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...
Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
over a year ago
Jonas Hietala
New Year, New Theme: 100 Things
Happy New Year, Everyone! 2009 was great in many ways; I drove a submarine (yeah quite literally), I...
over a year ago
Happy New Year, Everyone! 2009 was great in many ways; I drove a submarine (yeah quite literally), I released 6 experimental games and recently I discovered the completely amazing game Evil Genius but lets try to make 2010 even better!
So let’s forget our small mishaps (yes I’m...
Good Enough
TIL: Turbo Stream and personalised content
Hotwire and Turbo are great for very quickly and easily adding real-time updating of webpages...
a year ago
Hotwire and Turbo are great for very quickly and easily adding real-time updating of webpages without requiring the browser to reload the whole page.
But if the information you want to stream back from your server to the client has anything specific to the current user — like...
./techtipsy
ThinkPad as a server: third time's the charm
This is a follow-up to my two previous attempts on this topic:
Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable...
2 months ago
This is a follow-up to my two previous attempts on this topic:
Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
ThinkPad as a server: the follow-up
Since then, I’ve had quite a few changes to my home server setup:
I put my home server stuff on an IKEA pegboard
I tried the...
Arduino Blog
How to customize your Arduino Cloud IoT dashboards on the go
The Arduino Cloud has long been a trusted platform for makers, engineers, and developers to manage...
a month ago
The Arduino Cloud has long been a trusted platform for makers, engineers, and developers to manage their IoT projects with ease. From tracking sensor data to automating smart devices, the cloud enables seamless connectivity. Complementing this, the Arduino IoT Remote mobile app...
Odds and Ends of...
Keir Starmer needs to prepare for a world without America
Today's empires, tomorrow's ashes.
a month ago
Today's empires, tomorrow's ashes.
computers are bad
2023-04-10 solving problems with chatgpt
One of the foundational goals of computer technology, at least as understood by
popular culture, is...
a year ago
One of the foundational goals of computer technology, at least as understood by
popular culture, is to automate away our jobs. When your job is (put simply) to
get computers to work correctly, there's sort of an irony to this view of
things. Still, just within the span of my...
Jonas Hietala
Design for Hackers has arrived!
Design for Hackers
It’s here! After about a month of waiting I’ve finally gotten the book that will...
over a year ago
Design for Hackers
It’s here! After about a month of waiting I’ve finally gotten the book that will make me a design god! Or at least make me aware of something called design. Joking aside I’m really terrible at design and making things look good. Admittedly my programming art...
Style over Substance
Shooting the Ligero 3D-printed Mamiya Press camera by MaxWanderlush
Last year I started shooting my first 3D-printed camera, a Goodman Zone. It was soon followed by the...
over a year ago
Last year I started shooting my first 3D-printed camera, a Goodman Zone. It was soon followed by the panoramic pinhole Goodman Scura and the MPWide, a modified Fuji Instax Wide 300. The MPWide is a mod by the talented Mario, otherwise known as MaxWanderlush. He has been releasing...
Willem's Blog
Solo around the Markermeer (211KM)
This week I took my bike for a long distance (211)KM ride around the Dutch Markermeer, solo! Read...
over a year ago
This week I took my bike for a long distance (211)KM ride around the Dutch Markermeer, solo! Read along for practical tips for long distance cycling.
Applied Cartography
Hidden settings are for cowards
At Stripe, we had two abstractions for branching logic in production: flags, which were meant to be...
2 weeks ago
At Stripe, we had two abstractions for branching logic in production: flags, which were meant to be explicitly temporal (temporarily split-testing traffic; rolling out a new feature or code path; exposing a specific path for a cohort of users during a closed beta) and gates,...
Louwrentius
Linux Software RAID benchmarking script
Just a small post.
To benchmark your Linux software RAID array as setup with MDADM, please use...
over a year ago
Just a small post.
To benchmark your Linux software RAID array as setup with MDADM, please use my
new benchmark script. I used this script to create these results.
You may need to configure some values within the header of this file to make
it fit your enviroment.
...
Jonas Hietala
October theme says: Numbers
New month and a new theme. As with the two previous games I’m following The Experimental Gameplay...
over a year ago
New month and a new theme. As with the two previous games I’m following The Experimental Gameplay Project theme which this month is numbers. What’s it gonna be? A sudoku game or something more… thrilling? I’ll see what I can do :)
./techtipsy
What I've learned running Linux and Windows off of USB flash drives
I’ve recently made an effort to reduce the amount of tech stuff that I own. Lack of space, lack of...
2 weeks ago
I’ve recently made an effort to reduce the amount of tech stuff that I own. Lack of space, lack of time and the guilt
of storing perfectly functional hardware unused in a box were the main motivators.
This has resulted in experiments with my assortment of USB flash storage that...
Odds and Ends of...
Odds and Ends #47: I think this YouTube video just changed my life
Plus vertical farming, the Russia/EU border, and more on why the Lobby is bad.
a week ago
Plus vertical farming, the Russia/EU border, and more on why the Lobby is bad.
Birchtree
I’m Not a Panda Person
Niléane has a new webcam, Chris is downing in keyboards, and everyone installs some web-ass web...
2 days ago
Niléane has a new webcam, Chris is downing in keyboards, and everyone installs some web-ass web apps.
Watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app!
Notes on software...
A single-node Kubernetes cluster without virtualization or a container registry
This post is a recipe for setting up a minimal Kubernetes cluster on
Fedora without requiring...
over a year ago
This post is a recipe for setting up a minimal Kubernetes cluster on
Fedora without requiring virtualization or a container registry. These
two features make the system cloud-agnostic and the cluster entirely
self-contained. The post will end with us running a simple Flask...
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
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...
Opsbros
WiFi Binary Clock
Who doesn't love a classic Binary Clock? I remember getting one of these when I was in my 20's from...
over a year ago
Who doesn't love a classic Binary Clock? I remember getting one of these when I was in my 20's from ThinkGeek, and it was pride of place on my desk. LED's are a thing of beauty.
Home on Erik...
My favorite management failures
For most people straight out of school, work life is a bit of a culture shock. For me it was an...
over a year ago
For most people straight out of school, work life is a bit of a culture shock. For me it was an awesome experience, but a lot of the constraints were different and I had to learn to optimize for different things.
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...
Simply Explained
Preventing Cumulative Layout Shifts with lazy loaded images (Eleventy + markdown-it)
There's nothing more annoying than a website shifting down just as you're about to click on a button...
over a year ago
There's nothing more annoying than a website shifting down just as you're about to click on a button or link. This is called a layout shift, and Google has declared war on them. They've added layout shifts to the Core Web Vitals, and if your website has a lot of them, it will get...
Arduino Blog
This beautiful table creates art in the sand
Kinetic sand art tables are pretty hot right now, because they look really cool. They’re like zen...
4 months ago
Kinetic sand art tables are pretty hot right now, because they look really cool. They’re like zen gardens that rake themselves in intricate patterns. But most of the builds we’ve seen use a conventional cartesian CNC layout or polar layout. This table by Newsons Electronics takes...
Home on Erik...
2D embedding of 5k artists = WIN
I'm at KDD in Chicago for a few days. We have a Spotify booth tomorrow, and I wanted to put together...
over a year ago
I'm at KDD in Chicago for a few days. We have a Spotify booth tomorrow, and I wanted to put together some cool graphics to show. I've been thinking about doing a 2D embedding of the top artists forever since I read about t-SNE and other papers so this was a perfect opportunity to...
Louwrentius
'Syslog: the hidden security risk'
People sometimes forget that there are also a number of UDP-based services
that may pose a threat to...
over a year ago
People sometimes forget that there are also a number of UDP-based services
that may pose a threat to the security of your systems. SNMP is a well-known
service, notorious for being configured with a default password (or community
string).
But there is another service that is...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Why we need wide adoption of social recovery wallets
over a year ago
Avestura's Blog
Versioning microservices in GitLab monorepos and polyrepos
What are some possible options to version projects for a microservices project in Gitlab?
over a year ago
What are some possible options to version projects for a microservices project in Gitlab?
Jonas Hietala
August theme: Bare Minimum
This time I’ll be following my inspiring site and declare Bare Minimum as the theme for my next...
over a year ago
This time I’ll be following my inspiring site and declare Bare Minimum as the theme for my next game. This could really be anything, from graphics to user interaction… But I’ve got an idea. It’ll be a real challange for me to make but hopefully I’ll have a game in a few weeks...
Notes on software...
Starting a minimal Common Lisp project
If you've only vaguely heard of Lisp before or studied Scheme in
school, Common Lisp is nothing like...
over a year ago
If you've only vaguely heard of Lisp before or studied Scheme in
school, Common Lisp is nothing like what you'd expect. While
functional programming is all the rage in Scheme, Common Lisp was
"expressly designed to be a real-world engineering language rather
than a theoretically...
Jonas Hietala
Before the Games: The Site
I’ve got some things I want to do before I start with my next game and they’re all about improving...
over a year ago
I’ve got some things I want to do before I start with my next game and they’re all about improving the site. The last week or so has been extremely productive with me throwing out a lot of wasted code, speeding up the site and adding/removing features and I want to continue with...
Good Enough
Season 1, Issue 2: Just the Two of Us
0. Everyone Likes a Giveaway
Stick around to hear how you can win a fabulous prize by hardly doing...
over a year ago
0. Everyone Likes a Giveaway
Stick around to hear how you can win a fabulous prize by hardly doing anything. Take it away, fellas…
1. Still Positive
Did you know that once you acquire COVID-19 your PCR test can be positive for up to 90 days? Did you know that the at-home tests...
Christian Selig
Trials and Tribulations of Making an Interruptable Custom View Controller Transition on iOS
I think it’s safe to say while the iOS custom view controller transition API is a very powerful one,...
over a year ago
I think it’s safe to say while the iOS custom view controller transition API is a very powerful one, with that power comes a great deal of complexity. It can be tricky, and I’m having one of those days where it’s getting the better of me and I just cannot get it to do what I want...
./techtipsy
How to build a fleet of networked offsite backups using Linux, WireGuard and rsync
Just like most people out there, I have some files that are irreplaceable, such as cat pictures.
At...
a week ago
Just like most people out there, I have some files that are irreplaceable, such as cat pictures.
At one point I had a few single-board computers sitting idle, namely
the Orange Pi Zero and
the LattePanda V1, and a few
1TB SSD-s.
I hate idle hardware, so I did the most sensible...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Should Ethereum be okay with enshrining more things in the protocol?
a year ago
Jonas Hietala
Early Christmas Present
School is almost over and it’s almost time to travel back up to Övertorneå. This year me and...
over a year ago
School is almost over and it’s almost time to travel back up to Övertorneå. This year me and Veronica opened our Christmas presents a bit early - we’re impatient like that.
I got one of the best presents yet I think! A Raspberry Pi!
Just look at this bad boy!
She got some...
Notes on software...
First month on a database team
A little over a month ago, I joined EnterpriseDB on a
distributed Postgres product
(PGD). The...
9 months ago
A little over a month ago, I joined EnterpriseDB on a
distributed Postgres product
(PGD). The process of onboarding
myself has been pretty similar at each company in the last decade,
though I think I've gotten better at it. The process is of course
influenced by the team, and my...
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...
Jonas Hietala
Embedding youtube videos with Hakyll
A while ago a made a timelapse of my entry to Ludum Dare. This is how I parse and embed videos using...
over a year ago
A while ago a made a timelapse of my entry to Ludum Dare. This is how I parse and embed videos using Hakyll.
I don’t want to remember any special syntax for embedding, I don’t want to bother (remember?) to use something like {% youtube: <link> %} or whatever syntax we might find...
Neil Madden
XSS doesn’t have to be game over
There’s a persistent belief among web security people that cross-site scripting (XSS) is a “game...
over a year ago
There’s a persistent belief among web security people that cross-site scripting (XSS) is a “game over” event for defence: there is no effective way to recover if an attacker can inject code into your site. Brian Campbell refers to this as “XSS Nihilism”, which is a great...
Old Vintage...
Finally, an MOS 7600/7601 Video Game Array data sheet
A quick one. Many of you are aware of my rather abnormal fascination with the MOS 7600/7601, MOS...
a year ago
A quick one. Many of you are aware of my rather abnormal fascination with the MOS 7600/7601, MOS Technology's dedicated "Pong-on-a-chip" (from the company that brought you my favourite CPU, the MOS 6502) that's actually a rather sophisticated microcontroller for the era. I own...
Louwrentius
Thunderbolt, a cheap high-speed storage interconnect?
Intel and Apple released Thunderbolt a high-speed (10 Gigabit/s) interface, that seems to replace...
over a year ago
Intel and Apple released Thunderbolt a high-speed (10 Gigabit/s) interface, that seems to replace both USB and Firewire. It is mainly targeted at end-user systems allowing to connect peripherals with just a single cable to a computer. Thunderbolt devices, like external hard...
Willem's Blog
iPad Pro next to my primary machine
Using iPad Pro with Apple Pencil next to my computer to form a create powerhouse
over a year ago
Using iPad Pro with Apple Pencil next to my computer to form a create powerhouse
Posts on Made of...
Using X forwarding with screen by proxying $DISPLAY
If you’re reading this blog, I probably don’t have to explain why I love GNU screen. I can keep a...
over a year ago
If you’re reading this blog, I probably don’t have to explain why I love GNU screen. I can keep a long-running session going on a server somewhere, and log in and resume my session without losing any state.
I also love X-forwarding. I love being able to log into a remote server...
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...
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...
Simply Explained
ESP32: Tips to increase battery life
Running an ESP32 on a battery is a tricky operation. The chip is a powerhouse, and with power comes...
over a year ago
Running an ESP32 on a battery is a tricky operation. The chip is a powerhouse, and with power comes great responsibility. In this post, I’ll outline how I got an ESP32 to run for over 15 weeks (and counting) on a single 1000mAh battery.
Jonas Hietala
rustc: error while loading shared libraries: librustc_driver
I had installed and used rust already but today I fired it up and received:
rustc...
over a year ago
I had installed and used rust already but today I fired it up and received:
rustc --version
rustc: error while loading shared libraries: librustc_driver-7e44814b.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I’ve seen this before… I thought modifying...
./techtipsy
ASRock DeskMini X300: the future form factor of desktop PC-s?
I wasn’t happy with my “one machine that does it all”
setup, which is why I finally bit the bullet...
over a year ago
I wasn’t happy with my “one machine that does it all”
setup, which is why I finally bit the bullet and got myself an ASRock DeskMini X300 bare-bones kit.
This is a fantastic little desktop PC kit that is very small, quiet and can
still be configured to have ridiculous amounts of...
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...
Willem's Blog
Creating the ultimate commuter bike
Creating the ultimate commuter bike by upgrading the Sensa Cintura belt drive bike.
over a year ago
Creating the ultimate commuter bike by upgrading the Sensa Cintura belt drive bike.
Avestura's Blog
Hiding a photo inside another photo
How to hide a small photo inside a larger photo?
over a year ago
How to hide a small photo inside a larger photo?
Posts on Made of...
Test suites as classifiers
Suppose we have some codebase we’re considering applying some patch to, and which has a robust and...
over a year ago
Suppose we have some codebase we’re considering applying some patch to, and which has a robust and maintained test suite.
Considering the patch, we may ask, is this patch acceptable to apply and deploy. By this we mean to ask if the patch breaks any important functionality,...
Simply Explained
Secure Home Assistant Access with Cloudflare and Ubiquiti Dream Machine
I've become increasingly reliant on Home Assistant to automate various tasks around the house. But...
over a year ago
I've become increasingly reliant on Home Assistant to automate various tasks around the house. But how do you safely expose your instance to the internet for remote access?You want to be able to log in from a remote location, but how to keep others out? This post will show how...
Computer Ads from...
American Heart Association
A PSA and an Ad
a month ago
Computer Ads from...
Bomb Squad Peripherals' BLOWGUN
It Could Have Been a Lot Worse - His Data is BLOWGUN Protected!
6 months ago
It Could Have Been a Lot Worse - His Data is BLOWGUN Protected!
Posts on Made of...
Design for Testability
When designing a new software project, one is often faced with a glut of choices about how to...
over a year ago
When designing a new software project, one is often faced with a glut of choices about how to structure it. What should the core abstractions be? How should they interact with each other?
In this post, I want to argue for a design heuristic that I’ve found to be a useful guide to...
Christian Selig
My little Apple Vision Pro stand
I want somewhere to put my Vision Pro when not in use. Many people use the original box, and there’s...
10 months ago
I want somewhere to put my Vision Pro when not in use. Many people use the original box, and there’s beautiful stands that exist out there, but I was looking for something more compact and vertical so it would take up less room on my desk.
So I opened Fusion 360 (which I am still...
Willem's Blog
The Ultimate Freedom Bike
With the Brompton foldable bike you find yourself a very versatile companion to go whenever and...
over a year ago
With the Brompton foldable bike you find yourself a very versatile companion to go whenever and wherever you please!
Jonas Hietala
My MCU movie ranking
I did the MCU Movie Re-Watch again this year in preparation for Avengers: Endgame. I wasn’t a huge...
over a year ago
I did the MCU Movie Re-Watch again this year in preparation for Avengers: Endgame. I wasn’t a huge MCU fan before doing the same re-watch for Infinity War, but after that I became one.
For fun I tried to rank the movies as I saw them, this is some sort of accounting my rankings...
Arduino Blog
The Club Master is a Nano RP2040 Connect-powered device that improves your golf swing
When playing golf, few things are as important as using the correct form when swinging, since even...
6 months ago
When playing golf, few things are as important as using the correct form when swinging, since even small deviations can be the difference between a hole-in-one and additional strokes. To improve his game, Concept Bytes has designed a small clip-on device called the “Club Master.”...
Matt Mullenweg
WPAI
Very excited to share that we’ve acquired WPAI and the team is joining Automattic. They have some...
a week ago
Very excited to share that we’ve acquired WPAI and the team is joining Automattic. They have some very cool products including CodeWP, AgentWP, and WP.chat.
Home on Erik...
Annoy 1.10 released, with Hamming distance and Windows support
I've been a bit bad at posting things with a regular cadence lately, partly because I'm trying to...
over a year ago
I've been a bit bad at posting things with a regular cadence lately, partly because I'm trying to adjust to having a toddler, partly because the hunt for clicks has caused such a high bar for me that I feel like I have to post something Pulitzer-worthy.
Home on Erik...
Headcount goals, feature factories, and when to hire those mythical 10x people
When I started building up a tech team for Better, I made a very conscious decision to pay at the...
over a year ago
When I started building up a tech team for Better, I made a very conscious decision to pay at the high end to get people. I thought this made more sense: they cost a bit more money to hire, but output usually more than compensates for it.
Engineers Need Art
Jigsaw Puzzle
Those of us who fiddled while Apple Computer burned. Well, actually some of us put together a big...
over a year ago
Those of us who fiddled while Apple Computer burned. Well, actually some of us put together a big jigsaw puzzle.
somenice
Russet Lake Early Summer
An early canvas of Fissile mountain reflected in Russet Lake. This time early summer when there was...
3 months ago
An early canvas of Fissile mountain reflected in Russet Lake. This time early summer when there was still a bit of ice on the lake and the mountain tops are covered with snow. The painting is framed in western red cedar. Russet Lake Early Summer by Andrew SmithAcrylic on canvas10...
Applied Cartography
Letters to a Young Bartender
Every straight white male is forced, character-creation-screen-style, to choose one overtly...
2 weeks ago
Every straight white male is forced, character-creation-screen-style, to choose one overtly consumptive hobby that in some small part defines their twenties and – God willing — their enduring adulthood. Some choose sourdough; many choose barbecue; I chose mixology.
(A...
Louwrentius
Understanding Windows KMS and MAK volume license activation
Introduction
If you have to administer a large number of PCs running Windows, you will end up...
over a year ago
Introduction
If you have to administer a large number of PCs running Windows, you will end up creating an automated deployment platform for your Windows clients. You may implement something like Windows Deployment Services.
I used WDS to create a fully automated installation of...
Home on Erik...
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by opportunity cost
Hanlon's razor is a classic aphorism I'm sure you have heard before: Never attribute to malice that...
over a year ago
Hanlon's razor is a classic aphorism I'm sure you have heard before: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I've found that neither malice nor stupidity is the most common reason when you don't understand why something is in a certain way.
Louwrentius
RAID 5 vs. RAID 6 or do you care about your data?
Storage is cheap. Lots of storage with 10+ hard drives is still cheap. Running
10 drives increases...
over a year ago
Storage is cheap. Lots of storage with 10+ hard drives is still cheap. Running
10 drives increases the risk of a drive failure tenfold. So often RAID 5 is
used to keep your data up and running if one single disks fails.
But disks are so cheap and storage arrays are getting so...
Willem's Blog
Rescuing files from a broken harddisk
Yesterday I helped a young woman with her broken computer containing precious photos, could I safe...
over a year ago
Yesterday I helped a young woman with her broken computer containing precious photos, could I safe them?
Style over Substance
DIY: Use an IKEA VINDRIKTNING air quality sensor in Home Assistant with ESPHome
IKEA has released some interesting new products lately, focused on air quality. In this product...
over a year ago
IKEA has released some interesting new products lately, focused on air quality. In this product line, one unit that stands out is the VINDRIKTNING air quality sensor. This cheap (just €9,99) sensor measures the air quality in your home, using a simple traffic light scheme to...
Notes on software...
Favorite compiler and interpreter resources
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Matt Mullenweg
UH Magazine, Revisiting My Alma Mater
My father attended University of Houston, and it’s where I went to college to study political...
a week ago
My father attended University of Houston, and it’s where I went to college to study political science, I started WordPress when there, and then dropped out after two years to move to San Franisco. It was fun seeing UH Magazine feature an article about my journey from a University...
Louwrentius
Improving web application security by implementing database security
Security is about defense-in-depth. It bogles my mind why it is so difficult to implement...
over a year ago
Security is about defense-in-depth. It bogles my mind why it is so difficult to implement defense-in-depth security in web applications. 99.9% of applications use a single database account, with root-like privileges. Easiest for the developer of course, and the database is just a...
Arduino Blog
Vintage rotary phone becomes stylish kitchen timer
It seems like everything that happens in a kitchen requires exact timing. Whisk the batter for three...
6 months ago
It seems like everything that happens in a kitchen requires exact timing. Whisk the batter for three minutes, knead the dough for 15 minutes, bake for 30 minutes, and so on. A timer is a necessity for cooking and baking, but there is no reason you need to use your phone or a...
Abort Retry Fail
The History of Red Hat
The Billion Dollar Open Source Company
a year ago
The Billion Dollar Open Source Company
./techtipsy
What running out of SATA ports looks like
One day I stumbled upon a Craft Computing video
about his new server build, and on the parts list...
over a year ago
One day I stumbled upon a Craft Computing video
about his new server build, and on the parts list was a Sedna PCI Express 2x SATA adapter card:
There are different designs out there, including a 4x SATA card, which is bonkers.
Anyway, I thought that I might as well give this a...
Notes on software...
Writing to be read
There is a common struggle in the writing and maintenance of
documentation, checklists, emails,...
over a year ago
There is a common struggle in the writing and maintenance of
documentation, checklists, emails, guides, etc. Each provides immense
value; a document may be the key to an important process. The goal is
to remove barriers -- to encourage understanding and correct
application of...
Jonas Hietala
Long Term Goals
I have a lot of things I want to do. Right now I want to go to the kids training tomorrow and also...
over a year ago
I have a lot of things I want to do. Right now I want to go to the kids training tomorrow and also to our training time. I haven’t trained a lot lately so it feels good to do something again and training the kids is very rewarding. On Monday I have the next graph theory lecture...
latest projects -...
POV Candle
[Hardware] Tiny volumetric display
a year ago
[Hardware] Tiny volumetric display
Jonas Hietala
Installing Krita on Slackware 14.1
This is a guide on how to build Krita on Slackware 14.1. This is based on this guide for...
over a year ago
This is a guide on how to build Krita on Slackware 14.1. This is based on this guide for linux.
removepkg calligra
Install some dependencies from Slackbuilds.
gsl
libgexiv2
libpqxx
pstoedit
Get Krita.
The original guide recommends building in ~/kde4 but I moved i to...
Opsbros
The Bindicator
So I made this project for my dad for Fathers Day a couple of years ago, and thought i'd share it....
over a year ago
So I made this project for my dad for Fathers Day a couple of years ago, and thought i'd share it. The one shown is the Rev-1 design which is far from perfect, in fact it has several major issues I will discuss below, however it definitely works,
Posts on Made of...
Property Testing Like AFL
In my last last post, I argued that property-based testing and fuzzing are essentially the same...
over a year ago
In my last last post, I argued that property-based testing and fuzzing are essentially the same practice, or at least share a lot of commonality. In this followup post, I want to explore that idea a bit more: I’ll first detour into some of my frustrations and hesitations around...
Good Enough
Good Enough, A Serious Business
Hello reader, my name is Shawn, and I'm one of the co-founders of Good Enough. I'd like to tell you...
a year ago
Hello reader, my name is Shawn, and I'm one of the co-founders of Good Enough. I'd like to tell you a bit about how Good Enough came to be and what we plan on doing here.
Barry and I started working together again in early 2022. By “work,” I mean that I’d show up on Slack for a...
Posts on Made of...
Running Tensorflow on AWS GPUs
I’ve been spending some time learning deep learning and tensorflow recently, and as part of that...
over a year ago
I’ve been spending some time learning deep learning and tensorflow recently, and as part of that project I wanted to be able to train models using GPUs on EC2. This post contains some notes on what it took to get that working. As many people have commented, the environment setup...
Arduino Blog
Galco goes Platinum! Welcome our newest SIPP
Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Madison Heights, Michigan, Galco is a leading e-commerce...
7 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...
Posts on Made of...
Distributed cloud builds for everyone
CPU cycles are cheaper than they have ever been, and cloud computing has never been more ubiquitous....
over a year ago
CPU cycles are cheaper than they have ever been, and cloud computing has never been more ubiquitous. All the major cloud providers offer generous free tiers, and services like GitHub Actions offer free compute resources to open-source repositories. So why do so many developers...
Opsbros
Docker and CumulusMX
I wanted to find out if I could successfully redeploy my Weather Station monitoring software into a...
over a year ago
I wanted to find out if I could successfully redeploy my Weather Station monitoring software into a Docker container. Let's battle the elements together...
Willem's Blog
Born with MCADD
Our son was diagnosed with MCADD days after he was born. We experienced a metabolic crisis but were...
over a year ago
Our son was diagnosed with MCADD days after he was born. We experienced a metabolic crisis but were lucky to be just in time!
Notes on software...
How I run a software book club
I've been running software book clubs almost continuously since last
summer, about 12 months ago. We...
6 months ago
I've been running software book clubs almost continuously since last
summer, about 12 months ago. We read through Designing Data-Intensive
Applications, Database
Internals,
Systems
Performance, and
we just started Understanding Software
Dynamics.
The DDIA discussions were...
Gwern.net Newsletter
December newsletter
December 2020 gwern.net newsletter with links on AI and technology; major new site feature:...
over a year ago
December 2020 gwern.net newsletter with links on AI and technology; major new site feature: fully-generalized recursive popups.
Home on Erik...
Why I went into the mortgage industry
I just realized last Thursday that I have spent two full years at Better, incidentally on the same...
over a year ago
I just realized last Thursday that I have spent two full years at Better, incidentally on the same day as we announced a $15M round led by Kleiner Perkins. So it was a good point to reflect a bit and think back – what the F led me to abandon my role managing the machine learning...
Arduino Blog
Top Arduino Cloud IoT dashboard ideas with the new Image widget
Recently, we announced the exciting new Image widget for Arduino Cloud. This powerful feature opens...
2 months ago
Recently, we announced the exciting new Image widget for Arduino Cloud. This powerful feature opens up a world of possibilities for enhancing your IoT dashboards. But the true potential of the Image widget lies in the applications that you create. Today, we’re excited to dive...
Notes on software...
Administering Kubernetes is hard
Kubernetes is easy to use after some exposure; it's pretty convenient
too. But it is super hard to...
over a year ago
Kubernetes is easy to use after some exposure; it's pretty convenient
too. But it is super hard to set up.
eksctl is a good tool for folks who don't want to
spend hours/days/weeks debugging VPC configuration in 1000s of lines
of CloudFormation. None of the other tools seem to be...
Engineers Need Art
Same Stop
Marvelling at the full circle life seems to have taken after retirement.
a year ago
Marvelling at the full circle life seems to have taken after retirement.
Willem's Blog
Designing an interface for a food ordering page
Designing a food ordering page is surprisingly challenging because of the many variables that need...
over a year ago
Designing a food ordering page is surprisingly challenging because of the many variables that need to be accommodated on a very small screen.
Home on Erik...
Norvig's claim that programming competitions correlate negatively with being good on the job
I saw a bunch of tweets over the weekend about Peter Norvig claiming there's a negative correlation...
over a year ago
I saw a bunch of tweets over the weekend about Peter Norvig claiming there's a negative correlation between being good at programming competitions and being good at the job. There were some decent Hacker News comments on it.
Yazin Alirhayim
The best bank in Bahrain … is Meem
Yes, that’s right. The best bank in Bahrain is … Meem. This nomination will be especially shocking...
over a year ago
Yes, that’s right. The best bank in Bahrain is … Meem. This nomination will be especially shocking to those of you that read my last post that ripped the Meem app to shreds.
Criteria for ‘best bank’
My criteria for “best bank” isn’t the best user experience or customer support....
Notes on software...
Go database driver overhead on insert-heavy workloads
The most popular SQLite and PostgreSQL database drivers in Go are
(roughly) 20-76% slower than...
a year ago
The most popular SQLite and PostgreSQL database drivers in Go are
(roughly) 20-76% slower than alternative Go drivers on insert-heavy
benchmarks of mine. So if you are bulk-inserting data with Go (and
potentially also bulk-retrieving data with Go), you may want to
consider the...
Jonas Hietala
Dbot
So I made a small irc bot in 294 characters in code-golfing language #1: Perl.
Usage
perl...
over a year ago
So I made a small irc bot in 294 characters in code-golfing language #1: Perl.
Usage
perl Dbot
Commands
.name - Echo the bots name
.hello - Output “hello world!”
.src - Dump the source code
Code
use IO::Socket;$s=IO::Socket::INET->new("158.38.8.251:6667");sub o{print$s...
Home on Erik...
Interview with a Data Scientist: Erik Bernhardsson
I was featured in Peadar Coyle's interview series interviewing various “data scientists” – which is...
over a year ago
I was featured in Peadar Coyle's interview series interviewing various “data scientists” – which is kind of arguable since (a) all the other ppl in that series are much cooler than me (b) I'm not really a data scientist.
Construction Physics
What Learning by Doing Looks Like
The evolution of polycrystalline diamond drill bits
a week ago
The evolution of polycrystalline diamond drill bits
Jonas Hietala
Writing Home Assistant automations using Genservers in Elixir
I’ve been a fan of Home Assistant a while now;
it’s a great platform for home automation with its...
2 months ago
I’ve been a fan of Home Assistant a while now;
it’s a great platform for home automation with its beginner friendly and feature rich UI,
support for a ton of different devices and integrations,
and there’s a bunch of ways to create automations.
But there’s no engine for writing...
Jonas Hietala
Netrunner ID draft Örebro
I entered an ID draft tournament in Netrunner hosted in Örebro and this is a brief overview of what...
over a year ago
I entered an ID draft tournament in Netrunner hosted in Örebro and this is a brief overview of what happened. Disclaimer: My memory is a little bit fuzzy and the events may or may not correspond to what actually happened.
The draft
The idea was to randomly sort all entrants and...
Jonas Hietala
2012 in Review
Like the last two years I’m summarizing the year. At the end of the year like this it always feel...
over a year ago
Like the last two years I’m summarizing the year. At the end of the year like this it always feel like I didn’t accomplish much, but after the yearly summary it always feels better.
2012 Geek Achievements
Designed a processor which fulfills the Core Wars 88 standard. Includes a...
Lighthouse Blog
How to combine multiple RSS feeds in one view
6 months ago
computers are bad
2023-07-15 underwater ears everywhere
Programming note: the subscribe link was broken for a while because I am
bad at computers (yet...
a year ago
Programming note: the subscribe link was broken for a while because I am
bad at computers (yet another case of "forgot to enable the systemd unit").
It's fixed now. The unsubscribe link was also broken and is now fixed but,
you know, maybe that was a feature. Did wonders for...
Matt Mullenweg
Disrupt Interview
On Wednesday I had a great chat with Connie Loizos, the editor in chief of TechCrunch, you can view...
a month ago
On Wednesday I had a great chat with Connie Loizos, the editor in chief of TechCrunch, you can view the video here: Then yesterday Automattic filed its legal responses to the spurious lawfare from WP Engine, Silver Lake, and Quinn Emanuel. It’s a bit long, but if you have time...
Azad's Blog
Traveling with Apple Vision Pro
The Vision Pro has quickly become an essential item that I take onto every flight. It’s a fantastic...
2 months ago
The Vision Pro has quickly become an essential item that I take onto every flight. It’s a fantastic device to travel with—Be it by train or by plane, it offers an unparalleled opportunity to selectively tune out your environment and sink into an engaging activity like watching a...
Applied Cartography
Always use an enum for your status field
When I was first starting my career at Amazon — even more bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked than I am now...
3 months ago
When I was first starting my career at Amazon — even more bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked than I am now — I was thrilled by the concept of an "architecture review", and by extension the concept of a "Principal Engineer" (Amazon's term for a staff-level engineer, someone beyond...
Jonas Hietala
Geekhack Toxic
I came back to Linköping yesterday and I had a package waiting for me to pick it up. What could it...
over a year ago
I came back to Linköping yesterday and I had a package waiting for me to pick it up. What could it be?
With a crummy mobile phone photo I give you my TOXIC keycaps mounted on my trusty old das keyboard:
Woooo
If only my GH60 could arrive some time this decade…
Vitalik Buterin's...
An incomplete guide to stealth addresses
a year ago
Home on Erik...
How to set compensation using commonsense principles
Compensation has always been one of the most confusing parts of management to me. Getting it right...
over a year ago
Compensation has always been one of the most confusing parts of management to me. Getting it right is obviously extremely important. Compensation is what drives our entire economy, and you could look at the market for labor as one gigantic resource-allocating machine in the same...
Jonas Hietala
Battling burnout
Mamma Mia! Here we go again…
Once again, I’m finding myself trying to recover from burnout, and...
a year ago
Mamma Mia! Here we go again…
Once again, I’m finding myself trying to recover from burnout, and after about a year I’m finally feeling more like myself.
Even though I’ve been here before, it’s a difficult thing to recognize and avoid, so I’m writing this to maybe help you or my...
Arduino Blog
A pair of Arduino UNO R4 boards power this Tron-inspired, decked-out shop room
Bob Clagett of the “I Like to Make Stuff” YouTube channel has recently undertaken an extensive shop...
6 months ago
Bob Clagett of the “I Like to Make Stuff” YouTube channel has recently undertaken an extensive shop renovation project where he is rearranging tools, tidying up various spaces, and even creating a dedicated “clean” room for his collection of 3D printers/electronics work. With its...
Home on Erik...
I already found the best gifs
Just search for “hackers gif“.
There you go. Fun for your work emails for the next 500 years. From...
over a year ago
Just search for “hackers gif“.
There you go. Fun for your work emails for the next 500 years. From the awesome movie Hackers. That movie together with The Warriors convinced me that I wanted to live in NYC when I was like… 14 years old.
Ken Shirriff's blog
Reverse engineering CMOS, illustrated with a vintage Soviet counter chip
I recently came across an interesting die photo of a Soviet1 chip, probably designed in the...
10 months ago
I recently came across an interesting die photo of a Soviet1 chip, probably designed in the 1970s.
This article provides an introductory guide to reverse-engineering CMOS circuits, using this chip as an
example.
Although the chip looks like a tangle of lines at first,
its large...
Computer Ads from...
Suture Software's Bludgeons 'n' Braggarts
We very simply give you what you've been asking for -- we give you BLOOD
9 months ago
We very simply give you what you've been asking for -- we give you BLOOD
Home on Erik...
Nearest neighbor methods and vector models – part 1
This is a blog post rewritten from a presentation at NYC Machine Learning last week. It covers a...
over a year ago
This is a blog post rewritten from a presentation at NYC Machine Learning last week. It covers a library called Annoy that I have built that helps you do (approximate) nearest neighbor queries in high dimensional spaces.
Jonas Hietala
The Coinparty hackathon, take two
In December I declared that I would enter a Bitcoin Cash hackathon and I was excited to give my...
over a year ago
In December I declared that I would enter a Bitcoin Cash hackathon and I was excited to give my procrastination a kick in the balls. Unfortunately the hackathon was postponed to January just an hour later. Maybe the organizers didn’t think my project was exciting enough or...
Style over Substance
How to build your own Goodman ZONE camera, part 2
The Goodman ZONE is a medium-format 3D-printed film camera designed by Dora Goodman as part of her...
over a year ago
The Goodman ZONE is a medium-format 3D-printed film camera designed by Dora Goodman as part of her range of open-source camera models, using the existing Mamiya Press lens series for glass and the Mamiya RB67 backs to hold film. She sells pre-printed kits that contain all the...
Arduino Blog
Two NEW Arduino Plug and Make Kit projects recreate iconic vintage games
The Plug and Make Kit is a toolbox you can use for infinite ideas. So what happens if you ask a mix...
3 months ago
The Plug and Make Kit is a toolbox you can use for infinite ideas. So what happens if you ask a mix of Arduino designers, engineers, and managers to sit down and brainstorm new ideas to have fun with it? Well, at least one of them is guaranteed to come up with an adorable,...
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...
Odds and Ends of...
Why we need seven bins
It's time for some #binchat
6 days ago
It's time for some #binchat
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...
./techtipsy
How to save an old printer from the e-waste pile with a Raspberry Pi
A family member has a Canon PIXMA MP250 printer, originally released in 2009.
It has been a very...
6 months ago
A family member has a Canon PIXMA MP250 printer, originally released in 2009.
It has been a very reliable piece of hardware, especially for a printer.
Then came Windows 10. The printer would not work out of the box with it and
the official drivers got stuck during installation....
Louwrentius
A 12.48 inch (1304x984) three-color e-paper display by Waveshare
Introduction
Update September 2023: A small horizontal and large vertical row of pixels died. Demo...
over a year ago
Introduction
Update September 2023: A small horizontal and large vertical row of pixels died. Demo of defective display here.
I'm running a solar-powered blog and I wanted to add a low-power display to show the daily solar 'harvest'1 and maybe some additional information.
So I...
Old Vintage...
Pretty pictures, bootable floppy disks, and the first Canon Cat demo?
Now that our 1987 Canon Cat is refurbished and ready to go another nine innings or so, it's time to...
5 months ago
Now that our 1987 Canon Cat is refurbished and ready to go another nine innings or so, it's time to get into the operating system and pull some tricks.
from our historical discussion of the Canon Cat, the Cat was designed by Jef Raskin as a sophisticated user-centric computer...
Jonas Hietala
2021 in review
A new year is always a good time to review the past year. Funny how this is already the 12th year...
over a year ago
A new year is always a good time to review the past year. Funny how this is already the 12th year I’ve done this kind of quick review… Time sure flies.
2021 Non-Geek Achievements
Started strength training using a strength coach from Kabuki.
I got inspired by the book Peak that...
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
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!
Good Enough
Good Enough Marketing: The Preparation
We have a couple of exciting projects—Guestbook! Yay.Boo!—that we want to share with the world. But...
a year ago
We have a couple of exciting projects—Guestbook! Yay.Boo!—that we want to share with the world. But that’s a difficult task for us because, honestly, we’re terrible not good at self-promotion. We’d rather spend time making things than talking about the things we’ve made.
We’d...
computers are bad
2024-11-23 cablesoft
As an American, I often feel an intense jealousy of Ceefax, one of several
commercially successful...
4 weeks ago
As an American, I often feel an intense jealousy of Ceefax, one of several
commercially successful teletext services in the UK and Europe. "Teletext" is
sometimes a confusing term because of its apparent relation to telecom-industry
technologies like the teletypewriter and...
./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...
Arduino Blog
Deploy your smart meeting room management system with Arduino GIGA
Managing shared spaces, especially meeting rooms, can be a headache in busy offices. At Arduino,...
3 days ago
Managing shared spaces, especially meeting rooms, can be a headache in busy offices. At Arduino, we’ve experienced it firsthand in our flexible and dynamic offices around the world – where colleagues could often be seen wandering around with their laptops, trying to find a quiet...
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...
Electronics etc…
Tesla’s FSD - First and Last Impressions
TLDR: It’s a useless technology demo.
Introduction
Rules of Engagement
Test Ride 1: from Kings Beach...
7 months ago
TLDR: It’s a useless technology demo.
Introduction
Rules of Engagement
Test Ride 1: from Kings Beach to Truckee (11 miles)
Test Ride 2: I-80 from Truckee to Blue Canyon (36 miles)
Test Ride 3: from West-Valley College to I-85 Entrance (1 mile)
Conclusion
Introduction
In the past...
lcamtuf’s thing
Electric chainsaws and the gorge of misery
Lithium batteries are great -- so why do mid-size electric power tools suck in 2024?
4 months ago
Lithium batteries are great -- so why do mid-size electric power tools suck in 2024?
./techtipsy
About the time I used Google Drive as a CMS for a web app
Near the beginning of my software development career, I worked on a pretty
standard web application....
over a year ago
Near the beginning of my software development career, I worked on a pretty
standard web application. The project was not a commercial success, but it did
give me a good technical foundation that turned out to be very useful for my
career so far.
For those interested, the tech...
Louwrentius
Using InfiniBand for cheap and fast point-to-point Networking
InfiniBand networking is quite awesome. It's mainly used for two reasons:
low latency
high...
over a year ago
InfiniBand networking is quite awesome. It's mainly used for two reasons:
low latency
high bandwidth
As a home user, I'm mainly interested in setting up a high bandwidth link between two servers.
I was using quad-port network cards with Linux Bonding, but this solution has some...
Notes on software...
Lessons learned streaming building a Scheme-like interpreter in Go
I wanted to practice making coding videos so I did a four-part
series
on writing a basic Scheme-like...
a year ago
I wanted to practice making coding videos so I did a four-part
series
on writing a basic Scheme-like language (minus macros and arrays and
tons of stuff).
I picked this simple topic because I wanted a low-stakes way to learn
what I did not know about making videos.
Here was the...
Good Enough
TIL: Merge nested attributes in Rails permit params
I am working on a new product that's a bit more complicated than our prior releases.
Getting...
a year ago
I am working on a new product that's a bit more complicated than our prior releases.
Getting refamiliarized with nested parameters in Rails has been interesting.
In this case imagine I have a discussion that, when creating it I also want to create the first comment.
The...
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...
Jonas Hietala
Ludum Dare 22 results!
The results from Ludum Dare 22 are in! I made the game Sat-E for the 48 hour competition and I was...
over a year ago
The results from Ludum Dare 22 are in! I made the game Sat-E for the 48 hour competition and I was quite happy with it.
#24 Community 3.71
#40 Fun 3.38
#49 Theme 3.69
#65 Overall 3.42
#95 Humor 2.82
#167 Mood 2.92
#247 Innovation 2.69
#338 Audio 2.23
#340 Graphics 2.62
#376...
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...
Louwrentius
Making cowpatty recognize a four-way handshake
I was unable to get cowpatty working with a packet capture that actually
contains a four-way...
over a year ago
I was unable to get cowpatty working with a packet capture that actually
contains a four-way handshake of a WPA session.
I got it working like this:
First, download cowpatty 4.6 right here, within the source directory of
cowpatty.
Extract cowpatty and apply this patch using these...
Jonas Hietala
I, Robot
Here are the results of the big robot construction course we had before christmas! The whole process...
over a year ago
Here are the results of the big robot construction course we had before christmas! The whole process went smooth and our group was amazing. The design and building of the robot went well even though in hindsight I would’ve changed a lot of stuff. The ending competition didn’t go...
Birchtree
I don’t care about bad or missing features that I don’t use
Sometimes I’ll talk about something I like online and people will express shock that I can use a...
2 weeks ago
Sometimes I’ll talk about something I like online and people will express shock that I can use a product that has such a clear downside. I’ve gotten people ask how I can use Things since it doesn’t have shared task lists. More recently I
Arduino Blog
An Arduino-powered robotic ukulele that plays itself
The ukulele has a bit of a reputation for being quaint, but it is a legitimate instrument like any...
4 months ago
The ukulele has a bit of a reputation for being quaint, but it is a legitimate instrument like any other and that means it takes a lot of practice to play competently. Zeroshot is too busy building cool stuff to bother with all of that, so he put his skills to use constructing...
./techtipsy
Overcoming hardware limitations: the time-to-sleep script
As some of you might own, I’m still rocking a ThinkPad T430, a laptop model
originally released in...
over a year ago
As some of you might own, I’m still rocking a ThinkPad T430, a laptop model
originally released in 2012.
It’s not the fastest laptop out there, but it is plenty fast for a number of
tasks, even most software development work.
I also try to keep my machines up to date and properly...
detreville
But why "detreville"?
(But why not?)
a year ago
Computer Ads from...
Comics from 1983/08 Today Mag
Time for some levity. The following comics were all found in the August 1983 issue of Today...
9 months ago
Time for some levity. The following comics were all found in the August 1983 issue of Today magazine. Enjoy! What computer ads would you like to see in the future? Please comment below. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and relatives. Thank you.
csvbase blog
Caching secrets of the HTTP elders, part 1
ETags - an elegant weapon, for a more civilised age
8 months ago
ETags - an elegant weapon, for a more civilised age
Good Enough
TIL: Blocking Password App Autocomplete on Form Fields
I wanted to disable password managers, particularly 1Password, from interacting with a username...
a year ago
I wanted to disable password managers, particularly 1Password, from interacting with a username field in Contact Me. It was pretty simple in the end:
<%= form.text_field :username, "data-lpignore": true, "data-1p-ignore": true %>
Reference: 1Password, Lastpass.
Jonas Hietala
I designed my own keyboard layout. Was it worth it?
Almost two and a half years ago I embarked on the journey to change keyboard layout.
At first I...
a year ago
Almost two and a half years ago I embarked on the journey to change keyboard layout.
At first I tried out existing ones, but it didn’t take long before I figured it’s better to develop my own—and things went downhill fast from there.
(Some) combos of the T-34 layout.
But now...
./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,...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Review of Optimism retro funding round 1
over a year ago
Ken Shirriff's blog
Two interesting XOR circuits inside the Intel 386 processor
Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a...
a year ago
Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a 32-bit processor but also switching to a CMOS implementation.
I've been reverse-engineering parts of the 386 chip and came across two interesting and completely different
circuits...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Inside the Intel 386 processor die: the clock circuit
Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip.
In this...
a year ago
Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip.
In this blog post, I'll examine the clock-generation circuitry inside the Intel 386 processor.
Earlier processors such as the 8086 (1978) were simpler, using two clock phases internally.
The...
Jonas Hietala
2023 in review
This is my yearly review #14.
Amazing that I’ve kept up with this for 14 years.
Even though it’s not...
11 months ago
This is my yearly review #14.
Amazing that I’ve kept up with this for 14 years.
Even though it’s not anything advanced, I really like looking back at the year to see what has happened.
Maybe it’s a very light version of a reverse bucket list, and I can see that it provides some...
Louwrentius
Apple is killing off the optical drive just like the floppy disk
With the release of the new MacBook Air we are one step closer to killing off
the cd-rom and the...
over a year ago
With the release of the new MacBook Air we are one step closer to killing off
the cd-rom and the dvd. As with the previous MacBook Air, this device has no
optical drive. And that is a good thing. People do not need an optical drive.
You have the network and you have USB disks....
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...
I'm looking for data engineers
I'm interrupting the regular programming for a quick announcement: we're looking for data engineers...
over a year ago
I'm interrupting the regular programming for a quick announcement: we're looking for data engineers at Better. You would be the first one to join and would work a lot directly with me.
Some fun things you could work on (these are all projects I'm working on right now):
Buck on Software
Winds of Change
Software is maybe, just maybe about to get exciting
6 months ago
Software is maybe, just maybe about to get exciting
Louwrentius
71 TiB DIY NAS based on ZFS on Linux
This is my new 71 TiB DIY NAS. This server is the successor to my six year old, twenty drive 18 TB...
over a year ago
This is my new 71 TiB DIY NAS. This server is the successor to my six year old, twenty drive 18 TB NAS (17 TiB). With a storage capacity four times higher than the original and an incredible read (2.5 GB/s)/write (1.9 GB/s) performance, it's a worthy successor.
Purpose
The...
Willem's Blog
Measuring cholesterol levels in blood
This week I had my blood examined to measure my cholesterol levels, taking a lipid profile. Know...
over a year ago
This week I had my blood examined to measure my cholesterol levels, taking a lipid profile. Know your LDL, HDL and Triglycerides numbers with a simple test.
Jonas Hietala
Postmortem: Beebop The Island Hopper
So I participated in the Ludum Dare for the first time and this is a postmortem of my game Beebop...
over a year ago
So I participated in the Ludum Dare for the first time and this is a postmortem of my game Beebop The Island Hopper for the theme Islands.
About Ludum Dare
Ludum Dare is a competition which runs maybe two times a year and the competition is 24 hours long with a specific theme....
Simply Explained
How WebP Images Reduced My Bandwidth Usage by 50%
Last year I migrated this website from Jekyll to Eleventy. This year, I’m finally implementing WebP...
over a year ago
Last year I migrated this website from Jekyll to Eleventy. This year, I’m finally implementing WebP images to save bandwidth and make this site even faster to load! This simple change reduced my bandwidth usage by 50% and is still backwards compatible with old devices and...
Nabeel S. Qureshi
Reading Notes on “Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp”
by Josef Czapski
over a year ago
Vitalik Buterin's...
[Mirror] Cantor was Wrong: debunking the infinite set hierarchy
over a year ago
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Blockchain explained simply
A blockchain is a distributed database. Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin are all different databases....
over a year ago
A blockchain is a distributed database. Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin are all different databases. A blockchain node is a computer with an…
Louwrentius
Smoking coolermaster Silent Pro M 600W TN6M50
So I was just messing around on my work station, when suddenly I smelled the
smell any person...
over a year ago
So I was just messing around on my work station, when suddenly I smelled the
smell any person familiar with electronics fears. The smell of some electrical
component burning.
The whole upper floor smelled like something was smoldering. So I shut down
both my storage servers....
Notes on software...
What makes a great technical blog
I want to explain why the blogs in My favorite technical
blogs are my favorite. That
page is solely...
8 months ago
I want to explain why the blogs in My favorite technical
blogs are my favorite. That
page is solely about non-corporate tech blogs. So this post is
too. I'll have to make another list for favorite corporate tech blogs.
In short, they:
Tackle hard and confusing topics
Show working...
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.
Jonas Hietala
September theme: Failure
I’m out of the busy mode and here’s the new theme! I’ve got an idea and I’ll be beginning very soon...
over a year ago
I’m out of the busy mode and here’s the new theme! I’ve got an idea and I’ll be beginning very soon I hope and again I’m following Experimental Gameplay Project’s site.
Let’s rock!!
Lighthouse Blog
Introducing Lighthouse - The RSS reader, newsletter reader, and read-it-later app to fight content...
8 months ago
Vitalik Buterin's...
Epochs and slots all the way down: ways to give Ethereum users faster transaction confirmation times
5 months ago
Applied Cartography
Notes from April
Welcome to spring, bona fide and humid. Lots of writing this month:
I wrote about spending the past...
7 months ago
Welcome to spring, bona fide and humid. Lots of writing this month:
I wrote about spending the past two years as an independent technologist.
On the media side of things: brief words on Murderville (meh), The Parallax View (incredible), This is Personal (meh), Cribsheet...
Notes on software...
Windows
It has been six years since I last used Windows for any remotely
serious software development. I've...
over a year ago
It has been six years since I last used Windows for any remotely
serious software development. I've used Ubuntu, Arch, or FreeBSD
since. But eventually I spent so much time working around common
workplace tasks that I decided to put Windows 10 Pro on my work
laptop.
Windows...
Computer Ads from...
UNIX Review Magazine Interviews Larry Tesler
They discuss Tesler's involvement with Xerox, Apple and office automation with Unix.
3 months ago
They discuss Tesler's involvement with Xerox, Apple and office automation with Unix.
Jonas Hietala
Focusing Attention: Programming
These last two weeks have been a small attempt at clearing up my head a bit. I have far too many...
over a year ago
These last two weeks have been a small attempt at clearing up my head a bit. I have far too many things I’d like to do and even if it’s not possible to do them all at once it didn’t stop me from thinking of them. One minute it’s that and the other it’s something completely...
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...
3 weeks ago
There's very little written about natural phosphorescence. Let's design a device that can spot it in the wild.
Willem's Blog
How to use rsync to make backups
In this post I'll explain how to use rsync to transfer files to another computer system in an...
over a year ago
In this post I'll explain how to use rsync to transfer files to another computer system in an efficient manner, suitable to be used in a backup script.
Odds and Ends of...
Odds and Ends #44: The New Statesman still needs fixing
Plus Channel Tunnel news, a NIMBY assault on an excellent pub, and more!
3 weeks ago
Plus Channel Tunnel news, a NIMBY assault on an excellent pub, and more!
Jonas Hietala
Coconut Cauliflower Curry Mash
It’s time for lesson 3. I made the mistake of not planning for something to augment the mash with,...
over a year ago
It’s time for lesson 3. I made the mistake of not planning for something to augment the mash with, but a simple salad had to do:
It was okay. Girlfriend gave it 5/10 and I gave it a 6/10, a higher rating would be possible if there was something else to eat it with.
Engineers Need Art
Op-Amp Helper PCB
A PCB for breadboards to make working with op-amps easier.
a year ago
A PCB for breadboards to make working with op-amps easier.
Jonas Hietala
I Made It!
It’s been over a year, but I haven’t lost (most) my touch yet! For the second time I’ve completed a...
over a year ago
It’s been over a year, but I haven’t lost (most) my touch yet! For the second time I’ve completed a Ludum Dare! Not an easy feat and yet there are tons of games that look absolutely wonderful. I’m not there yet but now I have at least gotten back into game making again, long...
detreville
This is "detreville"
It's my name, and the name of my Substack too. That's one less thing for everyone to remember.
a year ago
It's my name, and the name of my Substack too. That's one less thing for everyone to remember.
Home on Erik...
Machine, Platform, Crowd
I just bought Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future and discovered that it...
over a year ago
I just bought Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future and discovered that it mentions my blog – in particular the post When machine learning matters.
Ok, I lied a little bit. I didn't discover it serendipitously.
Arduino Blog
Adding proximity unlock to an old car with the Arduino Nano 33 BLE
A lot of newer cars have a really nifty feature called “proximity unlock,” which automatically...
5 months ago
A lot of newer cars have a really nifty feature called “proximity unlock,” which automatically unlocks the doors when the driver approaches while carrying their key fob. When paired with a push-to-start ignition switch, the driver never has to take their keys out of their pocket....
Lighthouse Blog
How to manage content subscriptions
6 months ago
Lighthouse Blog
Overview of the reading view
6 months ago
Home on Erik...
Tumblr's awesome project names
Not sure how I managed to miss this, but I'm watching this Tumblr presentation and they talk about...
over a year ago
Not sure how I managed to miss this, but I'm watching this Tumblr presentation and they talk about their projects named after Arrested Development topics: Gob, Parmesan, Buster, Jetpants, Oscar, George and Motherboy.
Still, the best software project name is probably still Apple's...
Jonas Hietala
Regex substitution with unicode in Haskell
While remaking the site I noticed my automatic embedding of bare youtube links sometimes didn’t...
over a year ago
While remaking the site I noticed my automatic embedding of bare youtube links sometimes didn’t work. The culprit was unicode in the document which the regex library couldn’t handle.
Apparently while this would be supported by default by almost all modern languages it’s not the...
Notes on software...
Writing a storage engine for Postgres: an in-memory Table Access Method
With Postgres 12,
released in 2019, it became possible to swap out Postgres's storage
engine.
This...
a year ago
With Postgres 12,
released in 2019, it became possible to swap out Postgres's storage
engine.
This is a feature MySQL has supported for a long time. There are at
least 8 different built-in
engines you can pick from. MyRocks, MySQL on
RocksDB, is another popular third-party...
Good Enough
Asking the Right Question
Lately I've been pondering the future for Album Whale. It does what we'd like it to do, and we've...
a year ago
Lately I've been pondering the future for Album Whale. It does what we'd like it to do, and we've spread the word enough that there's now a steady stream of new users coming in each day. So, what's next?
Portrait of the author pondering
My first impulse was to answer this...
Notes on software...
btest: a language agnostic test runner
btest is a minimal,
language-agnostic test runner originally written for testing
compilers. Brian,...
over a year ago
btest is a minimal,
language-agnostic test runner originally written for testing
compilers. Brian, an ex- co-worker from Linode, wrote the first
implementation in Crystal (a compiled
language clone of Ruby) for testing
bshift, a compiler
project. The tool accomplished exactly...
Christian Selig
Instant Pan Gesture Interactions
Apple has a really awesome WWDC 2018 video called Designing Fluid Interfaces, and one of the key...
a year ago
Apple has a really awesome WWDC 2018 video called Designing Fluid Interfaces, and one of the key takeaways from the videos that one of the presenters, Chan Karunamuni, said is “Look for delays everywhere. Everything needs to respond instantly.” (6:28)
A really great example of...
Old Vintage...
The unreleased Commodore HHC-4's secret identity
Once upon a time (and that time was Winter CES 1983), Commodore announced what was to be their one...
a month ago
Once upon a time (and that time was Winter CES 1983), Commodore announced what was to be their one and only handheld computer, the Commodore HHC-4. It was never released and never seen again, at least not in that form. But it turns out that not only did the HHC-4 actually exist,...
Notes on software...
A Programmer-Friendly I/O Abstraction Over io_uring and kqueue
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.
Avestura's Blog
Creating a Git commit: The Hard Way
Let's create a Git commit using Git's low-level (plumbing) commands
3 months ago
Let's create a Git commit using Git's low-level (plumbing) commands
Applied Cartography
Mass renaming files in fish on macOS
One of many two-liners to come as I migrate things from the old site onto Obsidian:
brew install...
a year ago
One of many two-liners to come as I migrate things from the old site onto Obsidian:
brew install rename
rename "s/.mdx/.md/" **.md
Jonas Hietala
Building the GH60
I’ve finally completed my first custom made keyboard. I’m still missing stabilizers and some smaller...
over a year ago
I’ve finally completed my first custom made keyboard. I’m still missing stabilizers and some smaller screws to hold it all together but I’ve been using it the last days and I thought I’d share.
The hardware
Several years ago I joined the geekhack forum and I joined in a few group...
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...
Birchtree
My default apps of 2024
Last year I was the 27th of four hundred and freaking eight people to write about their default...
30 minutes ago
Last year I was the 27th of four hundred and freaking eight people to write about their default apps, and I though it would be fun to turn this into a tradition and revisit the list to see if anything has changed since last year.
✨ next to each change
Notes on software...
My favorite software subreddits
Originally published on December 5, 2021.
If you are an experienced software developer whose only...
a year ago
Originally published on December 5, 2021.
If you are an experienced software developer whose only exposure to
reddit is dank memes, proggit or even
language-specific subreddits like
/r/python, you're missing out.
What follows are my favorite subreddits in tech. My criteria is...
Willem's Blog
Harvesting boredom to let creativity flourish
What does it mean for my state of mind and creativity if I am no longer be constantly connected to...
over a year ago
What does it mean for my state of mind and creativity if I am no longer be constantly connected to the Internet using a smartphone.
Louwrentius
Difference of behavior in SATA Solid State Drives
Introduction
Update: I've noticed some strange behavior of SSDs when benchmarking them with FIO....
over a year ago
Introduction
Update: I've noticed some strange behavior of SSDs when benchmarking them with FIO. After further investigation and additional testing, I've found the reason for the strange patterns in the graphs.
The 'strange' test results are due to the fact that they were...
Louwrentius
The future of ZFS now that OpenSolaris is dead
With the probable loss of OpenSolaris, there may be another, maybe more
devastating loss.
The very...
over a year ago
With the probable loss of OpenSolaris, there may be another, maybe more
devastating loss.
The very popular and very advanced Zetabyte File System (ZFS)
The only open source platform that actively supports ZFS is FreeBSD. And they
just 'copied' the code from OpenSolaris. Are they...
Buck on Software
Thinking incrementally about SaaS
An overview of the key output of the growth software machine
over a year ago
An overview of the key output of the growth software machine
Jonas Hietala
The Arty Timeline
While working on Jonas IceCream Stand I took a screenshot every day and I thought they looked pretty...
over a year ago
While working on Jonas IceCream Stand I took a screenshot every day and I thought they looked pretty cool so here they are:
And now I’m off with New World Order and (for once) I’ve got a really really good idea!
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…
Arduino Blog
This unique wall sconce welcomes you home with warm light
Have you ever walked through your front door after a long day of work and realized that your home...
a week ago
Have you ever walked through your front door after a long day of work and realized that your home just isn’t as inviting as it seems like it should be? While it may not work miracles, some nice and welcoming lighting can make a big difference. That’s why Lauren Palazzi made this...
Home on Erik...
Books I read in 2015
Early last year when I left Spotify I decided to do more reading. I was planning to read at least...
over a year ago
Early last year when I left Spotify I decided to do more reading. I was planning to read at least one book per week and in particular I wanted to brush up on management, economics, and technology.
Jonas Hietala
Mailto: links with FastMail in Firefox
You can change the application to handle mailto: links in Firefox in Preferences -> Applications....
over a year ago
You can change the application to handle mailto: links in Firefox in Preferences -> Applications. The problem is that you can’t input custom urls and some email providers, like hotmail or fastmail, aren’t supported. I managed to fix it with the plugin MailtoWebmails. It annoys me...
Arduino Blog
Reduce power consumption in IoT and wearable devices, with Arduino’s new power management library!
Developing energy-efficient IoT and wearable devices is complex and time-consuming, yet it is...
2 months ago
Developing energy-efficient IoT and wearable devices is complex and time-consuming, yet it is essential for creating high-quality products that stand out in today’s market. A key part in this process is optimizing power consumption without sacrificing performance or...
Computer Ads from...
Creative Computing Magazine Interviews Clive Sinclair (1980)
This British inventor speaking about his ZX-80 computer system
2 weeks ago
This British inventor speaking about his ZX-80 computer system
Old Vintage...
Teaching Apple Cyberdog 1.0 new tricks (featuring OpenDoc)
this cyberdog (image credit).
that cyberdog, though this is one of my favourite weirdo pinball...
a year ago
this cyberdog (image credit).
that cyberdog, though this is one of my favourite weirdo pinball machines.
that cyberdog.
our PowerBook Duo 2300 rehabilitated, guess what we're gonna look at?
Internet document?
Thus was the nucleus of Cyberdog (named for the famous New...
Posts on Made of...
Confessions of a programmer: I hate code review
Most of the projects I've been working on today have fairly strict code review policies. My work...
over a year ago
Most of the projects I've been working on today have fairly strict code review policies. My work requires code review on most of our code, and as we bring on an army of interns for the summer, I've been responsible for reviewing lots of code. Additionally, about five months ago...
Applied Cartography
Postgres batch enqueuing in ten lines of Django
It hasn't failed me yet:
BATCH_SIZE = 100
def batch_proess(queryset) -> None:
count =...
a year ago
It hasn't failed me yet:
BATCH_SIZE = 100
def batch_proess(queryset) -> None:
count = queryset.count()
if count == 0:
time.sleep(10)
return
with transaction.atomic():
batch = list(
queryset.select_for_update(of=("self",),...
Notes on software...
Writing a document database from scratch in Go: Lucene-like filters and indexes
In this post we'll write a rudimentary document database from scratch
in Go. In less than 500 lines...
over a year ago
In this post we'll write a rudimentary document database from scratch
in Go. In less than 500 lines of code we'll be able to support the
following interactions, inspired by Elasticsearch:
$ curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"name": "Kevin", "age": "45"}'...
Jonas Hietala
Beebop The Island Hopper
It’s here! The stuff of dreams, an entry for the epic Ludum Dare 17 has been made! For those who...
over a year ago
It’s here! The stuff of dreams, an entry for the epic Ludum Dare 17 has been made! For those who don’t know it’s a 48 hour game making competition which actually is pretty silly. Even more silly is my two hours of commitment yesterday but late this night at about 03:05 I am now,...
Odds and Ends of...
Christmas Mailbag!
Is Elon Musk actually smart? Will HS2 ever be properly finished? Do I like Dominic Cummings? And...
3 days ago
Is Elon Musk actually smart? Will HS2 ever be properly finished? Do I like Dominic Cummings? And more!
anderegg.ca
Playing with the Bluesky firehose
Over the weekend I started playing around with Jetstream, a project from the Bluesky team to deliver...
3 weeks ago
Over the weekend I started playing around with Jetstream, a project from the Bluesky team to deliver a JSON based firehose of atproto data. Here’s an overview of the simple project I built with that data.
I was inspired by a post from Simon Willison where he showed off a tool for...
Notes on software...
In response to a frontend developer asking about database development
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Louwrentius
This blog is now running on solar power
Introduction
This blog is now running on solar power.
I've put a solar panel on my balcony, which...
over a year ago
Introduction
This blog is now running on solar power.
I've put a solar panel on my balcony, which is connected to a solar charge controller. This device charges an old worn-out car battery and provides power to a Raspberry Pi ~~3b+~~ 4B, which in turn powers this (static)...
watchTowr Labs -...
Pots and Pans, AKA an SSLVPN - Palo Alto PAN-OS CVE-2024-0012 and CVE-2024-9474
It'll be no surprise that 2024, 2023, 2022, and every other year of humanities' existence has been...
a month ago
It'll be no surprise that 2024, 2023, 2022, and every other year of humanities' existence has been tough for SSLVPN appliances.
Anyhow, there are new vulnerabilities (well, two of them) that are being exploited in the Palo Alto Networks firewall and SSLVPN offering, and as ever,...
Home on Erik...
New approximate nearest neighbor benchmarks
As some of you may know, one of my side interests is approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. I'm...
over a year ago
As some of you may know, one of my side interests is approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. I'm the author of Annoy, a library with 3,500+ stars on Github as of today. It offers fast approximate search for nearest neighbors with the additional benefit that you can load data...
Louwrentius
I resurrected my Dutch movie review site from 2003
Introduction
Between 2003 and 2006, I ran a Dutch movie review site called moevie.nl.1
I built the...
over a year ago
Introduction
Between 2003 and 2006, I ran a Dutch movie review site called moevie.nl.1
I built the site and wrote the reviews. It never made any money. It cost me money to host, and it cost me a lot of time writing reviews, but I remember enjoying writing reviews about films I...
Notes on software...
Finishing up a FreeBSD experiment
I've been using FreeBSD as my daily driver at work since
December. I've successfully done my job and...
over a year ago
I've been using FreeBSD as my daily driver at work since
December. I've successfully done my job and I've learned a hell of a
lot forcing myself on CURRENT... But there's been a number of issues
with it that have made it difficult to keep using, so I replaced it
with Arch Linux...
Arduino Blog
Self-leveling workbench can travel without trouble
An actually level workbench is critical for many different jobs, such as pouring resin or...
6 months ago
An actually level workbench is critical for many different jobs, such as pouring resin or calibrating sensors. But it is difficult enough to level a stationary workbench and that becomes a nightmare for a workbench that needs to roll around a shop on casters, as shop floors...
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,...
2 weeks 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
Batavus Champion bike from 1978
Restore the retro glory of an old bike from the 70s using the internet.
over a year ago
Restore the retro glory of an old bike from the 70s using the internet.
Louwrentius
Why filtering DHCP traffic is not always possible with iptables
When configuring my new firewall using iptables, I noticed something very
peculiar. Even if all...
over a year ago
When configuring my new firewall using iptables, I noticed something very
peculiar. Even if all input, forward and output traffic was dropped, DHCP
traffic to and from my DHCP server was not blocked even if there were no
rules permitting this traffic.
I even flushed all rules,...
Christian Selig
Curing Mac mini M4 fomo with 3D printing
Spoiler: 3D printed! The colored ports really sell the effect
If you’re anything like me, you’ve...
a month ago
Spoiler: 3D printed! The colored ports really sell the effect
If you’re anything like me, you’ve found the new, tinier Mac mini to be absolutely adorable. But you might also be like me that you either already have an awesome M1 Mac mini that you have no real reason to replace,...
Engineers Need Art
Building Quarter-Cab - Phase I
Lets build a simple virtual pinball controller to bring more immersion to your game.
7 months ago
Lets build a simple virtual pinball controller to bring more immersion to your game.
Home on Erik...
Miscellaneous unsolicited (and possibly biased) career advice
No one asked for this, but I'm something like ~12 years into my career and have had my fair share of...
over a year ago
No one asked for this, but I'm something like ~12 years into my career and have had my fair share of mistakes and luck so I thought I'd share some.
Honestly, I feel like I've mostly benefitted from luck.
lcamtuf’s thing
The serious science of trolling LLMs
The internet's oldest pastime finally has a purpose -- and it's more serious than AI companies would...
5 months ago
The internet's oldest pastime finally has a purpose -- and it's more serious than AI companies would like to admit.
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...
Arduino Blog
Create your own affordable Arduino-powered smart glasses
When Google Glass launched in 2013, the public opinion seemed to be “interesting technology, but the...
7 months ago
When Google Glass launched in 2013, the public opinion seemed to be “interesting technology, but the world isn’t ready yet.” Now that more than a decade has passed, the world may finally be ready — especially with the omission of controversial features like video recording. If...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Alternatives to selling at below-market-clearing prices for achieving fairness (or community...
over a year ago
GitButler
Stacked Branches with GitButler
GitButler can now manage dependent branches that are stacked, including managing stacked GitHub PRs.
2 weeks ago
GitButler can now manage dependent branches that are stacked, including managing stacked GitHub PRs.
anderegg.ca
More details on Bluesky’s subscription plan
Update: I had missed this, but the Bluesky team had already announced a subscription model was on...
2 weeks ago
Update: I had missed this, but the Bluesky team had already announced a subscription model was on the way. I had written this article assuming that was the news. What is new is the work happening on their official apps, which contains details on features and potential pricing. An...
Willem's Blog
Hello, stranger
"Discover the transformative power of simple conversations in our tech-dominated world, as one...
a year ago
"Discover the transformative power of simple conversations in our tech-dominated world, as one individual delves into the lost art of talking to strangers and the profound connections it can forge."
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...
4 days 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...
Jonas Hietala
Extracting schedule information from timeedit
At LIU we use timeedit to track our schedules. Recently they updated their interface and improved...
over a year ago
At LIU we use timeedit to track our schedules. Recently they updated their interface and improved some parts. It’s now possible to create a prenumeration of a collection of courses exported as csv which can then be imported to other calendar apps. But they also started to...
Home on Erik...
We're hiring at Better
Just a quick note that my team is always hiring at Better. A lot of new people have been joining the...
over a year ago
Just a quick note that my team is always hiring at Better. A lot of new people have been joining the team here in NYC lately—the tech team has actually grown from 35 to 60 in just ~3 months.
Arduino Blog
This automatic laser turret keeps the cats entertained for hours
Cats may be adorable, but they evolved to be predators. Unfortunately, responsible owners keep their...
2 months ago
Cats may be adorable, but they evolved to be predators. Unfortunately, responsible owners keep their cats indoors to avoid decimating the local wildlife population and that means Mr. Whiskers and Ms. Socks don’t get much opportunity to express their hunting urges. That’s why...
Jonas Hietala
Why is my file so huge?
My latest game was absolutely huge! And I’m not talking about the music (which was pretty huge too -...
over a year ago
My latest game was absolutely huge! And I’m not talking about the music (which was pretty huge too - roughly 20mb) but the little .exe file.
It was 14,6mb!!
Now every way you look at it, that’s incredibly huge. It’s like comparing an ant to a human. Normally the little ant is the...
Lars Lofgren
The 9 Delusions From the Halo Effect
You’re being lied to. Well, not intentionally. We’re constantly being pinged with stories of...
over a year ago
You’re being lied to. Well, not intentionally. We’re constantly being pinged with stories of companies that have rocketed to success. Especially in tech, there’s always another $1 billion unicorn around the corner. Uber, Facebook, Airbnb, Slack, Zenefits, Box, Shopify, yadda...
Old Vintage...
xa (xa65) 2.4.0 - finally
xa (xa65) 2.4.0 is the newest release of André Fachat's fast and portable two-pass 6502/65816...
a year ago
xa (xa65) 2.4.0 is the newest release of André Fachat's fast and portable two-pass 6502/65816 crossassembler; yours truly is the current maintainer and I just punched "live" on it tonight. It runs on Un*xy things and Windows (with Cygwin or msys2 or similar), and probably other...
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...
Willem's Blog
Fighting backscatter spam at server level
Deal with backscatter spam by implementing a stringent SMTP delivery policy at MTA level.
over a year ago
Deal with backscatter spam by implementing a stringent SMTP delivery policy at MTA level.
Willem's Blog
Abandoning my own tablet OS
After a year of experimenting with Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go 2 I have returned to iPad Pro...
over a year ago
After a year of experimenting with Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go 2 I have returned to iPad Pro and the Mac.
Jonas Hietala
HandCash handles require trust and are insecure
The HandCash wallet has recently become a popular Bitcoin Cash wallet in large part thanks to their...
over a year ago
The HandCash wallet has recently become a popular Bitcoin Cash wallet in large part thanks to their $handle concept. It’s basically a username you use instead of the normal Bitcoin Cash address, similar to how domain names abstract away IP addresses. For example instead of...
Jonas Hietala
Recent experiences with Netrunner tournaments
After a bit of a hiatus after the Winter Kit Tournament the 16th January I participated in three...
over a year ago
After a bit of a hiatus after the Winter Kit Tournament the 16th January I participated in three tournaments during February - March. After each of these tournaments I started a writeup of them but they fell off my mind a bit but consider this my break with my blogging...
Louwrentius
The minimum requirements for a secure system
The most secure server system is a system that is not connected to a network
and turned off....
over a year ago
The most secure server system is a system that is not connected to a network
and turned off. However, little work seems to be getting done this way. So we
want to turn systems on and connect them to a network, or even (God forbid)
the internet.
The thing is this. A system...
Louwrentius
Benchmark results of Random I/O performance of different RAID levels
Introduction
I have performed some benchmarks to determine how different RAID levels perform when...
over a year ago
Introduction
I have performed some benchmarks to determine how different RAID levels perform when handling a 100% random workload of 4K requests. This is a worst-case scenario for almost every storage subsystem. Normal day-to-day workloads may not be that harsh in a real-life...
Arduino Blog
Using Arduino with gaming
It’s not surprising that the Arduino community is packed to the brim with examples of gaming-related...
a month 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...
Notes on software...
One year as a solo dev building open-source data tools without funding
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Willem's Blog
Vision Pro
My thoughts on using Vision Pro to get some real work done, exploring what Spatial Computing means...
10 months ago
My thoughts on using Vision Pro to get some real work done, exploring what Spatial Computing means and how it can be useful.
Posts on Made of...
Some thoughts on Quora
With the announcement this week that Quora had taken $11 million in VC at an $86 million valuation,...
over a year ago
With the announcement this week that Quora had taken $11 million in VC at an $86 million valuation, there’s been an awful lot of attention on Quora. I’ve had an account there and wanted to write up some of my initial thoughts.
If you haven’t heard about Quora, it’s yet another...
Arduino Blog
This Halo helmet features an adjustable-transparency RGB-backlit visor
The Halo franchise is full of iconic designs, from vehicles like the Warthog to weapons like the...
3 weeks ago
The Halo franchise is full of iconic designs, from vehicles like the Warthog to weapons like the Needler. But the armor, such as the Spartan armor worn by Master Chief, is arguably the most recognizable. The helmets are especially cool, and LeMaster Tech put his own unique spin...
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...
Home on Erik...
Are data sets the new server rooms?
This blog post Data sets are the new server rooms makes the point that a bunch of companies raise a...
over a year ago
This blog post Data sets are the new server rooms makes the point that a bunch of companies raise a ton of money to go get really proprietary awesome data as a competitive moat. Because once you have the data, you can build a better product, and no one can copy it (at least not...
Notes on software...
Zig, Rust, and other languages
Having worked a bit in Zig, Rust, Go and now C, I think there are a
few common topics worth having a...
9 months ago
Having worked a bit in Zig, Rust, Go and now C, I think there are a
few common topics worth having a fresh conversation on: automatic
memory management, the standard library, and explicit allocation.
Zig is not a mature language. But it has made enough useful choices
for a number...
Jonas Hietala
Ludum Dare 20 Timelapse
So this time I managed to compose a timelapse of my weekend and the making of My Minions. Sadly I...
over a year ago
So this time I managed to compose a timelapse of my weekend and the making of My Minions. Sadly I lost the first few hours as I forgot to turn it on…
Anyway here’s the result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABVPlRaA5iI
Vitalik Buterin's...
Multidimensional gas pricing
7 months ago
Vitalik Buterin's...
La Guía Incompleta de los Rollups
over a year ago
Matt Mullenweg
Age-gating
I’m not opposed to age-gating at all, I think it’s appropriate in many situations and useful, and...
3 weeks ago
I’m not opposed to age-gating at all, I think it’s appropriate in many situations and useful, and democratic societies can decide their own rules there. But it should be handled and authenticated as low-level as possible, at the operating system layer. See also: Australia’s...
Good Enough
TIL: Fixing Broken Action Text Images in Atom Feeds
For a while now we've seen that images in our Pika atom feeds were not displaying in some feed...
7 months ago
For a while now we've seen that images in our Pika atom feeds were not displaying in some feed readers.
In fact, they weren't displaying in my own feed reader, which routes through Feedly.
I was sad.
I spent a lot of time troubleshooting this.
Compared our feed with a lot of atom...
Engineers Need Art
VPX Scripting - Part 6 (End Sound)
This post wraps up the sound work on Teacher's Pet.
8 months ago
This post wraps up the sound work on Teacher's Pet.
Applied Cartography
Notes on Zed, revisited
A little over six months ago, I wrote Notes on Zed. My conclusion at that time was that Zed made a...
2 months ago
A little over six months ago, I wrote Notes on Zed. My conclusion at that time was that Zed made a lot of great choices and felt really good to use, but lacked parity with VS Code's feature/ecosystem to its detriment.
Six months later, I spent a few days using it as my daily...
Old Vintage...
Refurb weekend: the Symbolics MacIvory Lisp machine I have hated
Every collector has that machine, the machine they sunk so much time and, often, money into that...
2 months ago
Every collector has that machine, the machine they sunk so much time and, often, money into that they would have defenestrated it years ago except for all the aforementioned time and money. Yours truly is no exception.
a future article.) They existed in highly technical...
Vitalik Buterin's...
What I would love to see in a wallet
2 weeks ago
computers are bad
2024-12-21 something over New Jersey
There were thousands of reports: strange aircraft, floating through the sky. A
retrospective sum of...
yesterday
There were thousands of reports: strange aircraft, floating through the sky. A
retrospective sum of press accounts finds that some 100,000 people were
reported to have witnessed aerial intruders. Despite the scant details
associated with most reports, an eager press repeated the...
Posts on Made of...
Tracking down a memory leak in Ruby's EventMachine
At Stripe, we rely heavily on ruby and EventMachine to power various internal and external services....
over a year ago
At Stripe, we rely heavily on ruby and EventMachine to power various internal and external services. Over the last several months, we’ve known that one such service suffered from a gradual memory leak, that would cause its memory usage to gradually balloon from a normal ~50MB to...
Christian Selig
Using PHPickerViewController Images in a Memory-Efficient Way
PHPickerViewController is (in my opinion) one of the more exciting parts of iOS 14. We developers...
over a year ago
PHPickerViewController is (in my opinion) one of the more exciting parts of iOS 14. We developers now have a fully-fledged photo picker that we can just use, rather than having to spend a bunch of our time creating our own (much like SFSafariViewController did for developers and...
OH8HUB’s Substack
Spring ham radio activation of Korkattivuori (Mt. Korkatti)
Korkattivuori (“Mount Korkatti”, 186m above sea level) is a small hill and Natura 2000 nature...
a year ago
Korkattivuori (“Mount Korkatti”, 186m above sea level) is a small hill and Natura 2000 nature reserve area near town Haapavesi (pop. 6588) in Finland. The nature reserve area consist of short family friendly hiking path of approximately 1.5km. One end of the path has parking...
Applied Cartography
Are monopolies bad, actually?
One of the more interesting theses advanced by Zero to One [1] is that monopolies are good to the...
9 months ago
One of the more interesting theses advanced by Zero to One [1] is that monopolies are good to the extent that they afford companies the agency and comfort to engage in long-term activities:
Monopolists can think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t. In...
Applied Cartography
Keeping a technical edge
Someone emailed me in response to Two years as an independent technologist, in which I wrote:
I miss...
3 months ago
Someone emailed me in response to Two years as an independent technologist, in which I wrote:
I miss of being at a large company, which is dealing with deeply cutting-edge technical problems, but my ability to analyze information, make decisions, and perform at a high-level has...
./techtipsy
Quest towards energy efficiency part 1: the water heater
While listening to the SelfHosted podcast, one of the hosts brought up their peculiar...
over a year ago
While listening to the SelfHosted podcast, one of the hosts brought up their peculiar living
arrangement multiple times. Essentially, he and his family are living in an RV that runs off of batteries, has solar
panels, utilizes Home Assistant for automation, supports multiple...
./techtipsy
I finally found an use case for my Raspberry Pi Model B+
You have probably heard about the Raspberry Pi. It’s a nice little affordable
single-board computer...
over a year ago
You have probably heard about the Raspberry Pi. It’s a nice little affordable
single-board computer with a huge community using it for all sorts of projects.
I got my first Raspberry Pi, the Model B+,
during my first year at university, which was around the winter of...
Jonas Hietala
Let's build a VORON: Noise
The build is going well and the printer is printing tons of random stuff and I’m generally in awe of...
9 months ago
The build is going well and the printer is printing tons of random stuff and I’m generally in awe of how cool the printer is.
But there’s one thing that sucks: it’s damn loud.
I knew that it wouldn’t be silent, but I wasn’t prepared for this kind of noise.
Silent controller...
Arduino Blog
Amassing a mobile Minion militia
Channeling his inner Gru, YouTuber Electo built a robotic minion army to terrorize and amuse the...
4 months ago
Channeling his inner Gru, YouTuber Electo built a robotic minion army to terrorize and amuse the public in local shopping malls. Building one minion robot is, in theory, pretty straightforward. That is especially true when, like these, that robot isn’t actually bipedal and...
Matt Blewitt
Building a PostgreSQL Extension, Line by Line
I’ve been working on a particular problem - how to offer logical replication for a very large number...
6 months ago
I’ve been working on a particular problem - how to offer logical replication for a very large number of Postgres databases, where I don’t have the ability (or capacity) to liaise with the users of the databases one-to-one. In order to mitigate some of the limitations, I wanted to...
Applied Cartography
Projects are things with steps
Lots of kind words poured in as a response to My approach to GTD and PKM, and one question was asked...
a month ago
Lots of kind words poured in as a response to My approach to GTD and PKM, and one question was asked so frequently that I decided to write about it.
Why is “Get mom a birthday present” a project and not a task?
GTD is very orthodox in what a “project” is: it’s anything that:
you...
Notes on software...
Reviewing the Surface Book 2
The first few paragraphs cover what I was looking for and what I
considered. Then the review.
Why...
over a year ago
The first few paragraphs cover what I was looking for and what I
considered. Then the review.
Why the Surface Book 2
I used a Macbook throughout my professional career until I had the
choice a few years ago when I started my current job. Here, I ran
Gentoo, then FreeBSD, then...
Avestura's Blog
Explaining The Postgres Meme
Have you seen this legendary SQL iceberg meme? Let's talk about it while wearing our PostgreSQL hat!
a year ago
Have you seen this legendary SQL iceberg meme? Let's talk about it while wearing our PostgreSQL hat!
computers are bad
2023-07-10 the tragedy of beatrice foods
Occasionally, research into the history of telephony takes you into some
strange places. There are...
a year ago
Occasionally, research into the history of telephony takes you into some
strange places. There are conspiracy theories, of course, and there are people
who insist on their version of events so incessantly that details of dates and
places can become heated arguments. There is also...