Applied Cartography
Fathom
I'd been meaning to jot down some thoughts on Fathom for a while, and did not have a particularly...
4 weeks ago
I'd been meaning to jot down some thoughts on Fathom for a while, and did not have a particularly good reason to do so until the news broke that Paul Jarvis was selling his share of the company to Jack Ellis, the technical co-founder. [1]
Anyway, the two thoughts:
I think Fathom...
Birchtree
That time Apple made Auido Hijack way worse, but eventually made it better for everyone
Paul Kafasis: The Developers Who Came in From the Cold
I’m delighted to say that we have completed...
a week ago
Paul Kafasis: The Developers Who Came in From the Cold
I’m delighted to say that we have completed our transition to ARK, and it now powers all of our audio capture apps on MacOS 14 and higher. Our glorious hassle-free future has finally arrived, and you can get
Home on Erik...
Wikiphilia
I've been obsessed with Wikipedia for the past ten years. Occasionally I find some good articles...
over a year ago
I've been obsessed with Wikipedia for the past ten years. Occasionally I find some good articles worth sharing and that's why I created the wikiphilia Twitter handle. Just a long stream of stuff that for one reason or another may be interesting.
Arduino Blog
Innovative new tactile sensor helps assess fine motor skills
Fine motor skills correlate strongly with cognition and the accurate assessment of an individual’s...
7 months ago
Fine motor skills correlate strongly with cognition and the accurate assessment of an individual’s motor skills can be critical in diagnosing and treating a variety of conditions. But objective evaluation has been a challenge, as suitable sensors weren’t available. To help...
GitButler
Fearless Rebasing
GitButler now supports first class conflicts, which makes rebasing much less annoying. What is...
2 months ago
GitButler now supports first class conflicts, which makes rebasing much less annoying. What is "fearless rebasing"?
Posts on Made of...
CVE-2007-4573: The Anatomy of a Kernel Exploit
CVE-2007-4573 is two years old at this point, but it remains one of my favorite vulnerabilities. It...
over a year ago
CVE-2007-4573 is two years old at this point, but it remains one of my favorite vulnerabilities. It was a local privilege-escalation vulnerability on all x86_64 kernels prior to v2.6.22.7. It’s very simple to understand with a little bit of background, and the exploit is...
lcamtuf’s thing
Building a phosphorescence detector
There's very little written about natural phosphorescence. Let's design a device that can spot it in...
a month ago
There's very little written about natural phosphorescence. Let's design a device that can spot it in the wild.
Jonas Hietala
Picking up rust by writing a QR code generator
I wanted to pick up rust again after having used it many years ago. After around 5 years or so I...
over a year ago
I wanted to pick up rust again after having used it many years ago. After around 5 years or so I didn’t really know where to start?
Approaches to picking up a language
When learning, or as in this case re-learning, a programming language there are different approaches. For...
Home on Erik...
Developer experience as a competitive advantage
I spent a ton of time looking at different software providers, both as a CTO, and as a nerd...
over a year ago
I spent a ton of time looking at different software providers, both as a CTO, and as a nerd “advanced” consumer who builds stuff in my spare time. In the last 10 years, there has been an order of magnitude more products that cater directly to developers, through APIs, SDKs, and...
./techtipsy
How to copy media off of an iPhone the hard way (using Linux)
I helped a family member upgrade to a newer iPhone and make some room so that the internal storage...
4 months ago
I helped a family member upgrade to a newer iPhone and make some room so that the internal storage does not run out.
They had Nextcloud installed on the current phone, but due to limitations of the Nextcloud iOS
app, the backups only take place if the app itself is open, meaning...
Willem's Blog
Enter text without keys
Worn on your fingers, the Tap Strap recognises tapping and moving to control and type without a...
over a year ago
Worn on your fingers, the Tap Strap recognises tapping and moving to control and type without a mouse or keyboard!
Arduino Blog
Kickstart your tech journey, with the new Arduino Plug and Make Kit!
Hey, creating an IoT device shouldn’t be rocket science. We believe technology is for everyone....
5 months ago
Hey, creating an IoT device shouldn’t be rocket science. We believe technology is for everyone. That’s why we’ve developed the whole new, beginner-friendly Plug and Make Kit – the easiest way to get started with Arduino! Inside the box, you’ll find everything you need to create...
Notes on software...
Writing an x86 emulator from scratch in JavaScript: 1. a stack and register machine
Better yet, take a look at this post walking through emulating x86 ELF binaries in Go:
Emulating...
over a year ago
Better yet, take a look at this post walking through emulating x86 ELF binaries in Go:
Emulating linux/AMD64 userland: interpreting an ELF binary
2. system calls
In this post we'll create a small virtual machine in JavaScript and
use it to run a simple C program compiled...
Construction Physics
The Influence of Bell Labs
We’ve talked previously about Bell Labs’ long, storied history as an innovation engine and a...
a month ago
We’ve talked previously about Bell Labs’ long, storied history as an innovation engine and a generator of new technology.
Ian's Blog
Pragmatically Generating a Self-Signed Certificate and Private Key using OpenSSL
Recently I found myself needing to generate a HTTPS Server Certificate and Private Key for an iOS...
over a year ago
Recently I found myself needing to generate a HTTPS Server Certificate and Private Key for an iOS app using OpenSSL, what surprised me was the total lack of documentation for OpenSSL.
While there is plenty of function documentation, what OpenSSL really lacks is examples of how it...
computers are bad
2024-03-17 wilhelm haller and photocopier accounting
In the 1450s, German inventor Johannes Gutenburg designed the movable-type
printing press, the first...
9 months ago
In the 1450s, German inventor Johannes Gutenburg designed the movable-type
printing press, the first practical method of mass-duplicating text. After
various other projects, he applied his press to the production of the Bible,
yielding over one hundred copies of a text that...
lcamtuf’s thing
The marvelous disappearing capacitor
The performance of photodiode amplifiers can be improved in a clever way.
3 weeks ago
The performance of photodiode amplifiers can be improved in a clever way.
anderegg.ca
Using WordPress is risky
It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote about WordPress. Stuff’s been happening in the...
2 months ago
It’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote about WordPress. Stuff’s been happening in the background, but I’ve been trying to ignore it. This morning I read a story that bothered me enough to require another round of therapy-by-blog-post.
First up, a couple of things that...
Birchtree
2025: The year of fitness (members post)
2025 is upon us and my goals for the new year are very clear: I need to get my fitness in order....
4 days ago
2025 is upon us and my goals for the new year are very clear: I need to get my fitness in order. Here's the plan…
computers are bad
2024-07-20 minuteman missile communications
A programming note: I am looking at making some changes to how I host things
like Computers Are Bad...
5 months ago
A programming note: I am looking at making some changes to how I host things
like Computers Are Bad and wikimap that are going to
involve a lot more recurring expense. For that and other reasons, I want to see
if y'all would be willing to throw some money my way. If everyone...
Vitalik Buterin's...
STARKs, Part 3: Into the Weeds
over a year ago
Louwrentius
'Linux: unattended installation with Debian preseeding'
Debian Linux provides a mechanism to install the operating
system without user intervention. This...
over a year ago
Debian Linux provides a mechanism to install the operating
system without user intervention. This mechanism is called 'preseeding' and is
similar to Red Hat Kick Start and Sun Solaris Jump Start.
The basic idea is that the installer is fed a recipe, according to which the
system...
Willem's Blog
Multi-Window support in your iPad app
Take advantage of the improved support for multiple windows on iPadOS by implementing new UI...
over a year ago
Take advantage of the improved support for multiple windows on iPadOS by implementing new UI concepts enabling different use cases for your app.
Vitalik Buterin's...
Gitcoin Grants Round 6 Retrospective
over a year ago
Posts on Made of...
Two Perspectives on the End-to-End Principle
Back when I was an undergraduate, as part of a class called “Computer Systems Engineering”, we read...
over a year ago
Back when I was an undergraduate, as part of a class called “Computer Systems Engineering”, we read numerous classic papers of systems design. I enjoyed and learned a great deal from many of these papers, but one that paper that has stuck with me in particular was Saltzer et al’s...
Abort Retry Fail
The History of Windows NT 3.1
A Highly Portable Future
a year ago
Posts on Made of...
Implementing a declarative mini-language in the C preprocessor
Last time, I announced Check Plus, a declarative language for defining Check tests in C. This time,...
over a year ago
Last time, I announced Check Plus, a declarative language for defining Check tests in C. This time, I want to talk about the tricks I used to implement a declarative minilanguage using the C preprocessor (and some GCC extensions).
The Problem We want to write some toplevel...
Good Enough
Yes, Facebook Is Terrible, but Also…
I’m not on Facebook.
It was eight or ten years ago when I left for good.
While there were some good...
a year ago
I’m not on Facebook.
It was eight or ten years ago when I left for good.
While there were some good and useful interactions, the algorithm brought me down, I didn’t have a lot of desire to keep up with old acquaintances, and hearing everyone’s political stance was not good for...
Applied Cartography
Why should a company?
For a long time, my goal with Buttondown was largely around failure avoidance: "I want to get my...
9 months ago
For a long time, my goal with Buttondown was largely around failure avoidance: "I want to get my first paying customer so I know it's not a fake product"; "I want to hit a thousand dollars in revenue so I know it's not just friends humoring me"; "I want to make $10K/mo or else I...
Vitalik Buterin's...
A Philosophy of Blockchain Validation
over a year ago
Posts on Made of...
A Very Subtle Bug
6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for...
over a year ago
6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a reminder that failure modes are subtle and often involve strange interactions between multiple parts...
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...
Neil Madden
A few programming language features I’d like to see
I enjoyed Hillel Wayne’s recent newsletter about microfeatures they’d like to see in programming...
a year ago
I enjoyed Hillel Wayne’s recent newsletter about microfeatures they’d like to see in programming languages. A “microfeature” is essentially a small convenience that makes programming in that language a bit easier without fundamentally changing it. I love this idea. I’m partial to...
Nabeel S. Qureshi
How To Understand Things
The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking...
over a year ago
The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking...
Simply Explained
ESP32: Keep WiFi connection alive with a FreeRTOS task
I have a few ESP32's running in my house. A few of them are running 24/7 and require an always-on...
over a year ago
I have a few ESP32's running in my house. A few of them are running 24/7 and require an always-on WiFi connection. That's been quite tricky to implement. I used to include various checks throughout my code, but that's not scalable.What I need is something running in the...
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....
5 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...
csvbase blog
I didn't write any Javascript, and other shortcuts
Getting it done by not doing a lot of it
a year ago
Getting it done by not doing a lot of it
Applied Cartography
Order, Tailwind, DRY
(Order in the CSS rule sense, not the metaphysical sense.)
The time has come to begin exfiltrating...
2 weeks ago
(Order in the CSS rule sense, not the metaphysical sense.)
The time has come to begin exfiltrating some higher-traffic, higher-leverage parts of Buttondown's admin UI away from the autogenerated Django admin and into some more bespoke components.
Take, for instance, this rather...
Arduino Blog
This Arduino-controlled machine dispenses the perfect bowl of cereal
Breakfast cereal is controversial. Milk or cereal first? Best cereal to milk ratio? Favorite cereal?...
7 months ago
Breakfast cereal is controversial. Milk or cereal first? Best cereal to milk ratio? Favorite cereal? Most attractive mascot? The opportunities for debate never end. But we can all agree that consistency is key when it comes to the milk:cereal ratio — nobody changes that up from...
Home on Erik...
Top posts
These are some blog posts which have gotten a disproportionate amount of traffic (10,000+ page...
over a year ago
These are some blog posts which have gotten a disproportionate amount of traffic (10,000+ page views):
2024 It's hard to write code for computers, but it's even harder to write code for humans 2023 Simple sabotage for software 2022 We are still early with the cloud: why...
computers are bad
2023-08-07 STIRred AND SHAKEN
In a couple of days, I pack up my bags to head for DEFCON. In a rare moment of
pre-planning, perhaps...
a year ago
In a couple of days, I pack up my bags to head for DEFCON. In a rare moment of
pre-planning, perhaps spurred by boredom, I looked through the schedule to see
what's in store in the world of telephony. There is a workshop on SS7, of
course [1], plenty of content on cellular, but...
Matt Mullenweg
CNBC on WP Engine
Ari Levy at CNBC has a great article covering the battle between WordPress and Silver Lake / WP...
2 months ago
Ari Levy at CNBC has a great article covering the battle between WordPress and Silver Lake / WP Engine: Why WordPress [co-]founder Matt Mullenweg has gone ‘nuclear’ against tech investing giant Silver Lake.
Arduino Blog
A DIY weather display with dedicated outdoor sensor station
Weather stations are popular projects in the maker community because they’re useful and usually...
6 months ago
Weather stations are popular projects in the maker community because they’re useful and usually quite affordable to construct. But most that we see are really weather information displays that gather data through the internet from stations in the region. That data is fairly...
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
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...
Computer Ads from...
Comics from 1982/08 Commodore Computing International Mag
Time for some humor
5 months ago
Arduino Blog
Can this tiny lawn mower robot cut it in the real world?
We’re finally starting to see robotic lawn mowers gain a little bit of traction as prices come down...
6 months ago
We’re finally starting to see robotic lawn mowers gain a little bit of traction as prices come down and consumer trust goes up. They work a bit like Roomba vacuums and pathfinding sophistication varies from one model to the next. But even the most basic models are still a lot...
Jonas Hietala
Let's build a VORON: Filters
I can print, but the printer is missing a very important thing that I alluded to in the previous...
a year ago
I can print, but the printer is missing a very important thing that I alluded to in the previous post: filtering dangerous particles and fumes.
This is mostly covered by the kit, but I was missing some parts from the print it forward and the kit didn’t include a HEPA...
Matt Blewitt
Leadership Power Tools: SQL and Statistics
A common pattern I’ve seen over the years have been folks in engineering leadership positions that...
a month ago
A common pattern I’ve seen over the years have been folks in engineering leadership positions that are not super comfortable with extracting and interpreting data from stores, be it databases, CSV files in an object store, or even just a spreadsheet. We’re going to cover SQL &...
./techtipsy
Tiered storage: use the right tool for the job
Hard drives are still the default choice for many homelab and data hoarding
enthusiasts. They still...
a year ago
Hard drives are still the default choice for many homelab and data hoarding
enthusiasts. They still hold the gigabytes per dollar advantage over SSD-s (for now),
and if you buy the big external drives and take the drives out of the enclosures,
you can get a pretty good...
Applied Cartography
How shadcn/ui examples work
I’m increasingly convinced that for developer-first tools, a really good docs experience is a...
7 months ago
I’m increasingly convinced that for developer-first tools, a really good docs experience is a durable, non-trivial advantage.
Part of this thesis is that Really Good Docs Experiences, in addition to having great information architecture and strong writing/prose, should be thought...
./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...
Willem's Blog
Developing a native iOS app
How hard can it be to build your own cycling and running workout tracker app using native code with...
7 months ago
How hard can it be to build your own cycling and running workout tracker app using native code with some help from AI? Read along to find out!
Engineers Need Art
Experiments in Printmaking - Part 1
Trying some unconventional techniques to create a pop-art print of a Cherry Mash candy bar.
9 months ago
Trying some unconventional techniques to create a pop-art print of a Cherry Mash candy bar.
Louwrentius
Howto get the hard disk size under Linux?
A: There is no single tool for this job, but it seems that Fdisk is just fine:
server:~# fdisk -l 2>...
over a year ago
A: There is no single tool for this job, but it seems that Fdisk is just fine:
server:~# fdisk -l 2> /dev/null | grep Disk | grep -v identifier
Disk /dev/sda: 500.0 GB, 500028145664 bytes
Disk /dev/sdb: 500.0 GB, 500028145664 bytes
Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.1 GB, 1000123400192...
Willem's Blog
Escaping the flat tires
Finding the answer to the question how resilient a puncture-proof tire really is took me quite some...
over a year ago
Finding the answer to the question how resilient a puncture-proof tire really is took me quite some time, but alas - here it is!
Louwrentius
Visual representation of hard drives and their temperature
If you build a NAS with many drives, it may be of interest to you which
drives get hot and where...
over a year ago
If you build a NAS with many drives, it may be of interest to you which
drives get hot and where they are located in the chassis. My Norco 4020 case
has twenty drives in RAID 6, plus two operating system drives in RAID 1. I
wrote a script that shows me the temperature of each...
Arduino Blog
Zoo elephants get a musical toy to enrich their lives
Everyone loves looking at exotic animals and most of us only get to do that at zoos. But, of course,...
a month ago
Everyone loves looking at exotic animals and most of us only get to do that at zoos. But, of course, there is a lot to be said about the morality of keeping those animals in captivity. So, good zoos put a lot of effort into keeping their animals healthy and happy. For more...
Willem's Blog
Inspiration from a child
Explore the world together with your kids and reap the rewards of adventure and fun!
over a year ago
Explore the world together with your kids and reap the rewards of adventure and fun!
Louwrentius
My Ceph test cluster based on Raspberry Pi's and HP MicroServers
Introduction
To learn more about Ceph, I've build myself a Ceph Cluster based on actual hardware. In...
over a year ago
Introduction
To learn more about Ceph, I've build myself a Ceph Cluster based on actual hardware. In this blogpost I'll discus the cluster in more detail and I've also included (fio) benchmark results.
This is my test Ceph cluster:
The cluster consists of the following...
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.
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...
Jonas Hietala
March Theme: 10 seconds
Well well here’s something interesting. The Experimental Gameplay Project has given us a really...
over a year ago
Well well here’s something interesting. The Experimental Gameplay Project has given us a really interesting thing to focus on: Time. Like Braid, it’s time for us to make something interesting with time itself. 10 seconds is the constraint and that’s not a lot, but perhaps enough?
Jonas Hietala
The 4-Hour Chef: Scrambled Eggs
I’ve been listening to The Tim Ferriss Show a while now and he and his guests often inspire me to...
over a year ago
I’ve been listening to The Tim Ferriss Show a while now and he and his guests often inspire me to make changes and start doing new things. I got introduced to Josh Waitzkin’s excellent The Art of Learning and the meta skill of learning has since then fascinated me. So when I got...
Notes on software...
Writing a lisp compiler from scratch in JavaScript: 6. an x86 upgrade
Previously in compiler basics:
1. lisp to assembly
2. user-defined functions and variables
...
over a year ago
Previously in compiler basics:
1. lisp to assembly
2. user-defined functions and variables
3. LLVM
4. LLVM conditionals and compiling fibonacci
5. LLVM system calls
This post upgrades the ulisp x86 backend from using a limited set of
registers (with no spilling...
Arduino Blog
Circuit Canvas can help you quickly create illustrated wiring diagrams
Good documentation is extremely useful when conceiving, building, or sharing electronic circuit...
5 months ago
Good documentation is extremely useful when conceiving, building, or sharing electronic circuit designs, but traditional schematics and technical drawings are difficult for non-professionals to interpret and create. Makers can benefit from intuitive illustrations that look good...
Bryan Braun - Blog
Made in 2024
Here are some things I made in 2024:
Music Box Fun: Advanced Editing (a new major feature):
...
2 days ago
Here are some things I made in 2024:
Music Box Fun: Advanced Editing (a new major feature):
Adds multiple-note selection for bulk operations on notes (like deletion, copy/paste, nudging and dragging)
Also includes a “space editor” for arbitrarily adding/removing space...
./techtipsy
You can use almost anything as a key file for your encrypted storage device
Imagine that you have an unencrypted drive containing your private data and one day it starts...
a month ago
Imagine that you have an unencrypted drive containing your private data and one day it starts throwing a bunch of
errors. You have backups of the data so you’ve got that part covered, but would you feel comfortable sending the drive
in to be warrantied? You have no control over...
Arduino Blog
A DIY bottle-labeling machine perfect for homebrewers
While it is certainly possible (and common) to put homebrewed beer into kegs, that requires...
6 months ago
While it is certainly possible (and common) to put homebrewed beer into kegs, that requires regulated gas and large refrigeration space. A keg is also more difficult to transport and overkill if you just want to bring a few beers to a friend’s backyard BBQ. For those reasons,...
Matt Blewitt
What Is a Senior Engineer, Anyway?
I’ve been having a bunch of conversations with my team about our career ladder, and what it means to...
a month ago
I’ve been having a bunch of conversations with my team about our career ladder, and what it means to be “senior” in a software engineering context. It’s a little different in every company, but here is my view.
Jonas Hietala
Motivation is Valuable
It’s funny how motivation can play such a huge role with my productivity. I’m currently having two...
over a year ago
It’s funny how motivation can play such a huge role with my productivity. I’m currently having two math courses; one mandatory about analysis in multiple variables and vector analysis and one voluntary about advanced linear algebra. I don’t like the analysis course, didn’t like...
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...
Jonas Hietala
Favourite Programming Language
All the programmers love to promote their favourite language, or to hate on others. Now I read a...
over a year ago
All the programmers love to promote their favourite language, or to hate on others. Now I read a post which claimes my favourite language is not good enough! But he’s correct of course, there is no one language to rule them all. You should always choose the mest language for the...
computers are bad
2024-03-09 the purple streetscape
Across the United States, streets are taking on a strange hue at night. Purple.
Purple streetlights...
10 months ago
Across the United States, streets are taking on a strange hue at night. Purple.
Purple streetlights have been reported in Tampa, Vancouver, Wichita, Boston.
They're certainly in evidence here in Albuquerque, where Coal through downtown
has turned almost entirely to mood lighting....
Jonas Hietala
Stereotypes
I read a great essay or article about stereotypical programmers called The Little Printf. I really...
over a year ago
I read a great essay or article about stereotypical programmers called The Little Printf. I really couldn’t do it justice so do yourself a favor and go read it. It touches on several types of programmers or rather traits of programmers I recognize in my surroundings and also...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Quadratic Payments: A Primer
over a year ago
Vitalik Buterin's...
Where to use a blockchain in non-financial applications?
over a year ago
Home on Erik...
More MCMC – Analyzing a small dataset with 1-5 ratings
I've been obsessed with how to iterate quickly based on small scale feedback lately. One awesome...
over a year ago
I've been obsessed with how to iterate quickly based on small scale feedback lately. One awesome website I encountered is Usability Hub which lets you run 5 second tests. Users see your site for 5 seconds and you can ask them free-form questions afterwards.
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...
Old Vintage...
So long, Z80
You can still buy 6502s from Western Design Center and others, but Zilog's getting out of Z80s...
8 months ago
You can still buy 6502s from Western Design Center and others, but Zilog's getting out of Z80s (PDF), announcing earlier this week that after June 14th you won't be able to buy them anymore (specifically the last-part-standing Z84C00 which comes in various speeds from 6-20 MHz)...
Louwrentius
Fully unattended deployment of Windows clients using limited resources
Introduction
Anyone who ever installed Windows on a computer by hand must have wished for a solution...
over a year ago
Introduction
Anyone who ever installed Windows on a computer by hand must have wished for a solution that automate this task. It's just waiting a lot and pressing a button now and then. But installing the operating system itself is only the beginning. Once installed, you need to...
Louwrentius
ZFS performance on HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 G1610T
I think the HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 is a very interesting little box if you want to build your...
over a year ago
I think the HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 is a very interesting little box if you want to build your own ZFS-based NAS. The benchmarks I've performed seem to confirm this.
The Microserver Gen8 has nice features such as:
iLO (KVM over IP with dedicated network interface)
support...
Louwrentius
HP Proliant Microserver N40L is a great NAS or Router
Update 2012-12-11: It seems that a new and faster version is on the horizon.
Update 2012-12-21:...
over a year ago
Update 2012-12-11: It seems that a new and faster version is on the horizon.
Update 2012-12-21: Yes, the new model G7 N54L is out.
Some products seem almost too good to be true and I think the HP Proliant Microserver N40L is one of them. If you are into the market for a very...
Electronics etc…
Hideo Okawara’s Mixed Signal Lecture Series
Introduction
Hideo Okawara’s Mixed Signal Lecture Series
Frequency/Phase Movement Analysis by...
12 months ago
Introduction
Hideo Okawara’s Mixed Signal Lecture Series
Frequency/Phase Movement Analysis by Orthogonal Demodulation
Misc
Introduction
While researching a DSP related topic, Google dug up an excellent article,
written by Hideo Okawara, that is just one part of a series of ~53. I...
Applied Cartography
My approach to GTD and PKM
One pernicious thing with writing about productivity and knowledge systems: you only change systems...
2 months ago
One pernicious thing with writing about productivity and knowledge systems: you only change systems that aren’t working, and you tend to write about things during times of change. So most writing about productivity systems stem from people whose systems have failed them.
It is...
Louwrentius
Did you know that RDP is as insecure as telnet?
Microsoft developed the remote desktop protocol in order to allow remote GUI-
based access to hosts....
over a year ago
Microsoft developed the remote desktop protocol in order to allow remote GUI-
based access to hosts. It is easy to pick on Microsoft and I do respect what
they have accomplished, however, it may not come as a surprise that they did
it all wrong with RDP in terms of security.
By...
Posts on Made of...
Security doesn't respect abstraction boundaries
The fundamental tool of any engineering discipline is the notion of abstraction. If we can build a...
over a year ago
The fundamental tool of any engineering discipline is the notion of abstraction. If we can build a set of useful, easily-described behaviors out of a complex system, we can build other systems on top of those pieces, without having to understand to worry about the full complexity...
Simply Explained
Securely access home network with Cloudflare Tunnel and WARP
When Cloudflare announced that their Tunnel service would become free, I saw an opportunity to...
over a year ago
When Cloudflare announced that their Tunnel service would become free, I saw an opportunity to strengthen the security of my Home Assistant instance. Until now, I have been using Cloudflare's CDN to connect to my HA instance, but that required opening ports on my router and...
On Life and Lisp
AAA gaming on Asahi Linux
Gaming on Linux on M1 is here! We’re thrilled to release our Asahi
game playing toolkit, which...
2 months ago
Gaming on Linux on M1 is here! We’re thrilled to release our Asahi
game playing toolkit, which integrates our Vulkan 1.3 drivers with x86
emulation and Windows compatibility. Plus a bonus: conformant OpenCL
3.0.
Asahi Linux now ships the only conformant OpenGL®,
OpenCL™,
and...
lcamtuf’s thing
The secret lives of snowblowers
Yes, they throw snow. But the mechanical design of residential snowblowers is more interesting than...
4 months ago
Yes, they throw snow. But the mechanical design of residential snowblowers is more interesting than it seems.
Posts on Made of...
A Cursed Bug
In my day job at Anthropic, we run relatively large distributed systems to train large language...
over a year ago
In my day job at Anthropic, we run relatively large distributed systems to train large language models. One of the joys of using a lot of computing resources, especially on somewhat niche software stacks, is that you spend a lot of time running into the long-tail of bugs which...
./techtipsy
Testing a cheap ExpressCard to NVMe SSD adapter on my ThinkPad T430
I stumbled upon this post in /r/thinkpad,
which got my attention. It showcases an ExpressCard to M.2...
over a year ago
I stumbled upon this post in /r/thinkpad,
which got my attention. It showcases an ExpressCard to M.2 NGFF adapter that
they purchased from AliExpress. The adapter has a similar purpose to the one
designed by thinkmods.store, with the added bonus
that it could fit longer NVMe...
Willem's Blog
The value of notifications
It's easy to dismiss your phone's notifications as something that disturbs you, but if you take the...
over a year ago
It's easy to dismiss your phone's notifications as something that disturbs you, but if you take the time to set them up correctly, notifications can actually save you time!
lcamtuf’s thing
A 15-minute intro to resin casting
At one point in my life, I penned an epic, 110-page opus on hobby manufacturing.
a week ago
At one point in my life, I penned an epic, 110-page opus on hobby manufacturing.
Jonas Hietala
The first (worst) post
Well, here it is: The opening post. What will come here? Here’s where I’ll outline what the blog...
over a year ago
Well, here it is: The opening post. What will come here? Here’s where I’ll outline what the blog will be about and maybe, if I’m dedicated, it won’t die before Christmas you think.
And sure, you’re right. I will run away to the corner in about two and a half months crying I never...
Arduino Blog
Easily add Python-controlled GPIO pins to any computer
Let’s say that, hypothetically, you wanted to use your computer to blink an LED or read the state of...
6 months ago
Let’s say that, hypothetically, you wanted to use your computer to blink an LED or read the state of a button. Could you? Almost certainly not — at least not without additional hardware. Most modern computers don’t provide any interface for direct interaction with low-level...
Vitalik Buterin's...
The Dawn of Hybrid Layer 2 Protocols
over a year ago
./techtipsy
My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter
It turns out that you can’t trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec.
I have a Catit...
a year ago
It turns out that you can’t trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec.
I have a Catit Flower Fountain
for my two adorable cats. The idea of a water fountain for cats may sound odd,
but having one really helps with cats staying hydrated and that alone avoids all
sorts...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Reverse engineering the barrel shifter circuit on the Intel 386 processor die
The Intel 386 processor (1985) was a large step from the 286 processor, moving x86 to a 32-bit...
a year ago
The Intel 386 processor (1985) was a large step from the 286 processor, moving x86 to a 32-bit architecture.
The 386 also dramatically improved the performance of shift and rotate operations by adding a
"barrel shifter", a circuit that can shift by multiple bits in one step.
The...
Willem's Blog
Go Viral on X
Learn how to go viral on X using simple logic in creating engaging posts.
a month ago
Learn how to go viral on X using simple logic in creating engaging posts.
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.
Willem's Blog
I see dead people
This may be Apple Vision Pro's killer feature, enabling you to see dead people: augmenting old...
3 months ago
This may be Apple Vision Pro's killer feature, enabling you to see dead people: augmenting old photos into lifelike representations.
Louwrentius
Linux network interface bonding / trunking or how to get beyond 1 Gb/s
This article discusses Linux bonding and how to achieve 2 Gb/s transfer speeds
with a single TCP/UDP...
over a year ago
This article discusses Linux bonding and how to achieve 2 Gb/s transfer speeds
with a single TCP/UDP connection.
UPDATE July 2011
Due to hardware problems, I was not able to achieve transfer speeds
beyond 150 MB/s. By replacing a network card with one from another
vendor (HP...
Willem's Blog
Replacing a Shimano shift cable
After some adventure with our cargo bike, the Shimano Nexus 7-speed shifter cable got damaged and...
over a year ago
After some adventure with our cargo bike, the Shimano Nexus 7-speed shifter cable got damaged and needed replacement. Read my blog post to learn how to do this yourself.
Lighthouse Blog
Updates November 17: Content classification and summary
a year ago
Arduino Blog
Let’s play at the Maker Faire Rome 2024!
We are excited to be back at Maker Faire Rome as a Gold Sponsor of the 12th edition (October 25-27,...
3 months ago
We are excited to be back at Maker Faire Rome as a Gold Sponsor of the 12th edition (October 25-27, 2024), with some exciting experiences lined up for all makers, innovators, and creators who attend! Learn by playing at our booth Visit us at the fair for a playful, interactive...
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Why some engineers get trusted with high-impact work
It’s fun and rewarding to work on critical tasks. But there’s only so much important work to go...
a week ago
It’s fun and rewarding to work on critical tasks. But there’s only so much important work to go around. Worse still, the chances to work on…
Arduino Blog
This machine automatically creates chain art
Art is very personal and we often consider the process of creation itself when evaluating the...
5 months ago
Art is very personal and we often consider the process of creation itself when evaluating the resulting piece. Does a sculpture have more artistic value when molded by human hands rather than a 3D printer? Most would say that it does. But what if the automation was, itself, part...
Jonas Hietala
Let's build a VORON: More mods
The printer is done, but I feel one of the best part of a VORON printer is the ability to modify and...
10 months ago
The printer is done, but I feel one of the best part of a VORON printer is the ability to modify and personalize it.
There a tons of mods you can do, and while I’ve done a few there are lots more that I’d like to do some day.
It’s a wonderful feeling to augment the printer with...
Willem's Blog
From tree to table
Creating a night stand from a raw slab of chestnut wood.
over a year ago
Creating a night stand from a raw slab of chestnut wood.
Computer Ads from...
Vote for the April 2004 Plus Post Topic
If you are a paid subscriber, voting is open for one week
9 months ago
If you are a paid subscriber, voting is open for one week
Jonas Hietala
Customizing Neovim
Scripting is configuration. Configuration is scripting.
TJ DeVries A different take on editing...
8 months ago
Scripting is configuration. Configuration is scripting.
TJ DeVries A different take on editing code
I’ve been using Neovim since it forked from Vim almost 8 years ago, and I used Vim many years before that.
I feel quite comfortable with Neovim, and I’ve gone down the...
Posts on Made of...
Check Plus: An EDSL for writing unit tests in C
Check is an excellent unit-testing framework for C code, used by a number of relatively well-known...
over a year ago
Check is an excellent unit-testing framework for C code, used by a number of relatively well-known projects. It includes features such as running all tests in separate address spaces (using fork(2)), which means that the test suite can properly report segfaults or similar crashes...
Engineers Need Art
VPX Scripting - Part 5 (DOF)
Some light Visual Pinball debugging and the world of DOF. New to DOF? Read on.
8 months ago
Some light Visual Pinball debugging and the world of DOF. New to DOF? Read on.
./techtipsy
Running my ThinkPad T430 with an eGPU in 2024
I probably shouldn’t have written down my notes on the eGPU setup I had years ago.
I’d be lying if I...
4 months ago
I probably shouldn’t have written down my notes on the eGPU setup I had years ago.
I’d be lying if I wasn’t considering remaking this setup with everything I’ve learned 6 years later.
Oops.
I got access to an allegedly-faulty AMD Radeon RX 480 and an NVIDIA GTX 1650 for free...
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...
Louwrentius
How to resolve extreme memory usage on Windows 2008 R2-based file servers
I'm responsible for a file server with about 5 terrabytes of data. The file server is based on...
over a year ago
I'm responsible for a file server with about 5 terrabytes of data. The file server is based on Windows 2008 R2. I've noticed extreme memory usage on the server. After a reboot, it slowly builds up until almost all RAM memory is consumed.
So I googled around and found this post...
Willem's Blog
Monolithic vs Microservices software architecture
This week I flew to Gothenburg to talk about enterprise software architecture, read along to learn...
over a year ago
This week I flew to Gothenburg to talk about enterprise software architecture, read along to learn about choosing the right architecture for your app development
Good Enough
Thoughts On Thoughts
It’s time for a revolution. Too long have we, collectively and individually, been tyrannized by our...
a year ago
It’s time for a revolution. Too long have we, collectively and individually, been tyrannized by our thoughts and what we believe about them.
Or perhaps we can think of this as an intervention. This post is the circle of friends gathered to help us stop hitting ourselves in the...
Notes on software...
Implementing MVCC and major SQL transaction isolation levels
In this post we'll build a database in 400 lines of code with basic
support for five standard SQL...
7 months ago
In this post we'll build a database in 400 lines of code with basic
support for five standard SQL transaction levels: Read Uncommitted,
Read Committed, Repeatable Read, Snapshot Isolation and
Serializable. We'll use multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) and
optimistic...
Good Enough
Why We Built Quack (Beta)
Today we're launching a tiny beta tool called Quack. It is a simple utility for you to share a...
a year ago
Today we're launching a tiny beta tool called Quack. It is a simple utility for you to share a beautifully rendered version of any markdown text. Type away in our simple editor. When you're done writing, click Share to grab the link for sending to others. There are no servers in...
./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...
Louwrentius
Configuring SCST iSCSI target on Debian Linux (Wheezy)
My goal is to export ZFS zvol volumes through iSCSI to other machines. The platform I'm using is...
over a year ago
My goal is to export ZFS zvol volumes through iSCSI to other machines. The platform I'm using is Debian Wheezy.
There are three iSCSI target solutions available for Linux:
LIO
IET
SCST
I've briefly played with LIO but the targetcli tool is interactive only. If you want to...
Electronics etc…
Symbolic Reference and Hardware Models in Python
The Traditional Hardware Design and Verification Flow
An Image Downscaler as Example Design
The...
a week ago
The Traditional Hardware Design and Verification Flow
An Image Downscaler as Example Design
The Reference Model
The Micro-Architecture Model
Comparing the results
Conversion to Hardware
Combining symbolic models with random input generation
Specification changes
Things to...
Lighthouse Blog
How to stay on top of (new) content
7 months ago
Vitalik Buterin's...
Blockchain voting is overrated among uninformed people but underrated among informed people
over a year ago
Jonas Hietala
Zucchini Crabcakes
With a tiny bit more planning I made a dinner out the lessons 4 and 5 as the crabcakes were only...
over a year ago
With a tiny bit more planning I made a dinner out the lessons 4 and 5 as the crabcakes were only supposed to be an appetizer:
Crabcakes: Surprisingly delicious. Both me and Veronica gives them a 7.
Zucchini: While I thought they passed Veronica said “Zucchini is not my thing” and...
./techtipsy
About the time my ThinkPad T430 ran with an external GPU
The ThinkPad T430 is not a remarkable laptop. It’s thick, bulky and built like
a tank. I got mine in...
6 months ago
The ThinkPad T430 is not a remarkable laptop. It’s thick, bulky and built like
a tank. I got mine in 2016 when the first university scholarship money dropped,
and it’s still my backup laptop of choice.
Around 2017 I did something every reasonable poor computer science...
anderegg.ca
The “Home Alone” / “NiGHTS into Dreams” connection
NiGHTS into Dreams is one of those games I tend to think about when Christmas rolls around. It’s one...
3 weeks ago
NiGHTS into Dreams is one of those games I tend to think about when Christmas rolls around. It’s one of my favourites from the Saturn lineup, and it also had a free Christmas version.
In it, there’s a song I really love that plays on the level select screen called Gate of Your...
Birchtree
How Flight Simulator helped my flying anxiety (members post)
It turns out video games really can impact how you view the world.
3 weeks ago
It turns out video games really can impact how you view the world.
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...
a month 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,...
Yazin Alirhayim
Braindump
Been having a hard time lately focusing.
It’s like whenever I start doing anything of any...
over a year ago
Been having a hard time lately focusing.
It’s like whenever I start doing anything of any significance I get derailed, and fall into this spiral of thought where I reconsider whether what I’m about to do matters, why it would, and whether I could be doing something else that...
Willem's Blog
Your own addressbook and calendar cloud
You can setup a CardDAV/CalDAV server to manage your own contacts, addressbook, agenda and task data...
over a year ago
You can setup a CardDAV/CalDAV server to manage your own contacts, addressbook, agenda and task data and share it between your devices.
Posts on Made of...
Three kinds of memory leaks
So, you’ve got a program that’s using more and more over time as it runs. Probably you can...
over a year ago
So, you’ve got a program that’s using more and more over time as it runs. Probably you can immediately identify this as a likely symptom of a memory leak.
But when we say “memory leak”, what do we actually mean? In my experience, apparent memory leaks divide into three broad...
Lighthouse Blog
How to manage content subscriptions
7 months ago
Posts on Made of...
Why node.js is cool (it's not about performance)
For the past N months, it seems like there is no new technology stack that is either hotter or more...
over a year ago
For the past N months, it seems like there is no new technology stack that is either hotter or more controversial than node.js. node.js is cancer! node.js cures cancer! node.js is bad ass rock star tech!. I myself have given node.js a lot of shit, often involving the phrase...
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).
Ian's Blog
Securing Your GitHub Account
Let's talk about some of the simple & practical steps you can take to improve your GitHub account...
over a year ago
Let's talk about some of the simple & practical steps you can take to improve your GitHub account security.
There's plenty of good reasons why you should try to keep any online account safe, but I feel that GitHub deserves special attention among developers. With automation...
Louwrentius
The security risk of vendor-supplied default SSL certificates
Often, software comes supplied with some default SSL certificate, for testing
purposes, such as...
over a year ago
Often, software comes supplied with some default SSL certificate, for testing
purposes, such as those 'snake oil' certificates (they are called snake oil
certificates for a reason). In practice, I often encounter usage of such
certificates. People may seem to think that as long...
Good Enough
Season 1, Issue 3: Fool Me Three Times
This will be a short one. Barry’s summer vacation has started, and Shawn is deflated after the...
over a year ago
This will be a short one. Barry’s summer vacation has started, and Shawn is deflated after the Warr…iors... sob… It’s just one game, right?
1. No One Likes a Giveaway
Who doesn’t love a good pickle?
Well that didn’t happen. There were no entries to last week’s giveaway. If you...
Posts on Made of...
CVE-2010-4258: Turning denial-of-service into privilege escalation
Dan Rosenberg recently released a privilege escalation bug for Linux, based on three different...
over a year ago
Dan Rosenberg recently released a privilege escalation bug for Linux, based on three different kernel vulnerabilities I reported recently. This post is about CVE-2010-4258, the most interesting of them, and, as Dan writes, the reason he wrote the exploit in the first place. In...
Birchtree
2 weeks to go and I don't think I'll have to eat that AirPod
Last month I made the courageous promise that I would eat an AirPod if a 9to5Mac writer's prediction...
2 weeks ago
Last month I made the courageous promise that I would eat an AirPod if a 9to5Mac writer's prediction that "[b]efore the end of the year, I have no doubt Apple’s AI features—especially what’s coming in 18.2—will become
Birchtree
Apple’s 2024 report card: Apple Watch
This is the fourth in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2024 across their major product lines. I...
5 days ago
This is the fourth in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2024 across their major product lines. I did this last year and you can read last year’s Apple Watch report card here.
Series 10
It’s always fun when we get a new Apple
Home on Erik...
Subway waiting math
Why does it suck to wait for things? In a previous post I analyzed a NYC subway dataset and found...
over a year ago
Why does it suck to wait for things? In a previous post I analyzed a NYC subway dataset and found that at some point, quite early, it's worth just giving up.
This isn't a proof that the subway doesn't run on time – in fact it might actually proves that the subway runs really...
Jonas Hietala
Bitcoin's security isn't binary
I’d like to address a misconception that’s at the core in many Bitcoin discussions lately: Bitcoin’s...
over a year ago
I’d like to address a misconception that’s at the core in many Bitcoin discussions lately: Bitcoin’s security isn’t binary. In fact security in general isn’t black and white. It’s a trade-off being secure enough for your threat model vs the cost and feasibility of your...
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...
Louwrentius
How to run victron veconfigure on a mac
Introduction
Victron Multiplus-II inverter/charges are configured with the veconfigure1 tool....
10 months ago
Introduction
Victron Multiplus-II inverter/charges are configured with the veconfigure1 tool. Unforntunately this is a Windows-only tool, but there is still a way for Apple users to run this tool without any problems.
Tip: if you've never worked with the Terminal app on MacOS, it...
Home on Erik...
hdfs2cass
Just open sourced hdfs2cass which is a Hadoop job (written in Java) to do efficient Cassandra...
over a year ago
Just open sourced hdfs2cass which is a Hadoop job (written in Java) to do efficient Cassandra bulkloading. The nice thing is that it queries Cassandra for its topology and uses that to partition the data so that each reducer can upload data directly to a Cassandra node.
Louwrentius
Is storage really that cheap?
Nowadays you can buy a 1 TB harddrive for less than 100 euro's . So I build
myself a 4 TB NAS box,...
over a year ago
Nowadays you can buy a 1 TB harddrive for less than 100 euro's . So I build
myself a 4 TB NAS box, which is already 50% full. However, although it is to
some degree fault-tollerant by using RAID 6, one mistake or catastrophic
hardware faillure and all data is lost.
And that's...
Louwrentius
Linode hacked: the dark side of cloud hosting
Linode has released an update about the security incident first reported
on April 12, 2013.
The...
over a year ago
Linode has released an update about the security incident first reported
on April 12, 2013.
The Linode Manager is the environment where you control your virtual private servers and where you pay for services. This is the environment that got compromised.
Linode uses Adobe's...
Home on Erik...
Optimizing over multinomial distributions
Sometimes you have to maximize some function $$ f(w_1, w_2, ldots, w_n) $$ where $$ w_1 + w_2 +...
over a year ago
Sometimes you have to maximize some function $$ f(w_1, w_2, ldots, w_n) $$ where $$ w_1 + w_2 + ldots + w_n = 1 $$ and $$ 0 le w_i le 1 $$ . Usually, $$ f $$ is concave and differentiable, so there's one unique global maximum and you can solve it by applying gradient ascent.
Arduino Blog
Using Arduino with gaming
It’s not surprising that the Arduino community is packed to the brim with examples of gaming-related...
2 months ago
It’s not surprising that the Arduino community is packed to the brim with examples of gaming-related projects. Both activities tend to attract people with a love for problem-solving, technology, and getting immersed in one challenging activity for hours at a time. The result is...
Jonas Hietala
2020 in review
And so 2020 has come to an end. On a global scale it’s been quite a horrible year, and for me...
over a year ago
And so 2020 has come to an end. On a global scale it’s been quite a horrible year, and for me personally it’s been both good and bad. Luckily we haven’t been directly affected by COVID too much, but it’s still been very disruptive. Either way as I’ve done for years now it always...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Review of Optimism retro funding round 1
over a year ago
Arduino Blog
This perplexing robotic performer operates under the control of three different Arduino boards
Every decade or two, humanity seems to develop a renewed interest in humanoid robots and their...
2 months ago
Every decade or two, humanity seems to develop a renewed interest in humanoid robots and their potential within our world. Because the practical applications are actually pretty limited (given the high cost), we inevitably begin to consider how those robots might function as...
Jonas Hietala
Postmortem: A Geek Valentine
Ah man the mush in my brain is finally letting go and I’m starting to feel this tiny little...
over a year ago
Ah man the mush in my brain is finally letting go and I’m starting to feel this tiny little programming urge again… This time it’s not Haskell or a new experimental game that’s luring me on, no this time it’s me longing to create this fantastic awesome epic RTS game. Sadly it’s a...
./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
Let's build a VORON: Smaller fixes
I’ve been busy.
Busy printing stuff.
Which is awesome, because one big worry I had was if I’d...
11 months ago
I’ve been busy.
Busy printing stuff.
Which is awesome, because one big worry I had was if I’d actually use the printer or just end up modding and tweaking it until the end of time.
But of course, I’ve been slowly working through my large mods-I-want list.
My initial plan was to...
Birchtree
I’m Knee-Deep in Turkey
Another week, another fantastically fun episode of Comfort Zone! This week Niléane talked about her...
3 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
Home on Erik...
Why software projects take longer than you think: a statistical model
Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is...
over a year ago
Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It's hard to come up with an unbiased estimate of how long something will take, when fundamentally the work in itself is about solving something.
Old Vintage...
xa (xa65) 2.4.1
A quick one: xa (xa65), André Fachat's compatible fast two-pass cross-assembler for 6502, 65C02,...
10 months ago
A quick one: xa (xa65), André Fachat's compatible fast two-pass cross-assembler for 6502, 65C02, R65C02 and 65816 processors that André and I maintain is now at version 2.4.1. This optionally expands the syntax from 2.4.0 and fixes some bugs primarily with relocatable .o65...
seangoedecke.com RSS...
How LLMs work
Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing around with the excellent llama2.c repository, which is...
a year ago
Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing around with the excellent llama2.c repository, which is basically a simple one-file C…
Odds and Ends of...
Nobody knows what the National Data Library is (not even the government)
A policy wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma
2 months ago
A policy wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma
Lars Lofgren
What Happened After I Outed a Reddit Mod for Affiliate Spam
I recently broke down how Reddit mods and users are abusing Google search rankings with affiliate...
3 months ago
I recently broke down how Reddit mods and users are abusing Google search rankings with affiliate spam. It’s reddit marketing gone awry. The post blew up and got a decent amount of attention. Then I got a front row seat to how deep of a spam filled porta-potty Reddit has become....
Engineers Need Art
Soft Dorothy Software — Shareware Projects
Wherein I attempt to recover and restore old shareware code and program again like it's 1989.
4 months ago
Wherein I attempt to recover and restore old shareware code and program again like it's 1989.
Notes on software...
Make small changes and solve the problems you have
Two frustrating things that can happen in an organization are 1) big
changes and 2) changes that...
over a year ago
Two frustrating things that can happen in an organization are 1) big
changes and 2) changes that aren’t clearly associated with a known
problem. It’s even worse in that order.
These situations tend to happen when a problem remain unaddressed for
too long. These situations tend to...
Louwrentius
Switching away from Debian to Ubuntu LTS
Over the last couple of years, Debian Linux has released new stable versions about every two years....
over a year ago
Over the last couple of years, Debian Linux has released new stable versions about every two years. This pace is great for progress, but there is a serious problem. This problem is related to their support for older Debian stable versions.
If you read the quote below from the...
Willem's Blog
Riding with Omata One
If you're looking for an alternative for common cycling computers, the Omata One is something truely...
over a year ago
If you're looking for an alternative for common cycling computers, the Omata One is something truely special: it indicates your speed, distance, ascent and time ridden using mechanical hands!
Home on Erik...
More Luigi!
Continuing in the same spirit of shameless self-promotion, here's some recent Luigi press:
Reddit...
over a year ago
Continuing in the same spirit of shameless self-promotion, here's some recent Luigi press:
Reddit thread A Guide to Python Frameworks for Hadoop (slides from the NYC Hadoop User Group) This presentation from the Open Analytics NYC meetup about how Foursquare uses Luigi Luigi...
Louwrentius
Cryptocurrencies are detrimental to society
Want to listen to this article?
audio element.
Introduction
How would you explain the inner...
over a year ago
Want to listen to this article?
audio element.
Introduction
How would you explain the inner workings of bitcoin to a person in simple, understandable terms?
source
This explanation seems perfect to me because it illustrates some seriously problematic aspects of...
GitButler
Git Merge 2024
Git Merge 2024 has wrapped and we all had a heck of a good time. Here's the overview.
3 months ago
Git Merge 2024 has wrapped and we all had a heck of a good time. Here's the overview.
Notes on software...
What's the big deal about Deterministic Simulation Testing?
Bugs in distributed systems are hard to find, largely because systems
interact in chaotic ways. And...
4 months ago
Bugs in distributed systems are hard to find, largely because systems
interact in chaotic ways. And even once you've found a bug, it can be
anywhere from simple to impossible to reproduce it. It's about as far
away as you can get from the ideal test environment: property...
Notes on software...
React without webpack: fast path to a working app from scratch
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.
Jonas Hietala
Generating ideas
So I got a fairly fun assignment from the game design course I’m taking for once. I should come up...
over a year ago
So I got a fairly fun assignment from the game design course I’m taking for once. I should come up with 50 ideas using my own idea generation technique.
I used a sort of “notes in the basket” approach where you placed some notes with words in a basket and randomly drew two and...
Abort Retry Fail
The History of Windows 2.0
Success and Litigation
a year ago
Old Vintage...
Virtualizing the 6502 on a 6502 with 6o6 (and The Incredible KIMplement goes 1.0)
Okay, promises, promises. Here's the first of my bucket list projects I'm completing which I've...
8 months ago
Okay, promises, promises. Here's the first of my bucket list projects I'm completing which I've intermittently worked on for literally two decades. Now that I've finally shaken out more bugs, tuned it up and cleaned it off, it's time to let people play with the source...
Louwrentius
Why I bought a digital projector (Panasonic PT-AT5000E)
I don't have a TV. I haven't been watching TV for more than 10 years. But I love to watch movies or...
over a year ago
I don't have a TV. I haven't been watching TV for more than 10 years. But I love to watch movies or great series like Dexter and Game of Thrones. Until recently, I watched movies or series on my 27" iMac. Twenty-seven inch is large for a computer screen but for a TV, it's quite...
Louwrentius
Creating configuration backups of HP procurve switches
I've created a tool called procurve-watch. It creates a backup of the running switch configuration...
over a year ago
I've created a tool called procurve-watch. It creates a backup of the running switch configuration through secure shell (using scp).
It also diffs backed up configurations against older versions, in order to keep track of changes. If you run the script from cron every hour or...
Arduino Blog
An ultra-affordable DIY underwater ROV
ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) let us explore bodies of water and it is hard not to be excited by...
7 months ago
ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) let us explore bodies of water and it is hard not to be excited by the possibilities. But traditional ROVs cost a lot of money and often require serious expertise to operate and maintain. Luckily there are affordable alternatives, such as this...
GitButler
GitButler for Windows
The GitButler client is now available natively on Windows.
8 months ago
The GitButler client is now available natively on Windows.
./techtipsy
Anything's a portable speaker if you're brave enough
I hate buying things that are single-purpose, which is why I ended up with this
setup.
Take a...
over a year ago
I hate buying things that are single-purpose, which is why I ended up with this
setup.
Take a speaker, a battery, put them together, and what you now have is a
portable speaker. Since I had access to both, I felt no need to buy a separate
portable speaker for use in social...
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...
Willem's Blog
Impact of training
Join me on an intriguing journey as I explore the transformative impact of effective training and...
a year ago
Join me on an intriguing journey as I explore the transformative impact of effective training and data analysis on my performance in the Fietselfstedentocht 2023.
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.
Azad's Blog
Apple Vision Pro—A Revolution for Home Video Formats
Apple has always been at the forefront of home video with Apple TV (the device), iTunes Movies,...
3 months ago
Apple has always been at the forefront of home video with Apple TV (the device), iTunes Movies, Spatial Audio, and the vivid displays of iPhones, iPads, and Mac displays. With Apple Vision Pro, Apple is once again pushing the boundaries of the movie watching experience by...
Applied Cartography
Typesafe routes in Vue
I watched Gary Bernhardt's talk on static routing back a few years ago and — I'm not sure if I would...
6 months ago
I watched Gary Bernhardt's talk on static routing back a few years ago and — I'm not sure if I would call it formative, but it stuck in my craw as a platonic ideal of sorts, as something I couldn't really justify adopting within Buttondown but really wanted.
I built out and...
Home on Erik...
Better precision and faster index building in Annoy
Sometimes you have these awesome insights. A few days ago I got an idea for how to improve index...
over a year ago
Sometimes you have these awesome insights. A few days ago I got an idea for how to improve index building in Annoy.
For anyone who isn't acquainted with Annoy – it's a C++ library with Python bindings that provides fast high-dimensional nearest neighbor search.
Home on Erik...
The hardest challenge about becoming a manager
Note: this post is full of pseudo-psychology and highly speculative content. Like most fun stuff!
I...
over a year ago
Note: this post is full of pseudo-psychology and highly speculative content. Like most fun stuff!
I became a manager back in 2009. Being a developer is fun. You have this very tangible way to measure yourself.
Applied Cartography
Use Rails
I have a good number of people ask me what software stack they should use. I always have a two-part...
8 months ago
I have a good number of people ask me what software stack they should use. I always have a two-part answer:
Use what you're familiar with. If there's something that you've spent a good amount of time using, stick with that one.
Rails. People are usually surprised when I say this...
./techtipsy
Database optimization adventures on low-end hardware
I used to work on a short-term project a while ago where the goal was to visualize some metrics that...
over a year ago
I used to work on a short-term project a while ago where the goal was to visualize some metrics that were collected from
a pretty fancy smart home setup. This data included power usage of various sections of the building, temperature
sensors, water usage levels and more. The data...
Willem's Blog
Wearing Grand Seiko
I am glad I took the opportunity to wear a Grand Seiko, learning first hand about its craftsmanship,...
over a year ago
I am glad I took the opportunity to wear a Grand Seiko, learning first hand about its craftsmanship, innovation and practicality.
Home on Erik...
How to build up a data team (everything I ever learned about recruiting)
During my time at Spotify, I've reviewed thousands of resumes and interviewed hundreds of people....
over a year ago
During my time at Spotify, I've reviewed thousands of resumes and interviewed hundreds of people. Lots of them were rejected but lots of them also got offers. Finally, I've also had my share of offers rejected by the candidate.
./techtipsy
DIY cloud gaming: NVIDIA and Moonlight
As you might have read from my previous post on this topic, I
have a pretty neat “cloud” gaming...
over a year ago
As you might have read from my previous post on this topic, I
have a pretty neat “cloud” gaming setup running. I have one powerful desktop PC, one virtual machine with a GPU attached
to it, and client machines that can be used to stream games from. To keep things simple (and...
Willem's Blog
Clouds below my floor
Building a little datacenter in my basement utilising a very fast internet connection.
over a year ago
Building a little datacenter in my basement utilising a very fast internet connection.
Posts on Made of...
autocutsel
As most of you probably know, X has several different mechanisms for copy-paste, used by different...
over a year ago
As most of you probably know, X has several different mechanisms for copy-paste, used by different applications in different ways. I know some people who use them deliberately, juggling two pieces of text in different clipboards at once, but for me, it’s always just been...
Odds and Ends of...
Odds and Ends #48: The most important week of Labour government so far?
Plus a British tech unicorn, a nuclear energy ticking time bomb and... New Zealand's weird...
a week ago
Plus a British tech unicorn, a nuclear energy ticking time bomb and... New Zealand's weird Parliament.
./techtipsy
Life is maintenance, maintenance is life
Over my relatively short career (6+ years), I’ve noticed a change in the way I approach building...
a year ago
Over my relatively short career (6+ years), I’ve noticed a change in the way I approach building things.
When I was still an inexperienced junior developer who barely survived operating in a Linux
environment and saw backend development as a black box, I was happy to get...
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...
Avestura's Blog
Understanding zero-knowledge proofs
What are zero-knowledge proofs, really?
over a year ago
What are zero-knowledge proofs, really?
./techtipsy
TOMO M4: probably the coolest power bank I've owned
A friend once showed me a power bank that was so cool that I had to get one
myself. Ended up getting...
a year ago
A friend once showed me a power bank that was so cool that I had to get one
myself. Ended up getting two, and here’s why.
This post is not sponsored.
Removable batteries
Let’s start with the feature that I appreciate the most: removable batteries!
The TOMO M4 accepts up to 4...
Computer Ads from...
Comics from 1982/02 Creative Computing Mag
Time for some humor
7 months ago
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...
Bryan Braun - Blog
The flood of AI website builders
There are so many of them.
instead of markdown to enable lazy-loading -->
How good...
8 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...
Willem's Blog
Using AI to generate code
Discover how AI-generated code can revolutionise your software development process and optimise...
a year ago
Discover how AI-generated code can revolutionise your software development process and optimise cloud performance in our fascinating exploration of GPT-4's transformative capabilities.
computers are bad
2024-11-09 iron mountain atomic storage
I have quipped before about "underground datacenters," and how they never
succeed. During the late...
a month ago
I have quipped before about "underground datacenters," and how they never
succeed. During the late decades of the Cold War and even into the '00s, the
military and (to a lesser extent) the telecommunications industry parted ways
with a great number of underground facilities....
Christian Selig
Choosing a travel pack is hard
I love the “carry-on only” traveling style, it’s cheaper and you don’t have to worry about airlines...
8 months ago
I love the “carry-on only” traveling style, it’s cheaper and you don’t have to worry about airlines losing your stuff. Outside of requiring a bit more planning, what’s not to love?
Turns out this is a beloved product category with a passionate community behind it, and as a result...
Arduino Blog
Improve indoor air quality with Arduino
When we think about air quality and pollution, it’s easy to conjure up images of smog-filled cities...
8 months ago
When we think about air quality and pollution, it’s easy to conjure up images of smog-filled cities and power plants churning clouds of poison into the atmosphere. And while all this is still important, and has massive consequences for our health, it’s all too easy to overlook...
Jonas Hietala
Going down
Ah my first game was so painless so I thought I could do any game I could imagine! Shooters, and...
over a year ago
Ah my first game was so painless so I thought I could do any game I could imagine! Shooters, and mario bros kinda stuff. Well now I’m not so upbeat anymore, I’ve worked on this game for 7 days now and it’s not playable at all. With seven days I don’t mean a week, I’ve had a big...
Louwrentius
I switched my blog from Blogofile to Pelican
This blog is a static website, which makes it fast, simple and secure. It was generated by Blogofile...
over a year ago
This blog is a static website, which makes it fast, simple and secure. It was generated by Blogofile but I switched to Pelican.
Blogofile has seen almost no updates over the years and I consider the project dead. Realising that blogofile is dead, I decided to look around for...
Home on Erik...
The eigenvector of "Why we moved from language X to language Y"
I was reading yet another blog post titled “Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y>” (I...
over a year ago
I was reading yet another blog post titled “Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y>” (I forgot which one) and I started wondering if you can generalize it a bit. Is it possible to generate a N * N contingency table of moving from language X to language Y?
csvbase blog
How does it know I want csv? — An HTTP trick
Forgotten parts of RFC2616
a year ago
Forgotten parts of RFC2616
Louwrentius
Release of PPSS - the Parallel Processing Shell Script
PPSS is a shell script that processess files or other items in parallel. It is
designed to make use...
over a year ago
PPSS is a shell script that processess files or other items in parallel. It is
designed to make use of the current multi-core CPUs. It will detect the number
of available CPUs and start a thread for each CPU core.
This script is build with the goal to be very easy to use. Also,...
Jonas Hietala
Rising from the Dead, it's Ludum Dare
I’ve been a long time gone, been busy with school then having summer vacation and generally not...
over a year ago
I’ve been a long time gone, been busy with school then having summer vacation and generally not making games or blogging. But I have revived! I scrambled to push my new website live because today it’s Ludum Dare time! The theme is “Evolution” and it’s the 24th time for Ludum Dare...
Computer Ads from...
Comics from 1985/12 Australian Personal Computer Mag
Some computer related levity from OZ
3 weeks ago
Some computer related levity from OZ
Willem's Blog
Swimming and cycling with Apple Watch
This month I tested the newest watchOS while swimming and cycling.
over a year ago
This month I tested the newest watchOS while swimming and cycling.
Home on Erik...
MCMC for marketing data
The other day I was looking at marketing spend broken down by channel and wanted to compute some...
over a year ago
The other day I was looking at marketing spend broken down by channel and wanted to compute some simple uncertainty estimates. I have data like this:
<th> Total spend </th> <th> Transactions </th> Channel A <td> 2292.
Avestura's Blog
How to change visibility in massive GitHub organizations like EpicGames?
How to publicize and un-publicize your visibility in massive GitHub orgs?
over a year ago
How to publicize and un-publicize your visibility in massive GitHub orgs?
Home on Erik...
ML+Hadoop at NYC Predictive Analytics
I was just at the NYC Predictive Analytics meetup talking about how we build machine learning...
over a year ago
I was just at the NYC Predictive Analytics meetup talking about how we build machine learning algorithms using Hadoop to power music recommendations.
Great meetup, where we had two speakers, me and Blake Shaw from Foursquare.
Louwrentius
How traffic shaping can dramatically improve internet responsiveness
At work, access to the internet is provided by a 10 Mbit down / 1 Mbit up ADSL-connection. As we are...
over a year ago
At work, access to the internet is provided by a 10 Mbit down / 1 Mbit up ADSL-connection. As we are a mid-size company, bandwidth is clearly a severe constraint. But it was not our biggest problem. Even simple web-browsing was very slow.
As I was setting up a monitoring...
Birchtree
The future simply has more computers (members post)
Glasses and headsets and computers, oh my! Why the future continues to be all about adding computers...
2 weeks ago
Glasses and headsets and computers, oh my! Why the future continues to be all about adding computers to our lives, not replacing anything.
Arduino Blog
Introducing Arduino Academy: your path to becoming an Arduino-Certified Engineer begins!
Want to upgrade your skills and become a certified Arduino engineer? Welcome to the Arduino Academy,...
2 months ago
Want to upgrade your skills and become a certified Arduino engineer? Welcome to the Arduino Academy, the go-to platform for hands-on, interactive learning designed to prepare you for the future of technology. Whether you’re just starting or looking to advance your career, the...
computers are bad
2023-07-29 Free Public WiFi
Remember Free Public WiFi?
Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree...
a year ago
Remember Free Public WiFi?
Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza
in Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was
directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service, and as a high school
student I was not...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Why Proof of Stake (Nov 2020)
over a year ago
Willem's Blog
Search like a pro: Google search operators
Read along for a comprehensive list of advanced Google search operators that allow you to filter...
over a year ago
Read along for a comprehensive list of advanced Google search operators that allow you to filter your search results.
Willem's Blog
Whoop strap review: 24/7 wearable sensor
over a year ago
Willem's Blog
Refining my tablet OS experience
Installing Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go 2 with LTE/4G to replace my iPad Pro as daily driver.
over a year ago
Installing Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go 2 with LTE/4G to replace my iPad Pro as daily driver.
Home on Erik...
ML at Twitter
I recently came across this paper describing how they do ML at Twitter.
TL;DR Their approach is...
over a year ago
I recently came across this paper describing how they do ML at Twitter.
TL;DR Their approach is pretty interesting. Everything is a Pig workflow and then they do everything as UDF's.
This approach seems pretty interesting.
Applied Cartography
Migrating to Django 5
The total LOC delta to migrate Buttondown from Django 4 to Django 5 was +143, -150. (I was...
2 months ago
The total LOC delta to migrate Buttondown from Django 4 to Django 5 was +143, -150. (I was incentivized to do so because our search right now is quite slow, and the lowest hanging piece of fruit is to move some of the tsvector generation out of band, and I'd rather do that using...
Jonas Hietala
A friendly game of Twilight Imperium
A few weeks ago I played my first game of Twilight Imperium (Fourth Edition). It was fantastic.
We...
over a year ago
A few weeks ago I played my first game of Twilight Imperium (Fourth Edition). It was fantastic.
We were six players, most had played the third edition before. As I was quite hyped before the game, I had read up on the rules, watched a let’s play or two and listened to a podcast...
Vitalik Buterin's...
El recurso escaso más importante es la legitimidad
over a year ago
Jonas Hietala
Computer upgrade
After 5 years or so I’ve made a large upgrade to my desktop, and this post contains details and some...
a year ago
After 5 years or so I’ve made a large upgrade to my desktop, and this post contains details and some pictures about the process.
It was time
I didn’t really want to do an upgrade right now, but I felt I had to do it.
Sometimes the lag had gotten very noticeable, for example when...
Louwrentius
Why Debian/Ubuntu Linux is to be preferred
There are many Linux distributions around. However, I always come back to just
one: Debian. The...
over a year ago
There are many Linux distributions around. However, I always come back to just
one: Debian. The reason why so many people use Debian is the same reason I
like it so much: software management. With good old apt-get or the new
aptitude, software is installed within minutes. Due to...
heavymeta.org
CrowdStrike's Impact on Aviation
Just after midnight Eastern Time on July 19, 2024, the enterprise cybersecurity
company CrowdStrike...
5 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...
lcamtuf’s thing
Shining light on photodiodes
Photodiodes are incredibly versatile, but commonly misused and misunderstood.
2 months ago
Photodiodes are incredibly versatile, but commonly misused and misunderstood.
Ian's Blog
Having a Website Used to Be Fun
According to the Wayback Machine, I launched my website over a decade ago, in 2013. Just that...
2 months ago
According to the Wayback Machine, I launched my website over a decade ago, in 2013. Just that thought alone makes me feel old, but going back through the old snapshots of my websites made me feel a profound feeling of longing for a time when having a website used to be a novel...
Jonas Hietala
Let's build a VORON: Wrap-up
It’s finally done™.
I’ve built a VORON that prints reliably and I’ve modded it enough to be able to...
10 months ago
It’s finally done™.
I’ve built a VORON that prints reliably and I’ve modded it enough to be able to leave it alone for a while, so I think it’s time to wrap up this build series with a little retrospective.
Building the printer was really fun and rewarding
I’ve always seen...
Willem's Blog
The joy of a simple laptop
This week I tested the Surface Laptop Go with Windows 10 and quite frankly was amazed by the...
over a year ago
This week I tested the Surface Laptop Go with Windows 10 and quite frankly was amazed by the experience!
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...
Jonas Hietala
Focusing Attention: Drawing
In my last post I wrote about some ideas and projects I have and how it’s a little bit too much at a...
over a year ago
In my last post I wrote about some ideas and projects I have and how it’s a little bit too much at a time, so now I’m going to try something new here. In the beginning of every week I’ll declare something I’ll be focusing on and then that’s the only thing I should focus on on my...
Notes on software...
A minimal RocksDB example with Zig
I mostly programmed in Go the last few years. So every time I
wanted an embedded key-value database,...
over a year ago
I mostly programmed in Go the last few years. So every time I
wanted an embedded key-value database, I reached for Cockroach's
Pebble.
Pebble is great for Go programming but Go does not embed well into
other languages. Pebble was inspired by
RocksDB (and its...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Updating my blog: a quick GPT chatbot coding experiment
over a year ago
Jonas Hietala
We moved away from the city
When me and my girlfriend Veronica moved to Linköping to study at the University the plan was never...
over a year ago
When me and my girlfriend Veronica moved to Linköping to study at the University the plan was never to stay there permanently. We just moved there to study but the longterm plan, if you can have one at that stage, was always to move back to the north of Sweden where we came...
anderegg.ca
How decentralized is Bluesky really?
Here’s an excellent article from Christine Lemmer-Webber that takes a deeper technical look into...
a month ago
Here’s an excellent article from Christine Lemmer-Webber that takes a deeper technical look into some of the criticisms I had in my previous piece.
The article is long, but very much worth a read. From the conclusion:
Bluesky is built by good people who care, and it is providing...
Construction Physics
Energy Cheat Sheet
Building an intuition about energy
a week ago
Building an intuition about energy
Odds and Ends of...
Four big US election takes: Yes, it was the woke stuff.
Plus how to know when the Democrats are taking their problems seriously, the one good thing Trump...
a month ago
Plus how to know when the Democrats are taking their problems seriously, the one good thing Trump might do, and why the polls were right
Construction Physics
Born Sleeping
A personal post about the loss of our son
3 months ago
A personal post about the loss of our son
Electronics etc…
ThinMachine - a $25 Thin Client MacOS Time Machine Appliance
The instructions below set up Time Machine using the Apple File Protocol
(AFP). After publishing...
a year ago
The instructions below set up Time Machine using the Apple File Protocol
(AFP). After publishing this blog post, I’ve been told that this is now
deprecated and that Samba should be used instead. I’ll update this blog
post in the near future.
Introduction
The HP t520 Thin...
Applied Cartography
Hypermodern Django
I've been on the hunt for a new way to dogfood Buttondown for the past month or so, and I've finally...
2 weeks ago
I've been on the hunt for a new way to dogfood Buttondown for the past month or so, and I've finally found it: Hypermodern Django.
At this point, all of my/our usages of Buttondown for Buttondown don't involve archives: we're using it headlessly, with RSS-to-email and APIs...
Willem's Blog
Removing paint from a bike frame
Using dichloromethane and sanding paper I removed the paint from my bike frame to create a minimal,...
over a year ago
Using dichloromethane and sanding paper I removed the paint from my bike frame to create a minimal, raw aluminium look.
./techtipsy
HoloISO: the unofficial Steam Deck experience on your PC
If you have spent any time in gaming hardware circles, then you’ve probably
heard about the Steam...
over a year ago
If you have spent any time in gaming hardware circles, then you’ve probably
heard about the Steam Deck, the
Linux-based handheld gaming PC built by Valve. Yes, you heard that right: not
Windows, but Linux.
I’ve had my fair share of attempts at gaming on Linux. When it works,...
Abort Retry Fail
Housekeeping for 20240102
Some stats, updates, and whatnot
a year ago
Some stats, updates, and whatnot
Jonas Hietala
Let's build a VORON: Printing & Tuning
It’s up and running, and now it’s finally printing time!
Less exciting—but necessary—tuning the...
a year ago
It’s up and running, and now it’s finally printing time!
Less exciting—but necessary—tuning the printer to make the prints better.
Filament shipment
Even though I’ve been building the printer for more than a month, I wasn’t ready for it being time for printing so soon.
I don’t...
Neil Madden
Parse, don’t type-check
There’s a fantastic article from last year titled Parse, don’t validate. I’d highly recommend it to...
over a year ago
There’s a fantastic article from last year titled Parse, don’t validate. I’d highly recommend it to any programmer (along with the more recent follow up Names are not type safety). The basic idea is that there are two ways to check that some input to a function is valid: A...
Home on Erik...
How to hire smarter than the market: a toy model
Let's consider a toy model where you're hiring for two things and that those are equally valuable....
over a year ago
Let's consider a toy model where you're hiring for two things and that those are equally valuable. It's not very important what those are, so let's just call them “thing A” and “thing B” for now.
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...
7 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...
Louwrentius
WFS - WAN Failover Script now available
Since I could not find a WAN failover script for Linux to my likening, I wrote
one myself. If you...
over a year ago
Since I could not find a WAN failover script for Linux to my likening, I wrote
one myself. If you have any use for it: I put it on a Google code project.
WFS tests the availability of your primary WAN connection and switches to your
secondary / backup connection when a failure is...
Applied Cartography
Notes from May
Lots of writing this month:
Why you should use Rails
A reminder that things take time
How...
7 months ago
Lots of writing this month:
Why you should use Rails
A reminder that things take time
How shadcn/ui's previews work
Why I hate that 1.01% meme
A lovely term, 'grace note'
Au revoir, invoke!
A quick check-in on 11ty
A rant/snippet for auth.js
The first edition of what will be a...
Good Enough
TIL: Fixing Broken Social Share Images in Twitter/X
I have an admission to make.
Social share images for Pika were broken on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and...
a month ago
I have an admission to make.
Social share images for Pika were broken on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and Apple Messages for months.
And it made me sad.
But in the past few months we got it fixed.
And that made me very happy!
We really love our Pika social share images.
They are...
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...
Computer Ads from...
Sundial Systems' Relish
The Premier Workplace Shell Calendar, Phone Book, To Do List, and Program Runner, too
3 months ago
The Premier Workplace Shell Calendar, Phone Book, To Do List, and Program Runner, too
Arduino Blog
Galco goes Platinum! Welcome our newest SIPP
Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Madison Heights, Michigan, Galco is a leading e-commerce...
8 months ago
Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Madison Heights, Michigan, Galco is a leading e-commerce distributor that specializes in providing a wide range of industrial and commercial electrical and electronic products, focusing on maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO). Known for...
Arduino Blog
Exploring Alvik: 3 fun and creative projects with Arduino’s educational robot platform
Alvik is cute, it’s smart, it’s fun… so what can it actually do? To answer this question, we...
2 weeks ago
Alvik is cute, it’s smart, it’s fun… so what can it actually do? To answer this question, we decided to have fun and put the robot to the test with some of the most creative people we know – our own team! A dozen Arduino employees volunteered for a dedicated Make Tank session...
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...
Louwrentius
Do not buy a hardware RAID controller for home use
Hardware RAID controllers are considered 'the best' solution for high
performance and high...
over a year ago
Hardware RAID controllers are considered 'the best' solution for high
performance and high availability. However, this is not entirely true. Using a
hardware RAID controller might even endanger your precious data.
For enterprise environments, where performance is critical, it is...
Applied Cartography
Notes on ActivityPub
By far the single most-fruitful tactic has been "just look at raw GET responses from Mastodon and...
7 months ago
By far the single most-fruitful tactic has been "just look at raw GET responses from Mastodon and see what things are shaped like." I know that "ActivityPub is under-specified" is a bit of a meme, but it's wild how little prior art there is.
Something that gives distinctly bad...
Arduino Blog
A beautiful custom calculator built with IV-12 VFD tubes
Nixie tubes have been the go-to option for makers looking for retro display aesthetics for many...
7 months ago
Nixie tubes have been the go-to option for makers looking for retro display aesthetics for many years, because their distinct orange glow carries a lot of vintage appeal. But VFD (vacuum fluorescent display) tubes have been gaining in popularity recently and have different —...
Good Enough
TIL: Use randomness to prevent email trimming
With conversation threading (which almost everyone has enabled), Gmail was trimming the bottom of...
a year ago
With conversation threading (which almost everyone has enabled), Gmail was trimming the bottom of the emails we send with our new app because they were too similar to the other emails in the conversation thread.
They’re similar because that’s just the link to get back into the...
Louwrentius
Linux: script that creates table of network interface properties
My server has 5 network interfaces and I wanted a quick overview of some properties. There may be an...
over a year ago
My server has 5 network interfaces and I wanted a quick overview of some properties. There may be an existing linux command for this but I couldn't find it so I quickly wrote my
own script (download).
This is the output:
The only requirement for this script is that you have...
Home on Erik...
I'm featured in Mashable
This article from today in Mashable describes some of the fun stuff I get to work with:
Erik...
over a year ago
This article from today in Mashable describes some of the fun stuff I get to work with:
Erik Bernhardsson is technical lead at Spotify, where he helped to build a music recommendation system based on large-scale machine learning algorithms, mainly matrix factorization of big...
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...
GitButler
Why GitHub Actually Won
How GitHub _actually_ became the dominant force it is today, from one of it's cofounders.
3 months ago
How GitHub _actually_ became the dominant force it is today, from one of it's cofounders.
Jonas Hietala
An invisible Remake
What does a guy like me do when not working on a new game? Except living my life, being a coach for...
over a year ago
What does a guy like me do when not working on a new game? Except living my life, being a coach for my little brother’s hockey team and eating strawberries? The last week or so I’ve been working hard with my webpage, yes this page. If you’ve visited my site before today you’ll...
Abort Retry Fail
The History of Red Hat
The Billion Dollar Open Source Company
a year ago
The Billion Dollar Open Source Company
./techtipsy
The best laptop is the one somebody else had
In 2011, I was finishing 9th grade. As a gift, I got to choose a laptop in the
400 EUR range. I...
2 months ago
In 2011, I was finishing 9th grade. As a gift, I got to choose a laptop in the
400 EUR range. I ended up picking
an ASUS Eee PC 1201PN. It was new and the
first computer in my life that was 100% mine, but awfully slow for a lot of tasks.
It was so slow that I ended up giving...
Good Enough
Season 3, Issue 4: Cosmic Staggering Tortoises
1. Weekly Studio Update
Hello. We're going to try doing this newsletter thing regularly. The...
a year ago
1. Weekly Studio Update
Hello. We're going to try doing this newsletter thing regularly. The ambitious goal is to write you a lovely letter every week. Aim for the moon, right? But wait, if you aim for the moon, how in this physical world can you possibly hit a star by...
Louwrentius
FFmpeg performance on a Core i7 920 @ 3.6 Ghz
The system i'm running is a Core i7 920 @ 3.6 Ghz.
I am transcoding a DVD (Grave Of The Fire Flies)...
over a year ago
The system i'm running is a Core i7 920 @ 3.6 Ghz.
I am transcoding a DVD (Grave Of The Fire Flies) to iPod format (640x480
x264).
Thread support is enabled, to FFmpeg uses about 250% CPU. That's 2.5 of the 4
cores available. If possible, I would have liked to see it use all four...
Vitalik Buterin's...
The Limits to Blockchain Scalability
over a year ago
Arduino Blog
This disturbing Halloween doll was brought to life with Bottango
Halloween is popular for a lot of reasons and it is safe to say that “creative expression” is near...
2 months ago
Halloween is popular for a lot of reasons and it is safe to say that “creative expression” is near the top of the list. That extends beyond store-bought costumes and decorations to DIY projects. If you want an excuse to make something impractical, Halloween can provide that. And...
Notes on software...
An effective product manager
There are three specific activities I have loved in some product
managers I've worked with (and...
a year ago
There are three specific activities I have loved in some product
managers I've worked with (and missed in others).
tldr;
Talk with customers and prospects
Develop and share a vision
Evangelize
Talk with customers and prospects
As a product manager, your superpower over...
Notes on software...
Writing a lisp compiler from scratch in JavaScript: 3. LLVM
Previously in compiler basics:
1. lisp to assembly
2. user-defined functions and variables
...
over a year ago
Previously in compiler basics:
1. lisp to assembly
2. user-defined functions and variables
4. LLVM conditionals and compiling fibonacci
5. LLVM system calls
6. an x86 upgrade
In this post we'll extend the
compiler to emit LLVM
IR as an option instead of...
Willem's Blog
One year on the ultimate commuter bike
Answering questions from one of the most popular posts of last year, I am reviewing my commuter bike...
over a year ago
Answering questions from one of the most popular posts of last year, I am reviewing my commuter bike after one year of extensive use through winter and summer.
Notes on software...
dsq: Commandline tool for running SQL queries against JSON, CSV, Excel, Parquet, and more.
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...
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.
Jonas Hietala
Swelling with New Shiny Books
So I read the wonderful Design for Hackers and I managed to win some money for books from a course…...
over a year ago
So I read the wonderful Design for Hackers and I managed to win some money for books from a course… So I ran away and ordered some new books, and they just arrived today. Yay!
First off I ordered Introduction to Algorithms which is the de facto book about algorithms and it seemed...
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...
Engineers Need Art
Adam74
The Adam74 is a small ASCII-based terminal designed for the 8-bit hobbyist.
over a year ago
The Adam74 is a small ASCII-based terminal designed for the 8-bit hobbyist.
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...
computers are bad
2024-05-06 matrix
For those of you who are members of the Matrix project, I wanted to let you
know that I am running...
8 months ago
For those of you who are members of the Matrix project, I wanted to let you
know that I am running for the Governing Board, and a bit about why. For those
of you who are not, I hope you will forgive the intrusion. Maybe you'll find my
opinions on the topic interesting anyway.
I...
Willem's Blog
Why Apple Silicon is a big deal
Never have I been so blown away as by the new MacBook Air with M1 processor. It is a big deal.
over a year ago
Never have I been so blown away as by the new MacBook Air with M1 processor. It is a big deal.
Applied Cartography
Buttondown Analytics 3.0
Working on a new analytics engine — a scant eleven months after the previous 'new analytics...
10 months ago
Working on a new analytics engine — a scant eleven months after the previous 'new analytics engine'.
Calling this 3.0 is a bit of a misnomer: most of the code, design, and plumbing from the 2023 redesign is sticking around, just in a more modular format. The goal here is to...
Jonas Hietala
The killer features of the Steam Deck
In the beginning of the year I gave myself a late Christmas gift and bought a Steam Deck for...
a year ago
In the beginning of the year I gave myself a late Christmas gift and bought a Steam Deck for myself.
There were two main reasons I decided to buy it:
burnout and depression by picking up gaming again.
And boy did it deliver.
The Deck is probably the most impressive thing I can...
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