bitcoin Unlimited is hosting a Bitcoin Cash hackathon this December and it seemed like a good...
over a year ago
Bitcoin Unlimited is hosting a Bitcoin Cash hackathon this December and it seemed like a good opportunity for me to explore how to program against Bitcoin Cash, and it gives me an excuse to build something real with Phoenix and Elixir. (While an event like this might help combat...
Home on Erik...
MLConf 2014
Just spent a day at MLConf where I was talking about how we do music recommendations. There was a...
over a year ago
Just spent a day at MLConf where I was talking about how we do music recommendations. There was a whole range of great speakers (actually almost 2/3 women which was pretty cool in itself).
Here are my slides:
Louwrentius
Migrated this blog from blogger.com to blogofile
Until now, I was hosting my blog on Google's blogger. I switched to using Blogofile. I wanted to...
over a year ago
Until now, I was hosting my blog on Google's blogger. I switched to using Blogofile. I wanted to have more control over my content and the layout.
I had many issues with the blogger blog post editor, resulting in ugly posts with too much white space, strange fonts and fonts...
Posts on Made of...
New reptyr feature: TTY-stealing
Ever since I wrote reptyr, I’ve been frustrated by a number of issues in reptyr that I fundamentally...
over a year ago
Ever since I wrote reptyr, I’ve been frustrated by a number of issues in reptyr that I fundamentally didn’t know how to solve within the reptyr model. Most annoyingly, reptyr fundamentally only worked on single processes, and could not attach processes with children, making it...
Electronics etc…
Remote Controlling an HP 1670G Logic Analyzer with a Linux PC X Server
Introduction
Reserving a fixed IP address for the logic analyzer
Assign the chosen IP address to the...
12 months ago
Introduction
Reserving a fixed IP address for the logic analyzer
Assign the chosen IP address to the logic analyzer
Allow the logic analyzer to access your Ubuntu X server
Configure the X-window Settings on the logic analyzer
Install and declare the HP logic analyzer font...
Yazin Alirhayim
Tracking where a WhatsApp user came from
At Amal, we have an AI chat bot that works over WhatsApp — allowing our customers to speak to their...
over a year ago
At Amal, we have an AI chat bot that works over WhatsApp — allowing our customers to speak to their bank account, asking questions like “What’s my balance” and “How much have I spent on Uber’s this month?”.
A problem we faced really early on when connecting to WhatsApp was that...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Base Layers And Functionality Escape Velocity
over a year ago
Notes on software...
Studying foreign languages with inbox zero
The only time I've been able to seriously, rapidly improve my ability
to speak a foreign language...
over a year ago
The only time I've been able to seriously, rapidly improve my ability
to speak a foreign language was through intensive language courses in
college. I was forced to actively speak, read, and write Chinese for
6-8 hours a week (1-2 hours every day). Then study another 5-10 hours
a...
GitButler
The New Era of Town Hall Chat
We're moving from Slack to Discord so we can involve our community more. Here's how we did it and...
3 months ago
We're moving from Slack to Discord so we can involve our community more. Here's how we did it and more importantly, why.
Louwrentius
Getting the Sitecom AC600 Wi-Fi adapter running on Linux
TL;DR Yes it works with some modifications of the driver source.
A USB Wi-Fi adapter I used with a...
over a year ago
TL;DR Yes it works with some modifications of the driver source.
A USB Wi-Fi adapter I used with a Raspberry Pi broke as I dropped it on the floor, so I had to replace it. I just went to a local shop and bought the Sitecom AC600 adapter as that's what they had available (with...
Willem's Blog
Around town in an electric car
For one week I drove the electric Smart EQ fortwo in and around town. I found out what it's like to...
over a year ago
For one week I drove the electric Smart EQ fortwo in and around town. I found out what it's like to drive electrically: fun!
Notes on software...
A Programmer-Friendly I/O Abstraction Over io_uring and kqueue
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here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Jonas Hietala
Minecraft Server Hosting
I play the phenomena that is Minecraft on and off. Sometimes the laid back building or the exploring...
over a year ago
I play the phenomena that is Minecraft on and off. Sometimes the laid back building or the exploring is just what I need. Sometimes I can challange myself to build cool complex stuff and I’m even an avid follower of Doc’M and Etho and the other mindcrackers over at the youtube....
Notes on software...
Running SQL Server in a container on Github Actions
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here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Arduino Blog
Explore e-paper technology with Nano Matter and the new EPDK-Matter from Pervasive Displays
We’re excited to share that Pervasive Displays has just launched the E-Paper Development Kit for...
a week ago
We’re excited to share that Pervasive Displays has just launched the E-Paper Development Kit for Matter! This groundbreaking, self-contained kit is designed to revolutionize how smart home devices use e-paper displays, enhancing user experience while driving down energy...
Louwrentius
Neato XV-15 / XV-11 Robotic Vacuum cleaner review
Update 18 February 2012
There is one problem. When the robot is not connected to the charger, the...
over a year ago
Update 18 February 2012
There is one problem. When the robot is not connected to the charger, the batteries are depleted very fast. Even if the batteries are not entirely depleted and the robot can still display the menu, the clock loses it's time. Every time the robot gets a too...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Binius: highly efficient proofs over binary fields
7 months ago
Push to Prod
Best Questions and Answers to the “Terrifying Netflix Concurrency Bug” Post
Why couldn't we roll back? Weren't we concerned about costs? Why is operating Netflix so...
3 weeks ago
Why couldn't we roll back? Weren't we concerned about costs? Why is operating Netflix so complicated? Plus many others.
Notes on software...
Languages you can run in the browser, part 1: Python, JavaScript, SQLite
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here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Abort Retry Fail
The History of Red Hat
The Billion Dollar Open Source Company
a year ago
The Billion Dollar Open Source Company
Applied Cartography
Shipping is capturing value
This great essay from Sean Goedecke went viral two weeks ago, drawing fury and fervor alike for a...
4 weeks ago
This great essay from Sean Goedecke went viral two weeks ago, drawing fury and fervor alike for a Moral Mazes-esque analysis of how engineers at large companies should think about shipping:
Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is...
Computer Ads from...
Vote for the Topic of the February 2024 Plus Post
If you are a paid subscriber, voting is open for one week
10 months ago
If you are a paid subscriber, voting is open for one week
Engineers Need Art
Jigsaw Puzzle
Those of us who fiddled while Apple Computer burned. Well, actually some of us put together a big...
over a year ago
Those of us who fiddled while Apple Computer burned. Well, actually some of us put together a big jigsaw puzzle.
Odds and Ends of...
Odds and Ends #45: Deliverism, blasphemy and selfies from space
Plus the best Minecraft-themed political deepfake you'll see today
2 weeks ago
Plus the best Minecraft-themed political deepfake you'll see today
Matt Blewitt
A Love Letter to Giant Robots
Ah, giant robots. I grew up thinking they are the coolest things ever, and I still do. My first...
6 months ago
Ah, giant robots. I grew up thinking they are the coolest things ever, and I still do. My first exposure to them was probably through 1994’s BattleTech animated series, where Adam Steiner piloted an AXM-2N Axman, in its frankly ridiculous neon green and purple paint job. And from...
Engineers Need Art
Op-Amp Helper PCB
A PCB for breadboards to make working with op-amps easier.
a year ago
A PCB for breadboards to make working with op-amps easier.
somenice
Painting of Russet Lake
Summer in Garibaldi Provincial Park, British Columbia, is a breathtaking experience, where the...
3 months ago
Summer in Garibaldi Provincial Park, British Columbia, is a breathtaking experience, where the natural world is alive with vibrant colours and serene beauty. One of the most stunning scenes unfolds at Russet Lake, where the iconic Fissile Mountain is mirrored perfectly in the...
Matt Blewitt
Thoughts on User Safety
We need to move beyond mere security and towards safety for our customers and our users. This is how...
over a year ago
We need to move beyond mere security and towards safety for our customers and our users. This is how we can do that.
Louwrentius
Building a RAID 6 array of mixed drives
To be honest, 4 TB of storage isn't really necessary for home usage.
However, I like to collect...
over a year ago
To be honest, 4 TB of storage isn't really necessary for home usage.
However, I like to collect movies in full DVD or HD quality and so I need some
storage.
I decided to build myself a NAS box based on Debian Etch. Samba is used to
allow clients to access the data. The machine...
Arduino Blog
Can remote co-presence keep distant human connections alive?
The pandemic made a lot of things obvious, not the least of which is that humans need social...
5 months ago
The pandemic made a lot of things obvious, not the least of which is that humans need social interaction to maintain good mental health. Sadly, many of us spend our lives physically separated from our loved ones by great distances or inopportune circumstances. That’s why a team...
computers are bad
2023-10-22 cooler screens
Audible even over the squeal of an HVAC blower with a suffering belt, the whine
of small, high...
a year ago
Audible even over the squeal of an HVAC blower with a suffering belt, the whine
of small, high velocity fans pervades the grocery side of this Walgreens. Were
they always this loud? I'm not sure; some of the fans sound distinctly
unhealthy. Still, it's a familiar kind of noise to...
./techtipsy
Stupid project ideas: the War Machine
LinusTechTips has some pretty great videos about building
insane PC and server setups, such...
over a year ago
LinusTechTips has some pretty great videos about building
insane PC and server setups, such as:
unboxing and deploying petabytes of storage
7 gamers, 1 CPU
building sleeper PC-s
testing sketchy CPU-s
opening up a 100TB SSD
I have the ideas, but not the budget of LinusTechTips, so...
Odds and Ends of...
Odds and Ends #47: I think this YouTube video just changed my life
Plus vertical farming, the Russia/EU border, and more on why the Lobby is bad.
a week ago
Plus vertical farming, the Russia/EU border, and more on why the Lobby is bad.
./techtipsy
How to fix ZFS pool not importing at boot
Issue description
You are running a Linux-based machine with an install of ZFS on Linux. Everything...
over a year ago
Issue description
You are running a Linux-based machine with an install of ZFS on Linux. Everything seems to work correctly, but
after restarting your machine, the ZFS pool is not visible. You can still import your pool manually using
zpool import poolname or zpool import -a.
In...
watchTowr Labs -...
Visionaries Have Democratised Remote Network Access - Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops...
Well, we’re back again, with yet another fresh-off-the-press bug chain (and associated Interactive...
a month ago
Well, we’re back again, with yet another fresh-off-the-press bug chain (and associated Interactive Artifact Generator). This time, it’s in Citrix’s “Virtual Apps and Desktops” offering.
This is a tech stack that enables end-users (and likely, your friendly neighbourhood...
Old Vintage...
The Hall SC-VGA-2 video processor, the Atari ST and NeXTSTEP: more tales of the unscreenshotable
A periodic fascination on this blog is figuring out better ways to get better screenshots of our...
3 weeks ago
A periodic fascination on this blog is figuring out better ways to get better screenshots of our classic systems, which often hail from the Wild Wild West/East in terms of video standards (read all entries in this series). Naturally the best way is a bitwise direct grab of the...
Abort Retry Fail
The Birth of Windows Gaming
Software is a fluid that expands to fill its container
a year ago
Software is a fluid that expands to fill its container
detreville
But why "detreville"?
(But why not?)
a year ago
Arduino Blog
Why is STEAM education important for kids? 6 activity tips
School’s out for summer – at least for most of us. While the majority of children (and teachers!)...
5 months ago
School’s out for summer – at least for most of us. While the majority of children (and teachers!) will probably be breathing a huge sigh of relief, parents face a new challenge: how to keep kids engaged during the long break. Of course, downtime is important, but there are also...
Applied Cartography
Gosling’s Old Rum
Virginia has draconian liquor laws, which means I have to get interesting bottles shipped from...
10 months ago
Virginia has draconian liquor laws, which means I have to get interesting bottles shipped from [REDACTED], a site on which I am very prone to judging a book by its cover; every month I'll end up purchasing a bottle of something purely because it looks interesting and I can...
Computer Ads from...
The Grand Stand
Joystick Stabilizer Support & Score Enhancer
a month ago
Joystick Stabilizer Support & Score Enhancer
Lighthouse Blog
How to manage content subscriptions
6 months ago
Willem's Blog
Snake '97 High Scores
Happily accepting the invitation to attend an exhibition of Snake 97 art works in Antwerp. This was...
over a year ago
Happily accepting the invitation to attend an exhibition of Snake 97 art works in Antwerp. This was totally WOW!
computers are bad
2023-04-10 solving problems with chatgpt
One of the foundational goals of computer technology, at least as understood by
popular culture, is...
a year ago
One of the foundational goals of computer technology, at least as understood by
popular culture, is to automate away our jobs. When your job is (put simply) to
get computers to work correctly, there's sort of an irony to this view of
things. Still, just within the span of my...
Neil Madden
Entity authentication with a KEM
In cryptography, the process of authenticating a user (or app/service) is known as entity...
a year ago
In cryptography, the process of authenticating a user (or app/service) is known as entity authentication or identification (to distinguish it from message authentication or data origin authentication). There are lots of ways to do this. In this post I’m going to talk about...
Home on Erik...
Bagging as a regularizer
One thing I encountered today was a trick using bagging as a way to go beyond a point estimate and...
over a year ago
One thing I encountered today was a trick using bagging as a way to go beyond a point estimate and get an approximation for the full distribution. This can then be used to penalize predictions with larger uncertainty, which helps reducing false positives.
Louwrentius
Mounting a file system or partition from a disk image
You cannot just make a disk copy with dd and then just mount it as a regular
disk. You must know...
over a year ago
You cannot just make a disk copy with dd and then just mount it as a regular
disk. You must know where the partition starts on the disk. So first, you need
to get the partition table with sfdisk:
sfdisk -l -uS image_file.dd
The output is something like:
Disk...
Jonas Hietala
Exploring the Gleam FFI
My brain is a curious thing.
I’m on a business trip right now and I’ve set aside time to finish some...
11 months ago
My brain is a curious thing.
I’m on a business trip right now and I’ve set aside time to finish some important todos I want and need to get done.
But instead of focusing on them, I started playing around with Gleam—a young and interesting programming language.
My (current)...
Electronics etc…
Increasing Frequency Counter Precision with Linear Regression
MathJax.Hub.Config({
jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"],
tex2jax: {
inlineMath: [...
a year ago
MathJax.Hub.Config({
jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"],
tex2jax: {
inlineMath: [ ['$', '$'], ["\\(", "\\)"] ],
displayMath: [ ['$$', '$$'], ["\\[", "\\]"] ],
processEscapes: true,
skipTags: ['script', 'noscript', 'style', 'textarea', 'pre',...
Arduino Blog
Patrol the pool with this Arduino Nano-powered DIY RC submarine
There is something inherently intriguing about submarines that doesn’t seem to apply to other...
4 months ago
There is something inherently intriguing about submarines that doesn’t seem to apply to other vehicles. Maybe that reflects our natural fears and phobias, or maybe it is a result of our curiosity about the mysterious depths. Maybe it is simply that most of us will never get the...
Home on Erik...
Ratio metrics
We run a ton of A/B tests at Spotify and we look at a ton of metrics. Defining metrics is a little...
over a year ago
We run a ton of A/B tests at Spotify and we look at a ton of metrics. Defining metrics is a little bit of an art form. Ideally you want to define success metrics before you run a test to avoid cherry picking metrics.
Willem's Blog
Optimising images for the web and performance
Make your website faster by optimising the images. This posts explains how you can do this.
over a year ago
Make your website faster by optimising the images. This posts explains how you can do this.
Matt Blewitt
Tools for a Culture of Writing
One of the hardest things we do, as humans, is try and communicate what is going on in our minds to...
over a year ago
One of the hardest things we do, as humans, is try and communicate what is going on in our minds to each other. With significant room for misunderstanding, biases, assumptions and cultural differences, communicating with other engineers (or to stakeholders) appears fraught....
Louwrentius
Secure caching DNS server on Linux with DJBDNS
The most commonly used DNS server software is ISC BIND, the "Berkeley Internet
Name Daemon"....
over a year ago
The most commonly used DNS server software is ISC BIND, the "Berkeley Internet
Name Daemon". However, this software has a bad security track record and is in
my opinion a pain to configure.
Mr. D.J. Bernstein developed "djbdns", which comes with a guarantee: if anyone
finds a...
watchTowr Labs -...
Pots and Pans, AKA an SSLVPN - Palo Alto PAN-OS CVE-2024-0012 and CVE-2024-9474
It'll be no surprise that 2024, 2023, 2022, and every other year of humanities' existence has been...
a month ago
It'll be no surprise that 2024, 2023, 2022, and every other year of humanities' existence has been tough for SSLVPN appliances.
Anyhow, there are new vulnerabilities (well, two of them) that are being exploited in the Palo Alto Networks firewall and SSLVPN offering, and as ever,...
Willem's Blog
Collecting health data with Biostrap
Wearing a clinical-grade PPG sensor for a month to collect advanced biometrics from my wrist.
over a year ago
Wearing a clinical-grade PPG sensor for a month to collect advanced biometrics from my wrist.
Arduino Blog
How makers can use AR and VR
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are both currently experiencing a meteoric rise in...
6 months ago
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are both currently experiencing a meteoric rise in popularity, with the combined market expected to reach $77 billion by 2025, from just $15.3 billion in 2020. For makers, AR and VR represent exciting opportunities to build new...
Louwrentius
Distributed Parallel Processing Shell Script (PPSS) released
I'd like to announce the release of the distributed version of the Parallel
Processing Shell Script...
over a year ago
I'd like to announce the release of the distributed version of the Parallel
Processing Shell Script (PPSS). PPSS is a bash script that allows you to
run commands in parallel. It is written to make use of current multi-core
CPUs.
The new distributed version of PPSS allows you to...
Arduino Blog
This DIY guitar transmitter sends digital audio to the amp
When on stage, most guitarists will simply run a long cable from their guitar to the amp or mixer....
4 months ago
When on stage, most guitarists will simply run a long cable from their guitar to the amp or mixer. But that cable can become tangled or get in the way, which is a problem for some of the more animated musicians out there. Wireless transmitters exist for them to express themselves...
Posts on Made of...
A Brief Introduction to termios
If you’re a regular user of the terminal on a UNIX system, there are probably a large number of...
over a year ago
If you’re a regular user of the terminal on a UNIX system, there are probably a large number of behaviors you take mostly for granted without really thinking about them. If you press ^C or ^Z it kills or stops the foreground program – unless it’s something like emacs or vim, in...
watchTowr Labs -...
Auth. Bypass In (Un)Limited Scenarios - Progress MOVEit Transfer (CVE-2024-5806)
In the early hours of a day in a month in 2024, watchTowr Labs was sent a chat log:
13:37 -!-...
5 months ago
In the early hours of a day in a month in 2024, watchTowr Labs was sent a chat log:
13:37 -!- dav1d_bl41ne [def_not_phalanx@kernel.org] has joined #!hack (irc.efnet.nl)
13:37 -!- dav1d_bl41ne changed the topic of #!hack to: mag1c sh0w
Home on Erik...
Missing the point about microservices: it's about testing and deploying independently
Ok, so I have to first preface this whole blog post by a few things:
I really struggle with the...
over a year ago
Ok, so I have to first preface this whole blog post by a few things:
I really struggle with the term microservices. I can't put my finger on exactly why. Maybe because the term is hopelessly ill-defined, maybe because it's gotten picked up by the hype train.
Jonas Hietala
Let's create a Tree-sitter grammar
One of my favorite features in Neovim is the Tree-sitter integration.
It allows for fast syntax...
9 months ago
One of my favorite features in Neovim is the Tree-sitter integration.
It allows for fast syntax highlighting that works well even in an error state (often the case when you’re editing code), and it has additional semantics (you can differentiate between function parameters and...
Jonas Hietala
Geekhack Toxic
I came back to Linköping yesterday and I had a package waiting for me to pick it up. What could it...
over a year ago
I came back to Linköping yesterday and I had a package waiting for me to pick it up. What could it be?
With a crummy mobile phone photo I give you my TOXIC keycaps mounted on my trusty old das keyboard:
Woooo
If only my GH60 could arrive some time this decade…
Arduino Blog
Assess your aquarium’s health with an AI-enabled ultrasonic sensor
Below the surface of any body of water, harmful amounts of toxic gases and contaminates can...
7 months ago
Below the surface of any body of water, harmful amounts of toxic gases and contaminates can accumulate, which leads to a loss in fish and plant populations if not fixed quickly. But because most water testing, especially in aquariums, is done primarily on the surface, vital...
Jonas Hietala
Where's Teddy?
So I did this course Game Design and what’s a course on Game Design without a game? Well, here it...
over a year ago
So I did this course Game Design and what’s a course on Game Design without a game? Well, here it is. Made in about seven days (more likely eight) and I thought it became quite cool.
Where’s Teddy?
How to Play
Your mission is to find teddy and his teddybear friends. The...
axio.ms
MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5
A microcontroller Macintosh
This all started from a conversation about the RP2040 MCU, and building...
6 months ago
A microcontroller Macintosh
This all started from a conversation about the RP2040 MCU, and building a simple desktop/GUI for it. I’d made a comment along the lines of “or, just run some old OS”, and it got me thinking about the original Macintosh.
The original Macintosh was...
Home on Erik...
Calculating cosine similarities using dimensionality reduction
This was posted on the Twitter Engineering blog a few days ago: Dimension Independent Similarity...
over a year ago
This was posted on the Twitter Engineering blog a few days ago: Dimension Independent Similarity Computation (DISCO)
I just glanced at the paper, and there's some cool stuff going on from a theoretical perspective. What I'm curious about is why they didn't decide to use...
Arduino Blog
Meet Real Robot One V2: A mini DIY industrial robot arm
Started in 2022 as an exploration of what’s possible in the field of DIY robotics, Pavel Surynek’s...
5 months ago
Started in 2022 as an exploration of what’s possible in the field of DIY robotics, Pavel Surynek’s Real Robot One (RR1) project is a fully-featured 6+1-axis robot arm based on 3D-printed parts and widely available electronics. The initial release was constructed with PETG...
Matt Mullenweg
UH Magazine, Revisiting My Alma Mater
My father attended University of Houston, and it’s where I went to college to study political...
a week ago
My father attended University of Houston, and it’s where I went to college to study political science, I started WordPress when there, and then dropped out after two years to move to San Franisco. It was fun seeing UH Magazine feature an article about my journey from a University...
Arduino Blog
RIoT Secure joins Arduino’s SIPP as Gold Partner
We are excited to announce that RIoT Secure has joined Arduino’s System Integrators Partnership...
6 months ago
We are excited to announce that RIoT Secure has joined Arduino’s System Integrators Partnership Program at the Gold level. Founded in 2017 in Stockholm, Sweden, RIoT Secure is at the forefront of IoT security, especially in regards to resource-constrained microcontrollers,...
Matt Blewitt
Lua: The Little Language That Could
Lua is probably my favourite “little language” - a language designed to have low cognitive load, and...
a year ago
Lua is probably my favourite “little language” - a language designed to have low cognitive load, and be easy to learn and use. It’s embedded in a lot of software, such as Redis, NGINX via OpenResty and Wireshark. It’s also used as a scripting language in games such as World of...
Bryan Braun - Blog
The flood of AI website builders
There are so many of them.
instead of markdown to enable lazy-loading -->
How good...
7 months ago
There are so many of them.
instead of markdown to enable lazy-loading -->
How good are these site builders? I don’t know.
Are you worried about job security? I have two thoughts…
1. We’ve seen this before
Wordpress, Squarespace, Shopify, Webflow… all these tools...
Posts on Made of...
Software Engineers should keep lab notebooks
Software engineers, as a rule, suck at writing things down. Part of this is training – unlike...
over a year ago
Software engineers, as a rule, suck at writing things down. Part of this is training – unlike chemists and biologists who are trailed to obsessively document everything they do in their lab notebooks, computer scientists are taught to document the end results of their work, but...
computers are bad
2024-09-08 private lines
I have been meaning, for some time, to write about common carrier switching
arrangements (CCSAs)....
3 months ago
I have been meaning, for some time, to write about common carrier switching
arrangements (CCSAs). These could be considered an early form of products like
"virtual private ethernet:" a private telephone network that was served by the
same switching machines that handled the...
Home on Erik...
Optimizing things: everything is a proxy for a proxy for a proxy
Say you build a machine learning model, like a movie recommender system. You need to optimize for...
over a year ago
Say you build a machine learning model, like a movie recommender system. You need to optimize for something. You have 1-5 stars as ratings so let's optimize for mean squared error. Great.
Then let's say you build a new model.
Home on Erik...
In defense of false positives (why you can't fail with A/B tests)
Many years ago, I used to think that A/B tests were foolproof and all you need to do is compare the...
over a year ago
Many years ago, I used to think that A/B tests were foolproof and all you need to do is compare the metrics for the two groups. The group with the highest conversion rate wins, right?
./techtipsy
What changing the CPU on a laptop looks like
This post illustrates something that is not common on modern laptops:
changing the...
over a year ago
This post illustrates something that is not common on modern laptops:
changing the CPU.
Background
One of the modifications that you can do to a ThinkPad T430 laptop is changing
the CPU to a more powerful quad core model. That’s exactly what I did back in 2017,
but due to the...
Jonas Hietala
Autumn 2016 Goals Retrospective
Earlier this year I set out some goals I wanted to accomplish this autumn. I accomplished a few...
over a year ago
Earlier this year I set out some goals I wanted to accomplish this autumn. I accomplished a few things and I failed others.
Exercise and Health
Eat more strict LCHF for 1 month ok
Train BJJ or MMA for 1 month ok
2 months of lifting at the gym ok
Powerlifting
100 kg deadlift 5x5...
Good Enough
Good Enough Marketing: The Preparation
We have a couple of exciting projects—Guestbook! Yay.Boo!—that we want to share with the world. But...
a year ago
We have a couple of exciting projects—Guestbook! Yay.Boo!—that we want to share with the world. But that’s a difficult task for us because, honestly, we’re terrible not good at self-promotion. We’d rather spend time making things than talking about the things we’ve made.
We’d...
Vitalik Buterin's...
STARKs, Part I: Proofs with Polynomials
over a year ago
Jonas Hietala
Ludum Dare 20 Timelapse
So this time I managed to compose a timelapse of my weekend and the making of My Minions. Sadly I...
over a year ago
So this time I managed to compose a timelapse of my weekend and the making of My Minions. Sadly I lost the first few hours as I forgot to turn it on…
Anyway here’s the result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABVPlRaA5iI
Home on Erik...
Pareto efficency
Pareto efficiency is a useful concept I like to think about. It often comes up when you compare...
over a year ago
Pareto efficiency is a useful concept I like to think about. It often comes up when you compare items on multiple dimensions. Say you want to buy a new TV. To simplify it let's assume you only care about two factors: price and quality.
Home on Erik...
Lessons from content marketing myself (aka blogging) for five years
I started writing this blog in late 2012, partly because I felt like it would help me improve my...
over a year ago
I started writing this blog in late 2012, partly because I felt like it would help me improve my English and my writing skills, partly because I kept having a lot of random ideas in my head and I wanted to write them down somewhere.
Lighthouse Blog
Rules improvement: filter based on content
a week ago
computers are bad
2024-10-19 land art and isolation
Prescript: I originally started writing this with the intent to send it out to
my supporter's...
2 months ago
Prescript: I originally started writing this with the intent to send it out to
my supporter's newsletter, EYES ONLY, but it
got to be long and took basically all day so I feel like it deserves wider
circulation. You will have to tolerate that it begins in the more
conversational...
Good Enough
Lettini is Good Enough
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know...
a year ago
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re starting a new Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time, starting with our resident designer…
Who the hell do you think you are?
👋 Hello, I’m...
GitButler
The Birth of THE MERGE
Sitting at lunch one day, the GitButler team were having our usual conversations of how awesome our...
7 months ago
Sitting at lunch one day, the GitButler team were having our usual conversations of how awesome our community is, product feature ideas, and how much Kiril loves food. As we shifted toward the topic of conferences, the idea of hosting our own event emerged. Wouldn’t it be fun
Notes on software...
1 million page views
I was delighted to notice this morning that this site has recently
passed 1M page views. And since...
3 weeks ago
I was delighted to notice this morning that this site has recently
passed 1M page views. And since Murat
wrote
about his 1M page view accomplishment at the time, I felt compelled to
now too.
I started regularly blogging in 2018. For some reason I decided to
write a blog post...
Azad's Blog
Simulating + Streaming a 4k, 90hz, ultrawide, HDR PC monitor to Apple Vision Pro
VR headsets can be pretty awesome at simulating monitors of any size and shape. Most VR headsets are...
3 months ago
VR headsets can be pretty awesome at simulating monitors of any size and shape. Most VR headsets are also capable of outputting at a high refresh rate (60hz, 90hz, 120hz, or even 144hz). Some headsets (like Apple Vision Pro) can also output in HDR! The beauty of it all is that in...
Notes on software...
Benchmarking esbuild, swc, tsc, and babel for React/JSX projects
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Home on Erik...
Snakebite
Just promoting Spotify stuff here: check out the Snakebite repo on Github, written by Wouter de Bie....
over a year ago
Just promoting Spotify stuff here: check out the Snakebite repo on Github, written by Wouter de Bie. It's a super fast tool to access HDFS over CLI/Python, by accessing the namenode directly over sockets/protobuf.
Spotify's developer blog features a nice blog post outlining what...
Applied Cartography
The taste of beer
Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.
There’s a...
6 months ago
Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.
There’s a relatively famous line from Bezos, circulated first at YC in ’08 and then more recently by the folks at Acquired (a great pod!):
Jeff uses this analogy for AWS. He talks about...
Construction Physics
How China Is Like the 19th Century U.S.
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly...
a month ago
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,...
Old Vintage...
Programming the Convergent WorkSlate's spreadsheet microcassette future
In this particular future, we will all use handheld spreadsheets stored on microcassettes, talking...
3 months ago
In this particular future, we will all use handheld spreadsheets stored on microcassettes, talking to each other via speakerphone, and probably listening to Devo and New Order a lot. (Though that part isn't too different from my actual present.)
a computer whose manufacturer...
./techtipsy
ThinkPad T40: it can still run modern Linux, for now
I recently busted out my old ThinkPad T40, the last of the OG IBM ThinkPads.
I picked it up some...
7 months ago
I recently busted out my old ThinkPad T40, the last of the OG IBM ThinkPads.
I picked it up some time around my university days because I liked collecting
ThinkPads at the time, and it was a nice complement to my existing ThinkPad T60
and T430.
The battery is dead, but everything...
Applied Cartography
Stripe Sessions 2024
Stripe held the keynote for Sessions, their annual WWDC/re:invent-esque conference, this morning. I...
8 months ago
Stripe held the keynote for Sessions, their annual WWDC/re:invent-esque conference, this morning. I wanted to jot down some thoughts while they’re still fresh. (I think the changelog is the best way to poke around both the changes I’m writing about and the ones that I...
Good Enough
Beware of Free Software
Beware of free pizza
If I want a slice of pizza, I don't expect it to be free. In fact, if you try...
a year ago
Beware of free pizza
If I want a slice of pizza, I don't expect it to be free. In fact, if you try to offer me a slice of free pizza, I'd suspect there's something wrong with it.
And ever since my kids can understand me, I've taught them to be careful of free stuff. Nothing is...
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Learning incident response with problem sets
It’s hard to teach good incident response. A good understanding of how the system runs in production...
over a year ago
It’s hard to teach good incident response. A good understanding of how the system runs in production is essential, but how do you build that…
Style over Substance
Buienalarm / Buienradar Apple Watch complication using Home Assistant
Living in the Netherlands, one of the things I really miss on my Apple Watch is a Buienradar...
over a year ago
Living in the Netherlands, one of the things I really miss on my Apple Watch is a Buienradar complication. Buienradar, Dutch for rain radar, is a popular site here that uses weather radar images to predict if it’s going to rain in the next few hours. For many people living here,...
Notes on software...
Favorite compiler and interpreter resources
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Matt Blewitt
Point and Call
It’s 2AM. You’re paged to respond to a failing set of components that you are the Subject Matter...
over a year ago
It’s 2AM. You’re paged to respond to a failing set of components that you are the Subject Matter Expert (SME) for. Sleepy, you load up the playbook for when the SplineReticulatorBlocked alert has gone off, and start executing. The Incident Commander (IC) is vaguely aware of what...
Willem's Blog
Rolex DateJust 36
Celebrating a major milestone, I treated myself to a Rolex DateJust 36. Want to know what it's like?...
over a year ago
Celebrating a major milestone, I treated myself to a Rolex DateJust 36. Want to know what it's like? Keep reading!
Jonas Hietala
Language spec in code blocks
Even though I just recently restyled the blog and wasn’t going to touch it, there was one thing I...
a year ago
Even though I just recently restyled the blog and wasn’t going to touch it, there was one thing I wanted to add, but it felt a little bothersome so I skipped it.
It was to display the highlighted language in code blocks:
The code spec displays what programming language the code...
Louwrentius
Recovering a lost partition using gpart
Even today people do not understand how important it is for the safety of your
data to make backups....
over a year ago
Even today people do not understand how important it is for the safety of your
data to make backups. I was asked to perform some data recovery on a hard
drive of an old computer, which still contained important documents and
photo's.
The first thing I did was to make a disk image...
Matt Blewitt
Control Loops and Rice Cookers
Rice cookers are fascinating machines. I’ve owned one for years, as rice is a significant part of my...
over a year ago
Rice cookers are fascinating machines. I’ve owned one for years, as rice is a significant part of my regular diet, and it completely removes the stress of preparing rice. They also operate on a simple principle that can help us operate cloud infrastructure – the control loop.
computers are bad
2023-11-04 nuclear safety
Nuclear weapons are complex in many ways. The basic problem of achieving
criticality is difficult on...
a year ago
Nuclear weapons are complex in many ways. The basic problem of achieving
criticality is difficult on its own, but deploying nuclear weapons as
operational military assets involves yet more challenges. Nuclear weapons must
be safe and reliable, even with the rough handling and...
Christian Selig
A free, 3D printable Meta Quest 3 stand
People were really kind and seemed to enjoy my 3D printable Apple Vision Pro stand, a stand I...
8 months ago
People were really kind and seemed to enjoy my 3D printable Apple Vision Pro stand, a stand I designed in Fusion 360 with the goal of being visually appealing and compact as it stored the headset vertically so it wouldn’t take up too much space on your desk.
Turns out there were...
Abort Retry Fail
The History of Windows 2.0
Success and Litigation
a year ago
Jonas Hietala
Done this, done that. What now?
Finished and uploaded our java game Grand Thief Arto, done an exam (didn’t quite go as intended) and...
over a year ago
Finished and uploaded our java game Grand Thief Arto, done an exam (didn’t quite go as intended) and starting some new courses in school. I’m liking my choice of Computer Science more and more. Data structures and Algorithms was a super fun course, I actually ordered a new book...
Odds and Ends of...
I'm pro-assisted dying in principle, but I'm not sure about the proposed law
Is no law better than a bad law?
a month ago
Is no law better than a bad law?
./techtipsy
How to build a fleet of networked offsite backups using Linux, WireGuard and rsync
Just like most people out there, I have some files that are irreplaceable, such as cat pictures.
At...
a week ago
Just like most people out there, I have some files that are irreplaceable, such as cat pictures.
At one point I had a few single-board computers sitting idle, namely
the Orange Pi Zero and
the LattePanda V1, and a few
1TB SSD-s.
I hate idle hardware, so I did the most sensible...
Ian's Blog
Mourning the Loss of Cohost
The staff running Cohost have announced (archived) that at the end of 2024 Cohost will be shutting...
3 months ago
The staff running Cohost have announced (archived) that at the end of 2024 Cohost will be shutting down, with the site going read-only on October 1st 2024. This news was deeply upsetting to receive, as Cohost filled a space left by other social media websites when they stopped...
Notes on software...
The year in books: 2022
In 2022 I finished 20
books
spanning 15,801 pages. 3 more than I read in 2021, but about twice
the...
a year ago
In 2022 I finished 20
books
spanning 15,801 pages. 3 more than I read in 2021, but about twice
the number of pages. 3 fiction and 17 non-fiction. Another ~30 started
but not finished.
I had a hard time reading books while I was trying to start my own
company. But I also...
Arduino Blog
ThermoGrasp brings thermal feedback to virtual reality
Imagine playing Half-Life: Alyx and feeling the gun heat up in your hand as you take down The...
2 months ago
Imagine playing Half-Life: Alyx and feeling the gun heat up in your hand as you take down The Combine. Or operating a robot through augmented reality and feeling coldness on your fingers when you get close to exceeding the robot’s limits. A prototype device called ThermoGrasp...
Matt Blewitt
So, You Want To Build A DBaaS Part 2: Technical Bits
In my first post in this pseudo-series, we covered more of the theory and organisational practices...
a year ago
In my first post in this pseudo-series, we covered more of the theory and organisational practices around building and operating a database-as-a-service platform. In this post, I’ll cover some of the more technical aspects of this that I think are worth considering, drawn from my...
Arduino Blog
Meet Mr. Wallplate, an animatronic wall plate that speaks to you
Interactive robots always bring an element of intrigue, and even more so when they feature unusual...
7 months ago
Interactive robots always bring an element of intrigue, and even more so when they feature unusual parts and techniques to perform their actions. Mr. Wallplate, affectionately named by Tony K on Instructables, is one such robot that is contained within an electrical wall plate...
Home on Erik...
Music recommendations using cover images (part 1)
Scrolling through the Discover page on Spotify the other day it occurred to me that the album is in...
over a year ago
Scrolling through the Discover page on Spotify the other day it occurred to me that the album is in fact a fairly strong visual proxy for what kind of content you can expect from it. I started wondering if the album cover can in fact be used for recommendations.
Nabeel S. Qureshi
The Serendipity Machine
Notes on Using Twitter
11 months ago
Posts on Made of...
The architecture of declarative configuration management
With the ongoing move towards “infrastructure-as-code” and similar notions, there’s been an ongoing...
over a year ago
With the ongoing move towards “infrastructure-as-code” and similar notions, there’s been an ongoing increase in the number and popularity of declarative configuration management tools. This post attempts to lay out my mental model of the conceptual architecture and internal...
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Writing good technical explanations
Software engineering is mainly learning. There is a great demand for technical explanations, and...
over a year ago
Software engineering is mainly learning. There is a great demand for technical explanations, and many thousands of books, talks and blog…
Matt Mullenweg
Rhino Dehorning
Yesterday in the African bush was great, I saw giraffes, zebras, warthogs, leopard turtles,...
2 months ago
Yesterday in the African bush was great, I saw giraffes, zebras, warthogs, leopard turtles, elephants. Today wasn’t great: I witnessed a rhino shot with a tranquilizer from a helicopter, then it was held down, had its horns cut off, and then shaved down. I have some photos and...
Notes on software...
HTML event handler attributes: down the rabbit hole
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Bryan Braun - Blog
Setting up your /now page with an RSS feed
I have a /now page, which I use to tell people what I’m up to these days.
I like the concept of “now...
a month ago
I have a /now page, which I use to tell people what I’m up to these days.
I like the concept of “now pages” but I felt like it would be better if it had an RSS feed. The feed would give interested parties a way to subscribe to life changes.
The problem is that RSS feeds aren’t...
./techtipsy
The absolute state of Bluetooth audio in 2022
I have the Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones. They’re good for consuming content.
Audio calls with your...
over a year ago
I have the Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones. They’re good for consuming content.
Audio calls with your colleagues? Forget about it.
This is the setup I have to go with, and it has all to do with how Bluetooth
works. Your options with Bluetooth headsets are the following:
high quality...
Home on Erik...
Storm in the stratosphere: how the cloud will be reshuffled
Here's a theory I have about cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP):
Cloud vendors1 will increasingly...
over a year ago
Here's a theory I have about cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, GCP):
Cloud vendors1 will increasingly focus on the lowest layers in the stack: basically leasing capacity in their data centers through an API. Other pure-software providers will build all the stuff on top of it.
Jonas Hietala
Resurrection
Aah what a nice summer!
It was nice to be back in Övertorneå, doing nothing in particular. Just not...
over a year ago
Aah what a nice summer!
It was nice to be back in Övertorneå, doing nothing in particular. Just not having to make lunch and dinner every day is such a relief, and if you do slip up food with grandma or Veronica’s parents is only a phone call away. I watched TV, played...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Making Ethereum alignment legible
2 months ago
Vitalik Buterin's...
[Mirror] Cantor was Wrong: debunking the infinite set hierarchy
over a year ago
Louwrentius
ZFS RAIDZ expansion is awesome but has a small caveat
Introduction
Update April 2023:
It has been fairly quiet since the announcement of this feature.
The...
over a year ago
Introduction
Update April 2023:
It has been fairly quiet since the announcement of this feature.
The Github PR about this feature is rather stale and people are wondering what the status is and what the plans are. Meanwhile, FreeBSD has announced In February 2023 that they...
Odds and Ends of...
Keir Starmer needs to prepare for a world without America
Today's empires, tomorrow's ashes.
a month ago
Today's empires, tomorrow's ashes.
Jonas Hietala
Black and White
Here it is at last! Boasting a unoriginal name, themed Bare Minimum. My thoughts where to create a...
over a year ago
Here it is at last! Boasting a unoriginal name, themed Bare Minimum. My thoughts where to create a game where graphics where included into the gameplay but sadly it didn’t come out nearly as good as I expected it too.
Yes I know there are a lot of things bad and wrong with this...
Jonas Hietala
The Coinparty hackathon, take two
In December I declared that I would enter a Bitcoin Cash hackathon and I was excited to give my...
over a year ago
In December I declared that I would enter a Bitcoin Cash hackathon and I was excited to give my procrastination a kick in the balls. Unfortunately the hackathon was postponed to January just an hour later. Maybe the organizers didn’t think my project was exciting enough or...
Neil Madden
CVE-2022-21449: Psychic Signatures in Java
The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to...
over a year ago
The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, this being Doctor Who, the card is really made out of a special “psychic paper“, which...
Gwern.net Newsletter
Jan 2021 Gwern.net Newsletter
January 2021 gwern.net newsletter with links on AI scaling up and down.
over a year ago
January 2021 gwern.net newsletter with links on AI scaling up and down.
Nabeel S. Qureshi
Reflections on Palantir
A retrospective of an eight-year stint.
2 months ago
A retrospective of an eight-year stint.
Jonas Hietala
Blogging in Djot instead of Markdown
What if we weren’t chained to the past? What if we tried to create a light markup syntax that keeps...
10 months ago
What if we weren’t chained to the past? What if we tried to create a light markup syntax that keeps what is good about Markdown, while revising some of the features that have led to bloat and complexity in the CommonMark spec?
John Macfarlane, Beyond Markdown
I recently...
computers are bad
2024-12-04 operators on the front
At the very core of telephone history, there is the telephone operator. For a
lot of people, the...
2 weeks ago
At the very core of telephone history, there is the telephone operator. For a
lot of people, the vague understanding that an operator used to be involved is
the main thing they know about historic telephony. Of course, telephone
historians, as a group, tend to be much more...
Louwrentius
Example of a home networking setup with VLANs
Updated October 24, 2012, see below.
This post is a description of my home network setup based on...
over a year ago
Updated October 24, 2012, see below.
This post is a description of my home network setup based on gigabit ethernet. I did a non-standard trick with VLANs that may also be of interest to other people. I'm going to start with a diagram of the network. Just take a look (click to...
Notes on software...
Writing a storage engine for Postgres: an in-memory Table Access Method
With Postgres 12,
released in 2019, it became possible to swap out Postgres's storage
engine.
This...
a year ago
With Postgres 12,
released in 2019, it became possible to swap out Postgres's storage
engine.
This is a feature MySQL has supported for a long time. There are at
least 8 different built-in
engines you can pick from. MyRocks, MySQL on
RocksDB, is another popular third-party...
Louwrentius
'Linux: obtain motherboard model / type and vendor'
If you want to know what motherboard is installed in a system, use the tool
dmidecode:
dmidecode |...
over a year ago
If you want to know what motherboard is installed in a system, use the tool
dmidecode:
dmidecode | grep -e "Manufacturer|Product" | head -n 4 | tail -n 2
The result might be something like:
Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Product Name: P5Q-EM DO
Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer...
Louwrentius
AI is critically important but not for you
Before Chat-GPT caused a sensation, big tech companies like Facebook and Apple were betting their...
7 months ago
Before Chat-GPT caused a sensation, big tech companies like Facebook and Apple were betting their future growth on virtual reality. But I'm convinced that virtual reality will never be a mainstream thing. If you ever used VR you know why:
A heavy thing on your head that messes up...
Old Vintage...
An Apple district manager's Macintosh Portable in 1989-91 (featuring GEIS AppleLink and a look at...
a late prototype Macintosh Portable. But it turns out it's not merely notable for what it is than...
9 months ago
a late prototype Macintosh Portable. But it turns out it's not merely notable for what it is than what it has on it: a beta version of System 6.0.6 (the doomed release that Apple pulled due to bugs), Apple sales databases, two online services — the maligned Mac Prodigy client,...
Christian Selig
Introducing Juno for Apple Vision Pro
YouTube is probably one of the parts of the internet I consume the most, so I was more than a little...
10 months ago
YouTube is probably one of the parts of the internet I consume the most, so I was more than a little sad when YouTube announced that they don’t have plans to build a visionOS app, and disabled the option to load the iPad app. This leaves you with Safari, and the website is okay,...
Louwrentius
'A Moment Of Silence: OpenSolaris Is Dead'
The last release of OpenSolaris dates back to July 2009. The next release was
scheduled for March...
over a year ago
The last release of OpenSolaris dates back to July 2009. The next release was
scheduled for March 2010, but Oracle did not release anything. It is dead
silent around OpenSolaris.
On 12 July 2010, the OpenSolaris Government Board sent out an ultimatum
to Oracle: "please...
Matt Blewitt
Corporate Legibility for Software Engineers
Corporate legibility is the art of making tasks, and their outcomes, easier to understand for those...
over a year ago
Corporate legibility is the art of making tasks, and their outcomes, easier to understand for those not directly involved. I’ll help you understand why this is an important thing to be aware of and how to use it to help your career.
Willem's Blog
The Ultimate Freedom Bike
With the Brompton foldable bike you find yourself a very versatile companion to go whenever and...
over a year ago
With the Brompton foldable bike you find yourself a very versatile companion to go whenever and wherever you please!
Willem's Blog
Data versus Feeling
Do you rely on data or on your feeling when running a Marathon? I decided to run two marathons to...
4 days ago
Do you rely on data or on your feeling when running a Marathon? I decided to run two marathons to find out the differences!
Notes on software...
Notes on running Electron
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Willem's Blog
Using the reMarkable paper tablet
The paper-like display makes you forget about reMarkable's digital innards, working with this tablet...
over a year ago
The paper-like display makes you forget about reMarkable's digital innards, working with this tablet is therefore quite remarkable!
./techtipsy
Strangling your service with a Kubernetes misconfiguration
This is a quick story about a fun discovery that I made a while ago.
For legal reasons, all of this...
over a year ago
This is a quick story about a fun discovery that I made a while ago.
For legal reasons, all of this is made up and no such service ever existed.
Once upon a time, we had this Java service that handled all the backend
work that you’d expect to occur for a product with a web...
Home on Erik...
What is your motivation?
I've been trying to learn Clojure. I keep telling people I meet that I really want to learn Clojure,...
over a year ago
I've been trying to learn Clojure. I keep telling people I meet that I really want to learn Clojure, but still every night I can't get myself to spend time with it. It's unclear if I really want to learn Clojure or just want to have learned Clojure?
Electronics etc…
Fake Parallel Printer - A Parallel Port Traffic Capturing Tool
Introduction
What Is Out There?
The Parallel Printer Port
Fake Printer Top Level Design Choices
Fake...
a year ago
Introduction
What Is Out There?
The Parallel Printer Port
Fake Printer Top Level Design Choices
Fake Printer HW Details
PCB Revision 1
PCB Revision 2
Firmware
Building a Fake Printer Tool Yourself
Programming the Raspberry Pico
Fake Printer as a USB Serial Device on your...
Willem's Blog
Measuring cholesterol levels in blood
This week I had my blood examined to measure my cholesterol levels, taking a lipid profile. Know...
over a year ago
This week I had my blood examined to measure my cholesterol levels, taking a lipid profile. Know your LDL, HDL and Triglycerides numbers with a simple test.
Louwrentius
HP Procurve "auto DoS" feature causing network problems
A feature on more recent HP Procurve models (18xx series, such as 1810G etc.)
is called "Auto DoS"....
over a year ago
A feature on more recent HP Procurve models (18xx series, such as 1810G etc.)
is called "Auto DoS". You can find it in the section "Security" and then
"Advanced security".
If you enable the Auto DoS feature, traffic is blocked based on one of these
conditions:
the source port...
Applied Cartography
Bluesky is good
Three months ago, I wrote Bluesky et al, in which I walked through the various platforms vying for...
a week ago
Three months ago, I wrote Bluesky et al, in which I walked through the various platforms vying for the dubious title of "Twitter's successor" and landed on Bluesky as being my favorite, perhaps less out of its ostensible inherent virtues and more out of the size of its...
./techtipsy
The IPv6 situation on Docker is good now!
Good news, everyone! Doing IPv6 networking stuff on Docker is actually good now!
I’ve recently...
2 days ago
Good news, everyone! Doing IPv6 networking stuff on Docker is actually good now!
I’ve recently started reworking my home server setup to be more IPv6 compatible, and as part of that I learned that
during
the summer of 2024 Docker shipped an update that eliminated a
lot of the...
Computer Ads from...
Creative Computing Magazine Interviews Clive Sinclair (1980)
This British inventor speaking about his ZX-80 computer system
2 weeks ago
This British inventor speaking about his ZX-80 computer system
Lighthouse Blog
How to combine multiple RSS feeds in one view
6 months ago
Notes on software...
Eight years of organizing tech meetups
This is a collection of random personal experiences. So if you don't
want to read everything, feel...
a year ago
This is a collection of random personal experiences. So if you don't
want to read everything, feel free to skip to the end for takeaways.
I write because I'd like to see more high-quality meetups. And maybe
my little bit of experience will help someone out.
2015: Philadelphia
I...
Notes on software...
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 2. binary expressions and WHERE filters
Previously in database basics:
1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
3. indexes
4. a...
over a year ago
Previously in database basics:
1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
3. indexes
4. a database/sql driver
In this post, we'll extend gosql
to support binary expressions and very simple filtering on SELECT
results via WHERE. We'll introduce a general mechanism...
Computer Ads from...
American Heart Association
A PSA and an Ad
a month ago
Home on Erik...
Buffet lines are terrible, but let's try to improve them using computer simulations
My company has a buffet every Friday, and the lines grow to epic proportions when the food arrives....
over a year ago
My company has a buffet every Friday, and the lines grow to epic proportions when the food arrives. I've suspected for years that the “classic” buffet line system is a deeply flawed and inefficient method, and every time I'm stuck in the line has made me more convinced.
Ian's Blog
Hardware-Accelerated Video Encoding with Intel Arc on Redhat Linux
I've been wanting hardware-accelerated video encoding on my Linux machine for quite a while now, but...
a month ago
I've been wanting hardware-accelerated video encoding on my Linux machine for quite a while now, but ask anybody who's used a Linux machine and they'll tell you of the horrors of Nvidia or AMD drivers.
Intel, on the other hand, seems to be taking things in a much different, much...
Home on Erik...
Dollar cost averaging
(I accidentally published an unfinished draft of this post a few days ago – sorry about...
over a year ago
(I accidentally published an unfinished draft of this post a few days ago – sorry about that).
There's a lot of sources preaching the benefits of dollar cost averaging, or the practice of investing a fixed amount of money regularly.
Applied Cartography
Is cool enough?
Via HN I ran into not one but two extremely neat
and pleasant-looking libraries for URL...
9 months ago
Via HN I ran into not one but two extremely neat
and pleasant-looking libraries for URL manipulation. They look like great libraries, and a prior version of me would have taken a brief set of cursory
glances at the hodgepodge of janky URL manipulation code that I wrote for...
Ken Shirriff's blog
The first microcomputer: The transfluxor-powered Arma Micro Computer from 1962
What would you say is the first microcomputer?1 The Apple I from 1976? The Altair 8800 from...
10 months ago
What would you say is the first microcomputer?1 The Apple I from 1976? The Altair 8800 from 1974?
Perhaps the lesser-known Micral N (1973) or Q1 (1972)?
How about the Arma Micro Computer from way back in 1962.
The Arma Micro Computer was a compact 20-pound transistorized...
anderegg.ca
Jet Lag: The Game: The Game
Some fun news today from the creators of Jet Lag: The Game. They officially announced the next...
a month ago
Some fun news today from the creators of Jet Lag: The Game. They officially announced the next season, and also a “home version” of the game. I’ve written about Jet Lag: The Game before, so you might want to start there if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
On the latest...
Bryan Braun - Blog
Goodbye Evernote, Hello Obsidian
I use note-taking software every day. I use it for journaling, blogging, capturing ideas,...
6 months ago
I use note-taking software every day. I use it for journaling, blogging, capturing ideas, researching technologies, managing my projects, and many other things. Writing is how I think through problems, and note-taking software makes all that thinking easy to search and...
Arduino Blog
A drone remote designed to enhance magic shows
Maker culture has always been a major part of magic performance. Some tricks are well-rehearsed...
7 months ago
Maker culture has always been a major part of magic performance. Some tricks are well-rehearsed slight of hand, but many of them rely on clever engineering to sell an illusion. And modern technology offers a great deal of interesting possibilities. That is the idea behind Peter...
computers are bad
2024-03-01 listening in on the neighborhood
Last week, someone leaked a spreadsheet of SoundThinking sensors to
Wired.
You are probably asking...
9 months ago
Last week, someone leaked a spreadsheet of SoundThinking sensors to
Wired.
You are probably asking "What is SoundThinking," because the company rebranded
last year. They used to be called ShotSpotter, and their outdoor acoustic
gunfire detection system still goes by the...
Louwrentius
Linux on Mac Mini - boot after power failure
When using a Mac Mini as a server or router, it is very nice if the machine
automatically boots if a...
over a year ago
When using a Mac Mini as a server or router, it is very nice if the machine
automatically boots if a power failure has occurred.
User chirhoxi on the ubuntu forum found out how this can be achieved:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1209576
Basically you need one of these...
Christian Selig
My little Apple Vision Pro stand
I want somewhere to put my Vision Pro when not in use. Many people use the original box, and there’s...
10 months ago
I want somewhere to put my Vision Pro when not in use. Many people use the original box, and there’s beautiful stands that exist out there, but I was looking for something more compact and vertical so it would take up less room on my desk.
So I opened Fusion 360 (which I am still...
Applied Cartography
Notes on Zed
I was late to the VS Code zeitgeist, and as penitence I try to go out of my way to try new editors...
9 months ago
I was late to the VS Code zeitgeist, and as penitence I try to go out of my way to try new editors whenever I see them — which is why this morning I installed Zed, which makes its bones on performance (yay!) and teams functionality (irrelevant for my use cases, but seems...
Applied Cartography
Klarna: nineteen years, twenty billion kroner
I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay...
3 weeks ago
I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay (RIP), Klarna, et al — not for any particular sin I feel that they are committing, but because they in my mind are much less interesting companies with less volatile upside than the...
Posts on Made of...
Distributed cloud builds for everyone
CPU cycles are cheaper than they have ever been, and cloud computing has never been more ubiquitous....
over a year ago
CPU cycles are cheaper than they have ever been, and cloud computing has never been more ubiquitous. All the major cloud providers offer generous free tiers, and services like GitHub Actions offer free compute resources to open-source repositories. So why do so many developers...
Construction Physics
The Long Road to Fiber Optics
Over the past six decades, advances in computers and microprocessors have completely reshaped our...
3 months ago
Over the past six decades, advances in computers and microprocessors have completely reshaped our world.
Arduino Blog
Massive tentacle robot draws massive attention at EMF Camp
Most of the robots we feature only require a single Arduino board, because one Arduino can control...
6 months ago
Most of the robots we feature only require a single Arduino board, because one Arduino can control several motors and monitor a bunch of sensors. But what if the robot is enormous and the motors are far apart? James Bruton found himself in that situation when he constructed this...
Posts on Made of...
A Brief Introduction to termios: termios(3) and stty
(This is part two of a multi-part introduction to termios and terminal emulation on UNIX. Read part...
over a year ago
(This is part two of a multi-part introduction to termios and terminal emulation on UNIX. Read part 1 if you’re new here)
In this entry, we’ll look at the interfaces that are used to control the behavior of the “termios” box sitting between the master and slave pty. The behaviors...
Simply Explained
Serverless Anagram Solver with Cloudflare R2 and Pages
Six years ago, I reworked my anagram solver so it would run on top of AWS Lambda and DynamoDB....
over a year ago
Six years ago, I reworked my anagram solver so it would run on top of AWS Lambda and DynamoDB. However, this year I realized I didn't need server-side code or a database at all. I could make it completely static by pre-computing anagram solutions.
Good Enough
How We Built Quack (Beta)
We recently launched Quack, a simple utility for you to share a beautifully rendered version of any...
a year ago
We recently launched Quack, a simple utility for you to share a beautifully rendered version of any Markdown text. This software is completely front-end based, and for me personally it was a bit of a challenging puzzle to implement. Thankfully we have genius hackers like Arun...
Willem's Blog
Programming on Apple Watch
Programming with VIM over SSH on Apple Watch using a bluetooth keyboard
over a year ago
Programming with VIM over SSH on Apple Watch using a bluetooth keyboard
Arduino Blog
Technology meets creativity in two interactive art student projects
Art and engineering are not separate concepts. There is a great deal of overlap between the two and...
2 months ago
Art and engineering are not separate concepts. There is a great deal of overlap between the two and many modern disciplines increasingly blur those lines. Mónica Riki is an “electronic artist and creative coder” who embodies that idea: you might remember her and her incredible...
Jonas Hietala
The great Hochstapler
Hey there. A lot has happened lately since my last update and my last game here.
I’m now a pretty...
over a year ago
Hey there. A lot has happened lately since my last update and my last game here.
I’m now a pretty happy student at Linköpings university and I’m reading something similar to Computer Science or Computer engineering, but I guess it’ll become whatever you make it to be. For...
Home on Erik...
My favorite management failures
For most people straight out of school, work life is a bit of a culture shock. For me it was an...
over a year ago
For most people straight out of school, work life is a bit of a culture shock. For me it was an awesome experience, but a lot of the constraints were different and I had to learn to optimize for different things.
Arduino Blog
This fake CRT TV works using lasers and UV magic
Until the 21st century, cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs were pretty much the only option. As such, media...
3 weeks ago
Until the 21st century, cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs were pretty much the only option. As such, media was made to suit them. Retro video game consoles in particular look best on CRT TVs. But those old TVs are getting hard to find and desirable models are now quite expensive. So,...
Jonas Hietala
Back to lazy.nvim
Around a month ago I had an affair with rocks.nvim.
It was fun, but I’m back together with lazy.nvim...
6 months ago
Around a month ago I had an affair with rocks.nvim.
It was fun, but I’m back together with lazy.nvim again.
This is a short post to explain why—at this point in time—the grass wasn’t greener on the other side.
Problems with rocks.nvim
Too many weird issues.
I had quite a few...
Applied Cartography
How Buttondown uses HAProxy
There are few technical decisions I regret more with Buttondown than the decision to combine the...
3 months ago
There are few technical decisions I regret more with Buttondown than the decision to combine the author-facing app, the subscriber-facing app, and the marketing site all under a single domain. Most technical decisions are reversible with sufficient grit and dedication; this one...
./techtipsy
How to start your self-hosting adventure: a high-level overview
Reddit is a great starting point for getting new ideas for your homelab: racks full of machines
in...
over a year ago
Reddit is a great starting point for getting new ideas for your homelab: racks full of machines
in /r/homelab, storage measured in terabytes (or even petabytes) over
at /r/datahoarder, all the different services that people host over at
/r/selfhosted. This can be a bit...
Neil Madden
SipHash-based encryption for constrained devices
I see a lot of attempts to define encryption schemes for constrained devices with short...
7 months ago
I see a lot of attempts to define encryption schemes for constrained devices with short authentication tags (e.g., 64 bits) using universal hashing. For example, there’s a proposal in CFRG at the moment for a version of AES-GCM with short tags for this kind of use-case. In my...
Arduino Blog
Explore underwater with this Arduino-controlled DIY ROV
Who doesn’t want to explore underwater? To take a journey beneath the surface of a lake or even the...
4 months ago
Who doesn’t want to explore underwater? To take a journey beneath the surface of a lake or even the ocean? But a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), which is the kind of robot you’d use for such an adventure, isn’t exactly the kind of thing you’ll find on the shelf at your local...
Christian Selig
Server side Live Activities guide
iOS 17.2 gained the capability to start Live Activities from a server, which is pretty cool and...
2 months ago
iOS 17.2 gained the capability to start Live Activities from a server, which is pretty cool and handy! I’ve been playing around with it a bit and found some parts a bit confusing, so I thought I’d do a little write up for future me as well as anyone else who could benefit!
(For...
Christian Selig
Recreating Apple's beautiful visionOS search bar
Many of Apple’s own visionOS apps, like Music, Safari, and Apple TV, have a handy search bar front...
9 months ago
Many of Apple’s own visionOS apps, like Music, Safari, and Apple TV, have a handy search bar front and center on the window so you can easily search through your content. Oddly, as of visionOS 1.1, replicating this visually as a developer using SwiftUI or UIKit is not...
Lighthouse Blog
Updates December 15: Rebranding to Lighthouse and complete redesign
a year ago
Home on Erik...
2D embedding of 5k artists = WIN
I'm at KDD in Chicago for a few days. We have a Spotify booth tomorrow, and I wanted to put together...
over a year ago
I'm at KDD in Chicago for a few days. We have a Spotify booth tomorrow, and I wanted to put together some cool graphics to show. I've been thinking about doing a 2D embedding of the top artists forever since I read about t-SNE and other papers so this was a perfect opportunity to...
Willem's Blog
The best bike computer app: Cyclemeter
Collect advanced bike ride data using your smartphone connected to external Bluetooth sensors and a...
over a year ago
Collect advanced bike ride data using your smartphone connected to external Bluetooth sensors and a steer mounted display.
Posts on Made of...
My Apollo Bibliography
Over the last few years — perhaps not that unusually among the nerds I know — I’ve become...
over a year ago
Over the last few years — perhaps not that unusually among the nerds I know — I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the Apollo program (and early space program more generally), and been reading my way through a growing number of books and documentaries written about it. At a...
Notes on software...
Exploring PL/pgSQL: Strings, arrays, recursion, and parsing JSON
Next in exploring PL/pgSQL:
Implementing a Forth-like interpreter
PostgreSQL comes with a...
over a year ago
Next in exploring PL/pgSQL:
Implementing a Forth-like interpreter
PostgreSQL comes with a builtin imperative programming language called
PL/pgSQL. I used to think this language was scary because it has a bit
more adornment than your usual language does. But looking deeper,...
Birchtree
I don’t care about bad or missing features that I don’t use
Sometimes I’ll talk about something I like online and people will express shock that I can use a...
2 weeks ago
Sometimes I’ll talk about something I like online and people will express shock that I can use a product that has such a clear downside. I’ve gotten people ask how I can use Things since it doesn’t have shared task lists. More recently I
Louwrentius
Benchmarking a 1.44 MB floppy drive
I've used fio - a storage benchmarking tool - to benchmark a 1.44 MB floppy drive to gauge its...
over a year ago
I've used fio - a storage benchmarking tool - to benchmark a 1.44 MB floppy drive to gauge its random I/O performance. I have no real reason for doing this. I just thought it was funny.
I've run a benchmark against the floppy drives for different queue depths. The results are...
Posts on Made of...
Computers can be understood
Introduction This post attempts to describe a mindset I’ve come to realize I bring to essentially...
over a year ago
Introduction This post attempts to describe a mindset I’ve come to realize I bring to essentially all of my work with software. I attempt to articulate this mindset, some of its implications and strengths, and some of the ways in which it’s lead me astray.
Software can be...
Computer Ads from...
Ergotron's MacTilt
MacTilt is the Solution
3 weeks ago
Home on Erik...
Plotting author statistics for Git repos using Git of Theseus
I spent a few days during the holidays fixing up a bunch of semi-dormant open source projects and I...
over a year ago
I spent a few days during the holidays fixing up a bunch of semi-dormant open source projects and I have a couple of blog posts in the pipeline about various updates. First up, I made a number of fixes to Git of Theseus which is a tool (written in Python) that generates...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 5: The Purge
a month ago
Jonas Hietala
Long Term Goals (part 2)
A few minutes after I wrote about my long term goals, in the shower, I realize I forgot a few major...
over a year ago
A few minutes after I wrote about my long term goals, in the shower, I realize I forgot a few major goals I have:
Write my own Programming Language
Why? Because it sounds fun and epic as hell.
Write a Book
So I like books and I like to collect them and I have my whole bookcase...
Jonas Hietala
ISOC update
I have now worked a bit more than 3 weeks out of my 4 weeks of IDA Summer of Code and this is an...
over a year ago
I have now worked a bit more than 3 weeks out of my 4 weeks of IDA Summer of Code and this is an update post of what I’ve done so far. I will write a more extensive summary post at the end of the project. I was planning on writing a weekly summary, but that ship sailed a long...
Arduino Blog
The end of Mbed marks a new beginning for Arduino
As you might have heard, on July 9th, Arm announced that the Mbed platform and OS are officially...
5 months ago
As you might have heard, on July 9th, Arm announced that the Mbed platform and OS are officially destined to reach end of life in July 2026, and therefore will no longer be maintained. The news has sent ripples through the embedded development community, particularly affecting...
heavymeta.org
CrowdStrike's Impact on Aviation
Just after midnight Eastern Time on July 19, 2024, the enterprise cybersecurity
company CrowdStrike...
4 months ago
Just after midnight Eastern Time on July 19, 2024, the enterprise cybersecurity
company CrowdStrike YOLOed a software update to millions of Windows machines. Or
as they put it:
On July 19, 2024 at 04:09 UTC, as part of ongoing operations, CrowdStrike
released a sensor...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Gitcoin Grants Round 7 Retrospective
over a year ago
Notes on software...
Interview with the D Language Blog: BSDScheme
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Notes on software...
Build a serverless ACID database with this one neat trick (atomic PutIfAbsent)
Delta Lake is an open protocol for serverless ACID databases. Due to
its simplicity, scalability,...
2 months ago
Delta Lake is an open protocol for serverless ACID databases. Due to
its simplicity, scalability, and the number of open-source
implementations, it's quickly becoming the DuckDB of serverless
transactional databases for analytics workloads. Iceberg is a
contender too, and is...
Vitalik Buterin's...
[Mirror] Exploring Elliptic Curve Pairings
over a year ago
Jonas Hietala
Weekend Tournaments
This weekend was filled by playing cards. On Saturday I hosted a small Game of Thrones tournament...
over a year ago
This weekend was filled by playing cards. On Saturday I hosted a small Game of Thrones tournament and on Sunday the local Netrunner community hosted a small summer kit tournament.
Game of Thrones
We’ve had a similar tournament once before when me and my girlfriend invited two of...
Simply Explained
ESP32 Cam: cropping images on device
The ESP32 camera is the cheapest microcontroller with a built-in camera that you can buy. The OV2640...
over a year ago
The ESP32 camera is the cheapest microcontroller with a built-in camera that you can buy. The OV2640 sensor has a max resolution of 1600x1200, but sometimes you don't need the entire image.In this post I'll show how to crop the images on the ESP32 itself, before sending it of to...
Gwern.net Newsletter
April 2020 gwern.net newsletter
This is the April 2020 edition of the gwern.net newsletter; previous, March 2020 (archives).
over a year ago
This is the April 2020 edition of the gwern.net newsletter; previous, March 2020 (archives).
Home on Erik...
Headcount goals, feature factories, and when to hire those mythical 10x people
When I started building up a tech team for Better, I made a very conscious decision to pay at the...
over a year ago
When I started building up a tech team for Better, I made a very conscious decision to pay at the high end to get people. I thought this made more sense: they cost a bit more money to hire, but output usually more than compensates for it.
Willem's Blog
Visiting an international hackers conference
This month I attended Global AppSec Amsterdam, an international conference for hackers and security...
over a year ago
This month I attended Global AppSec Amsterdam, an international conference for hackers and security specialists. Read along for some of the highlights.
Neil Madden
Regular JSON
For better or worse, depending on your perspective, JSON has become a dominant data format and shows...
a year ago
For better or worse, depending on your perspective, JSON has become a dominant data format and shows no signs of being replaced any time soon. There are good reasons for that: on the face of it, it provides a very simple format with just enough features to cover a lot of...
Jonas Hietala
Laying off Pintos
Exam period is here which means all courses should be wrapping up and a week or so ago we finished...
over a year ago
Exam period is here which means all courses should be wrapping up and a week or so ago we finished up our lab series about pintos. The labs were among the best I’ve had yet and I learned a ton. We didn’t follow the official instructions but we had our own assigmnets....
Applied Cartography
buttondown.com/alternatives
Some kind words from Chris Krycho on Buttondown's Alternatives page:
This is how I want all my tools...
a week ago
Some kind words from Chris Krycho on Buttondown's Alternatives page:
This is how I want all my tools to be. There is a ton of room in these markets for healthy and friendly competition — and no need at all for winner-take-all or monopolist attitudes.
First off — credit where it's...
Jonas Hietala
An intriguing new puzzle
Here’s another game made for the experimental gameplay project:
Slidoku which is a sort of mix...
over a year ago
Here’s another game made for the experimental gameplay project:
Slidoku which is a sort of mix between Rubik’s cube and sudoku. I enjoy puzzles like those and I really enjoyed this one too - it took me a while to beat it but I just love the feeling when you do. If you like...
Simply Explained
HEIC to JPG: Build a Quick Action with Automator
With the release of iOS 11, Apple switched from JPG to HEIC to store your photos. The...
over a year ago
With the release of iOS 11, Apple switched from JPG to HEIC to store your photos. The High-Efficiency Image File Format saves a lot of storage space on your devices while still maintaining your photos' quality. However, it does become problematic if you want to share those files...
Applied Cartography
Tailwind black magic: swallowing all pointer events
I wrote two days ago about a real and useful application of Tailwind black magic; here's...
8 months ago
I wrote two days ago about a real and useful application of Tailwind black magic; here's another.
Buttondown has a dropzone component lets folks drag-and-drop items or click on it to get a file-picker. It's used for importing images, archives, CSVs, the works: because it's so...
Jonas Hietala
My Dream Game: The RTS
Even if there are a million great games there’s one that has a very special place in my heart:...
over a year ago
Even if there are a million great games there’s one that has a very special place in my heart: Supreme Commander. It’s not the game I’ve played the most and there might even be games which are better and more fun but supcom was the game that introduced me to competitive gaming...
Posts on Made of...
Reflections on software performance
At this point in my career, I’ve worked on at least three projects where performance was a defining...
over a year ago
At this point in my career, I’ve worked on at least three projects where performance was a defining characteristic: Livegrep, Taktician, and Sorbet (I discussed sorbet in particular last time, and livegrep in an earlier post). I’ve also done a lot of other performance work on the...
Notes on software...
Confusion and disengagement in meetings
The quickest way to cut through confusion or disagreement among
otherwise amiable and honest folks...
over a year ago
The quickest way to cut through confusion or disagreement among
otherwise amiable and honest folks is to ask questions.
Ask early so you don't waste time. But it's not enough to just ask
clarifying questions because the answers won't always be clear.
Sounds like Human Interaction...
Notes on software...
Windows
It has been six years since I last used Windows for any remotely
serious software development. I've...
over a year ago
It has been six years since I last used Windows for any remotely
serious software development. I've used Ubuntu, Arch, or FreeBSD
since. But eventually I spent so much time working around common
workplace tasks that I decided to put Windows 10 Pro on my work
laptop.
Windows...
Posts on Made of...
Iron Blogger: Blogging for Beer
So, you may have noticed that I suddenly started updating this blog for the first time in a while....
over a year ago
So, you may have noticed that I suddenly started updating this blog for the first time in a while. The reason is that I’ve recently started an ongoing event with a whole bunch of friends around here to encourage us to blog more.
Like so many good ideas, it all started with a...
latest projects -...
Simsim Pendant
[Concept] Mercurial Medallion
9 months ago
[Concept] Mercurial Medallion
Home on Erik...
Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story
I guess I should really call this a parable.
The backdrop is: you have been brought in to grow a...
over a year ago
I guess I should really call this a parable.
The backdrop is: you have been brought in to grow a tiny data team (~4 people) at a mid-stage startup (~$10M annual revenue), although this story could take place at many different types of companies.
Odds and Ends of...
Important information if you used my Bluesky MP follows bot
Please read this immediately.
2 weeks ago
Please read this immediately.
Jonas Hietala
My first theme: Addictive Gaming
In true experimental spirit I’ll now announce the theme for my first game: Addictive Gaming. I won’t...
over a year ago
In true experimental spirit I’ll now announce the theme for my first game: Addictive Gaming. I won’t be following the lead from the Experimental Gameplay Project’s site but I will follow their three laws (7 days, alone, themes).
Puh… my first game! Wish me luck =)
OH8HUB’s Substack
Eliminating Radio Interference from Apple charger
Apple's product design teams should do a better job eliminating unwanted radio frequency emissions...
a year ago
Apple's product design teams should do a better job eliminating unwanted radio frequency emissions from their product!
Home on Erik...
Installing TensorFlow on AWS
Curious about Google's newly released TensorFlow? I don't have a beefy GPU machine, so I spent some...
over a year ago
Curious about Google's newly released TensorFlow? I don't have a beefy GPU machine, so I spent some time getting it to run on EC2. The steps on how to reproduce it are pretty brutal and I wouldn't recommend going through it unless you want to waste five hours of your live.
Posts on Made of...
Why scons is cool
I’ve recently started playing with scons a little for some small personal projects. It’s not...
over a year ago
I’ve recently started playing with scons a little for some small personal projects. It’s not perfect, but I’ve rapidly come to the conclusion that it’s a probably far better choice than make in many cases. The main exceptions would be cases where you need to integrate into legacy...
somenice
RGB Input Range Sliders
R0 G20 B0 A fun little challenge to myself this week was putting together these HTML input range...
4 months ago
R0 G20 B0 A fun little challenge to myself this week was putting together these HTML input range type sliders to control the color of an LED.Each color channel change triggers an update to read the value, convert it to a hex code (eg. #FF0000), update the output element value,...
Jonas Hietala
A Four-Eyed Update
Wow it’s been a while! Almost a month and a half since my last update. There I complained about my...
over a year ago
Wow it’s been a while! Almost a month and a half since my last update. There I complained about my almost constant headaches which hampered me a lot actually. Luckily now I have joined the rank of cool.
I took home three frames I think and tried them out and I settled some I...
Home on Erik...
New benchmarks for approximate nearest neighbors
UPDATE(2018-06-17): There are is a later blog post with newer benchmarks!
One of my super nerdy...
over a year ago
UPDATE(2018-06-17): There are is a later blog post with newer benchmarks!
One of my super nerdy interests include approximate algorithms for nearest neighbors in high-dimensional spaces. The problem is simple. You have say 1M points in some high-dimensional space.
Notes on software...
Interview With Phil of DataStation
This is an external interview. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external interview. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Notes on software...
Tail call elimination
In this post we'll explore what tail calls are, why they are useful,
and how they can be eliminated...
over a year ago
In this post we'll explore what tail calls are, why they are useful,
and how they can be eliminated in an interpreter, a compiler targeting
C++, and a compiler targeting LLVM IR.
Tail calls
A tail call is a function call made at the end of a block that
returns the value of the...
Applied Cartography
Pytest: test for print statements
Inspired by Adam Johnson's test for pending migrations, and of course in conversation with my own...
5 months ago
Inspired by Adam Johnson's test for pending migrations, and of course in conversation with my own love of weird tests, I offer a similar concept: a test for finding stray print statements in your codebase, with a ratchet array for stuff to ignore.
import glob
PATH =...
Home on Erik...
HubSpot's Picture Shows how to Maintain Monocultures in the 21st Century
I thought this article about the company culture at HubSpot is kind of funny. “HubSpot's Awesome...
over a year ago
I thought this article about the company culture at HubSpot is kind of funny. “HubSpot's Awesome Presentation Shows how to Create a 21st Century Culture”.
Just FYI: You're not different. You're a bunch of white hipsters aged 25-30 dressed up in the same theme.
computers are bad
2024-03-27 telephone cables
So let's say you're working on a household project and need around a dozen
telephone cables---the...
9 months ago
So let's say you're working on a household project and need around a dozen
telephone cables---the ordinary kind that you would use between your telephone
and the wall. It is, of course, more cost effective to buy bulk cable, or
simply a long cable, and cut it to length and attach...
Notes on software...
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 4. a database/sql driver
Previously in database basics:
1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
2. binary expressions...
over a year ago
Previously in database basics:
1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
2. binary expressions and WHERE filters
3. indexes
In this post, we'll extend gosql
to implement the database/sql driver interface. This will
allow us to interact with gosql the same way we would...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Reverse engineering standard cell logic in the Intel 386 processor
The 386 processor (1985) was Intel's most complex processor at the time, with 285,000...
10 months ago
The 386 processor (1985) was Intel's most complex processor at the time, with 285,000 transistors.
Intel had scheduled 50 person-years to design the processor, but it was falling behind schedule.
The design team decided to automate chunks of the layout, developing "automatic...
Jonas Hietala
Going to University
I mentioned in the last post that I’m going to the university, which might explain my lack of...
over a year ago
I mentioned in the last post that I’m going to the university, which might explain my lack of activity here and for that I’m sorry. It’s not as hard as I had imagined, and I don’t have that much in school but there’s still a lot that’s going on. For example now how to make...
./techtipsy
How I blew up my backup server (Valve pls fix)
It all started with me getting a Steam Deck.
Background
After getting familiar with the Steam Deck...
a year ago
It all started with me getting a Steam Deck.
Background
After getting familiar with the Steam Deck and how the Proton compatibility layer works, I decided to write a
backup script that would back up everything in the home folder, excluding the Steam games themselves due to the...
Willem's Blog
Talking tablets: what makes a great tablet?
Over the past few weeks I worked with Microsoft Surface Pro X to see if it is any good, can it be...
over a year ago
Over the past few weeks I worked with Microsoft Surface Pro X to see if it is any good, can it be your main computer?
./techtipsy
The simplicity of the modulo operator: how I scaled an inefficient solution on a legacy system
Your service cannot process events fast enough during peak hours.
There is no obvious quick and...
a year ago
Your service cannot process events fast enough during peak hours.
There is no obvious quick and dirty fix.
Refactoring would take ages.
People have been unhappy for a while now.
What the hell do you do?
Background
I had the pleasure of working with a legacy backend system...
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