Jonas Hietala
Netrunner Lindhska Store Championship Örebro
After the awesomeness during the previous store championship, I decided to go to the store...
over a year ago
After the awesomeness during the previous store championship, I decided to go to the store championship at Lindhska Bokhandel in Örebro.
I brought a modified version of the same corp I used the last time, a Blue Sun kill deck and a new runner with Leela Patel. See the links for...
Neil Madden
Hybrid encryption and the KEM/DEM paradigm
If you know a bit about public key cryptography, you probably know that you don’t directly encrypt a...
over a year ago
If you know a bit about public key cryptography, you probably know that you don’t directly encrypt a message with a public key encryption algorithm like RSA. This is for many reasons, one of which being that it is incredibly slow. Instead you do what’s called hybrid encryption:...
watchTowr Labs -...
“To live is to fight, to fight is to live! - IBM ODM Remote Code Execution
In previous blogs, we’ve discussed some of the big players in the enterprise software space, but...
10 months ago
In previous blogs, we’ve discussed some of the big players in the enterprise software space, but there is one that we have not mentioned before, that is - quite frankly - the heavy-weight champion of the world in terms of applications for large enterprises. With over a hundred
computers are bad
2023-08-19 meanwhile elsewhere
I had meant to write something today, but I'm just getting over a case of the
COVID and had a hard...
a year ago
I had meant to write something today, but I'm just getting over a case of the
COVID and had a hard time getting to it. Instead I did the yard work, edited
and uploaded a YouTube video, and then spewed out a Cohost thread as long as a
blog post. So in lieu of your regularly...
Home on Erik...
Calculating cosine similarities using dimensionality reduction
This was posted on the Twitter Engineering blog a few days ago: Dimension Independent Similarity...
over a year ago
This was posted on the Twitter Engineering blog a few days ago: Dimension Independent Similarity Computation (DISCO)
I just glanced at the paper, and there's some cool stuff going on from a theoretical perspective. What I'm curious about is why they didn't decide to use...
Notes on software...
Writing an efficient object previewer for JavaScript
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.
Neil Madden
Is Datalog a good language for authorization?
Datalog is a logic programming language, based on Prolog, which is seeing something of a resurgence...
over a year ago
Datalog is a logic programming language, based on Prolog, which is seeing something of a resurgence in interest in recent years. In particular, several recent approaches to authorization (working out who can do what) have used Datalog as the logical basis for access control...
Louwrentius
Understanding Ceph: open-source scalable storage
Introduction
In this blog post I will try to explain why I believe Ceph is such an interesting...
over a year ago
Introduction
In this blog post I will try to explain why I believe Ceph is such an interesting storage solution. After you finished reading this blog post you should have a good high-level overview of Ceph.
I've written this blog post purely because I'm a storage enthusiast and I...
Old Vintage...
Refurb weekend: Data General/One (and the worst LCD in the world)
I mentioned earlier that while I prefer specializing in non-x86 laptops, that doesn't mean I don't...
8 months ago
I mentioned earlier that while I prefer specializing in non-x86 laptops, that doesn't mean I don't collect interesting or unusual x86 laptops, like the Brother GeoBook NB-60 (I finally tracked down a mostly working NB-80C, the top of the line model, which will be the subject of a...
Willem's Blog
Being a volunteer in Amsterdam-Zuidoost
About my work as volunteer in the local community center in Amsterdam Zuidoost
over a year ago
About my work as volunteer in the local community center in Amsterdam Zuidoost
Avestura's Blog
How to change visibility in massive GitHub organizations like EpicGames?
How to publicize and un-publicize your visibility in massive GitHub orgs?
over a year ago
How to publicize and un-publicize your visibility in massive GitHub orgs?
Electronics etc…
Cable Length Measurement with an HP 8007B Pulse Generator
MathJax.Hub.Config({
jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"],
tex2jax: {
inlineMath: [...
a year ago
MathJax.Hub.Config({
jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"],
tex2jax: {
inlineMath: [ ['$', '$'], ["\\(", "\\)"] ],
displayMath: [ ['$$', '$$'], ["\\[", "\\]"] ],
processEscapes: true,
skipTags: ['script', 'noscript', 'style', 'textarea', 'pre',...
Louwrentius
IKEA $50 VINDSTYRKA vs. $290 Dylos air quality monitor
This is a brief article in which I compare the IKEA VINDSTYRKA $50 air quality monitor (PM2.5) with...
a year ago
This is a brief article in which I compare the IKEA VINDSTYRKA $50 air quality monitor (PM2.5) with a $290 air quality monitor made by Dylos to see if it's any good.
Context
If you care about indoor air quality, you may already own a CO2 to determine if it's time to ventilate...
Louwrentius
Switching away from Debian to Ubuntu LTS
Over the last couple of years, Debian Linux has released new stable versions about every two years....
over a year ago
Over the last couple of years, Debian Linux has released new stable versions about every two years. This pace is great for progress, but there is a serious problem. This problem is related to their support for older Debian stable versions.
If you read the quote below from the...
Home on Erik...
Developer experience as a competitive advantage
I spent a ton of time looking at different software providers, both as a CTO, and as a nerd...
over a year ago
I spent a ton of time looking at different software providers, both as a CTO, and as a nerd “advanced” consumer who builds stuff in my spare time. In the last 10 years, there has been an order of magnitude more products that cater directly to developers, through APIs, SDKs, and...
Home on Erik...
More Luigi!
Continuing in the same spirit of shameless self-promotion, here's some recent Luigi press:
Reddit...
over a year ago
Continuing in the same spirit of shameless self-promotion, here's some recent Luigi press:
Reddit thread A Guide to Python Frameworks for Hadoop (slides from the NYC Hadoop User Group) This presentation from the Open Analytics NYC meetup about how Foursquare uses Luigi Luigi...
Arduino Blog
Seaside Sweeper keeps beaches pristine
Without anyone caring for them, beaches quickly become trash-covered swaths of disappointment. That...
7 months ago
Without anyone caring for them, beaches quickly become trash-covered swaths of disappointment. That care is necessary to maintain the beautiful sandy havens that we all want to enjoy, but it requires a lot of labor. A capstone team of students from the University of Colorado...
Home on Erik...
The half-life of code & the ship of Theseus
As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old...
over a year ago
As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old code slowly over time? In order to understand this, I built a little thing to analyze Git projects, with help from the formidable GitPython project.
Home on Erik...
New benchmarks for approximate nearest neighbors
UPDATE(2018-06-17): There are is a later blog post with newer benchmarks!
One of my super nerdy...
over a year ago
UPDATE(2018-06-17): There are is a later blog post with newer benchmarks!
One of my super nerdy interests include approximate algorithms for nearest neighbors in high-dimensional spaces. The problem is simple. You have say 1M points in some high-dimensional space.
Louwrentius
Core i7 920 @ 3,6 Ghz is a true beast!
Even today, Core 2 Duo processors clocked at 2 ghz are no slugs. However, the
Core i7 920 is of a...
over a year ago
Even today, Core 2 Duo processors clocked at 2 ghz are no slugs. However, the
Core i7 920 is of a different kind. First, it is not only clocked at a higher
speed (default 2,8 Ghz), it is also a quad-core processor. Thanks to the re-
introduction of hyperthreading, this processor...
Good Enough
TIL: Deploying a Sinatra app to Render.com
This morning I wanted to deploy a simple Sinatra app to Render.com.
It wasn’t super obvious to me,...
a year ago
This morning I wanted to deploy a simple Sinatra app to Render.com.
It wasn’t super obvious to me, so I figured I’d write down what worked in the end.
First, a Gemfile:
# Gemfile
source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'sinatra'
gem 'sinatra-contrib'
gem 'puma'
* I’m pretty sure...
Arduino Blog
Arduino’s Alvik Robot shortlisted for the Bett Awards 2025 in the AV, VR/AR, Robotics, and Digital...
We’re thrilled to announce that Arduino Education has been shortlisted for the Bett Awards 2025,...
a month ago
We’re thrilled to announce that Arduino Education has been shortlisted for the Bett Awards 2025, this time in the AV, VR/AR, Robotics, or Digital Device category with our Alvik robot! This recognition highlights our dedication to innovation, inclusivity, and the advancement of...
Notes on software...
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
Next in database basics:
2. binary expressions and WHERE filters
3. indexes
4. a...
over a year ago
Next in database basics:
2. binary expressions and WHERE filters
3. indexes
4. a database/sql driver
In this series we'll write a rudimentary database from
scratch in Go. Project source code is available on
Github.
In this first post we'll build enough of a parser to...
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...
Home on Erik...
NYC Machine Learning meetup
From the NYC Machine Learning talk I had last week:
Haven't looked at it yet except briefly....
over a year ago
From the NYC Machine Learning talk I had last week:
Haven't looked at it yet except briefly. Unfortunately the quality isn't the best.
Jonas Hietala
The Top Idea
Recently I’ve been having a dozen ideas and projects I’ve been poking around with:
I wrote a simple...
over a year ago
Recently I’ve been having a dozen ideas and projects I’ve been poking around with:
I wrote a simple lua, later perl, which announced when a new day9 episode has come. Later I expanded it to search for new manga episodes, but now it’s broken and unfinished.
In an attempt to learn...
Matt Blewitt
7 Languages in 7 Weeks for 2025
It’s been over 14 years since the original 7 Languages in 7 Weeks was first published, giving a...
3 weeks ago
It’s been over 14 years since the original 7 Languages in 7 Weeks was first published, giving a hands on tour of Ruby, Clojure, Haskell, Io, Scala, Erlang and Prolog. Ruby achieved critical mass, to some degree so did Scala, with the others being popular within their specific...
Jonas Hietala
Favourite Programming Language
All the programmers love to promote their favourite language, or to hate on others. Now I read a...
over a year ago
All the programmers love to promote their favourite language, or to hate on others. Now I read a post which claimes my favourite language is not good enough! But he’s correct of course, there is no one language to rule them all. You should always choose the mest language for the...
Vitalik Buterin's...
What do I think about Community Notes?
a year ago
Matt Blewitt
So, You Want To Build A DBaaS
So you’ve made the decision to build a Database-as-a-Service product (or something similar). As a...
a year ago
So you’ve made the decision to build a Database-as-a-Service product (or something similar). As a result, you are making state and coordination your problem. Here are some things I’ve learned to keep in mind as you embark on this project, in no particular order (other than the...
Posts on Made of...
Three kinds of memory leaks
So, you’ve got a program that’s using more and more over time as it runs. Probably you can...
over a year ago
So, you’ve got a program that’s using more and more over time as it runs. Probably you can immediately identify this as a likely symptom of a memory leak.
But when we say “memory leak”, what do we actually mean? In my experience, apparent memory leaks divide into three broad...
./techtipsy
Steam local network game transfers are a game-changer
Steam recently launched a new feature: local network game transfers.
The idea is simple: if you have...
a year ago
Steam recently launched a new feature: local network game transfers.
The idea is simple: if you have a game downloaded on another PC and you’re both on the same local network, then Steam can download game data
from that PC, avoiding the need to download the game over public...
Posts on Made of...
Stripe's monorepo developer environment
I worked at Stripe for about seven years, from 2012 to 2019. Over that time, I used and contributed...
7 months ago
I worked at Stripe for about seven years, from 2012 to 2019. Over that time, I used and contributed to many generations of Stripe’s developer environment – the tools that engineers used daily to write and test code. I think Stripe did a pretty good job designing and building that...
Jonas Hietala
10 Games in 10 Languages
For school we have this programming course for Java. It isn’t anything special really and it would...
over a year ago
For school we have this programming course for Java. It isn’t anything special really and it would be really boring if I don’t like to program, it almost is anyway, if it weren’t for the fact that we’re to create a game! Just any game will do and we’re in a group of two and we...
Louwrentius
Why I bought a digital projector (Panasonic PT-AT5000E)
I don't have a TV. I haven't been watching TV for more than 10 years. But I love to watch movies or...
over a year ago
I don't have a TV. I haven't been watching TV for more than 10 years. But I love to watch movies or great series like Dexter and Game of Thrones. Until recently, I watched movies or series on my 27" iMac. Twenty-seven inch is large for a computer screen but for a TV, it's quite...
Posts on Made of...
Two kinds of testing
While talking about thinking about tests and testing in software engineering recently, I’ve come to...
over a year ago
While talking about thinking about tests and testing in software engineering recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are (at least) two major ideas and goals that people have when they test or talk about testing. This post aims to outline what I see as these two schools,...
Jonas Hietala
Ludum Dare 29 Entry
After months of procrastination it is time for me to enter Ludum Dare again!
I am totally...
over a year ago
After months of procrastination it is time for me to enter Ludum Dare again!
I am totally unprepared, but I did setup a setup which actually compiles. I never got audio to run but hopefully I can manage something.
Repository: https://github.com/treeman/LD29. Going for C++ this...
Posts on Made of...
Measuring Capacity Through Utilization
(This post is cross-posted from Honeycomb’s instrumentation series).
One of my favorite concepts...
over a year ago
(This post is cross-posted from Honeycomb’s instrumentation series).
One of my favorite concepts when thinking about instrumenting a system to understand its overall performance and capacity is what I call “time utilization”.
By this I mean: If you look at the behavior of a...
Ken Shirriff's blog
The first microcomputer: The transfluxor-powered Arma Micro Computer from 1962
What would you say is the first microcomputer?1 The Apple I from 1976? The Altair 8800 from...
10 months ago
What would you say is the first microcomputer?1 The Apple I from 1976? The Altair 8800 from 1974?
Perhaps the lesser-known Micral N (1973) or Q1 (1972)?
How about the Arma Micro Computer from way back in 1962.
The Arma Micro Computer was a compact 20-pound transistorized...
Jonas Hietala
February gets Themed: Rejection
The Experimental Gameplay Project has announced their next theme - and shame on me if I wouldn’t...
over a year ago
The Experimental Gameplay Project has announced their next theme - and shame on me if I wouldn’t follow suite! With valentine coming up I might just have found a pretty nice idea, just now, writing this…
Booyah!!
./techtipsy
How I fixed one hardware issue with another one
I happen to run on an ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac
motherboard that used to run fine, but ever...
over a year ago
I happen to run on an ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac
motherboard that used to run fine, but ever since I installed one UEFI update, it has had this one annoying issue:
whenever you reboot, it gets stuck at POST. Cold boots work fine and the shutdown-and-push-the-power-button...
Posts on Made of...
Software Engineers should keep lab notebooks
Software engineers, as a rule, suck at writing things down. Part of this is training – unlike...
over a year ago
Software engineers, as a rule, suck at writing things down. Part of this is training – unlike chemists and biologists who are trailed to obsessively document everything they do in their lab notebooks, computer scientists are taught to document the end results of their work, but...
GitButler
Git Merge 2024 Talks are Up
All the Git Merge 2024 talks are up on Youtube. Here is a quick summary of each one.
a month ago
All the Git Merge 2024 talks are up on Youtube. Here is a quick summary of each one.
Matt Mullenweg
Those Other Lawsuits
It’s a heavy day, and I’m sad to write this. Not sure where to start. In 2022, a lawyer recruited...
2 months ago
It’s a heavy day, and I’m sad to write this. Not sure where to start. In 2022, a lawyer recruited two people who took care of my Mom—an assistant and one of her dozen nurses—to resign and demand a million dollars each, or they would publish horrible things about her in a lawsuit....
Willem's Blog
Servicing a robot vacuum cleaner
This week it was time for some maintenance on my iRobot Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. Read along to...
over a year ago
This week it was time for some maintenance on my iRobot Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. Read along to learn how I did it.
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
Lighthouse Blog
What I want to achieve with Lighthouse
10 months ago
Home on Erik...
A brief history of Hadoop at Spotify
I was talking with some data engineers at Spotify and had a moment of nostalgia.
2008
I was writing...
over a year ago
I was talking with some data engineers at Spotify and had a moment of nostalgia.
2008
I was writing my master's thesis at Spotify and had to run a Hadoop job to extract some data from the logs.
Posts on Made of...
Indices point between elements
If you’re familiar with nearly any mainstream programming language, and I asked you to draw a...
over a year ago
If you’re familiar with nearly any mainstream programming language, and I asked you to draw a diagram of an array, the array indices, and the array elements, odds are good you’d produce a diagram something like this:
In this post, I want to persuade you to replace that image, or,...
Home on Erik...
Ratio metrics
We run a ton of A/B tests at Spotify and we look at a ton of metrics. Defining metrics is a little...
over a year ago
We run a ton of A/B tests at Spotify and we look at a ton of metrics. Defining metrics is a little bit of an art form. Ideally you want to define success metrics before you run a test to avoid cherry picking metrics.
Louwrentius
Creating configuration backups of HP procurve switches
I've created a tool called procurve-watch. It creates a backup of the running switch configuration...
over a year ago
I've created a tool called procurve-watch. It creates a backup of the running switch configuration through secure shell (using scp).
It also diffs backed up configurations against older versions, in order to keep track of changes. If you run the script from cron every hour or...
Posts on Made of...
Computers can be understood
Introduction This post attempts to describe a mindset I’ve come to realize I bring to essentially...
over a year ago
Introduction This post attempts to describe a mindset I’ve come to realize I bring to essentially all of my work with software. I attempt to articulate this mindset, some of its implications and strengths, and some of the ways in which it’s lead me astray.
Software can be...
lcamtuf’s thing
Random objects: Intel Edison
A glimpse of the missteps of x86 in the embedded world.
6 months ago
A glimpse of the missteps of x86 in the embedded world.
Louwrentius
Achieving 2.3 GB/s with 16 x 4 TB drives
I'm in the process of building a new storage server to replace my 18 TB NAS.
The server is almost...
over a year ago
I'm in the process of building a new storage server to replace my 18 TB NAS.
The server is almost finished, it's now down to adding disk drives. I'm using the HGST 4 TB 7200 RPM drive for this build (SKU 0S03356) (review).
I have not bought all drives at once, but slowly adding...
Home on Erik...
The eigenvector of "Why we moved from language X to language Y"
I was reading yet another blog post titled “Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y>” (I...
over a year ago
I was reading yet another blog post titled “Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y>” (I forgot which one) and I started wondering if you can generalize it a bit. Is it possible to generate a N * N contingency table of moving from language X to language Y?
Notes on software...
Why (and how) to read books
The last time I read for fun was in elementary school. Since college I
knew I must read more, but I...
over a year ago
The last time I read for fun was in elementary school. Since college I
knew I must read more, but I never forced myself to build the
habit. Then three years ago I spent time around my brother and a
coworker who were avid readers. This "peer pressure" helped me get
started.
Since...
Notes on software...
Analyzing large JSON files via partial JSON parsing
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.
Push to Prod
Best Questions and Answers to the “Terrifying Netflix Concurrency Bug” Post
Why couldn't we roll back? Weren't we concerned about costs? Why is operating Netflix so...
3 weeks ago
Why couldn't we roll back? Weren't we concerned about costs? Why is operating Netflix so complicated? Plus many others.
Vitalik Buterin's...
Make Ethereum Cypherpunk Again
12 months ago
Home on Erik...
Some more font links
My blog post about fonts generated lots of traffic – it landed on Hacker News, took down my site...
over a year ago
My blog post about fonts generated lots of traffic – it landed on Hacker News, took down my site while I was sleeping, and then obviously vanished from HN before I woke up. But it also got retweeted by a ton of people.
Jonas Hietala
Ores
Now we can build rooms, we can place objects and the worker will do things for us. Now I’ve added...
over a year ago
Now we can build rooms, we can place objects and the worker will do things for us. Now I’ve added some ores which makes the game look a bit less boring. I realize I’ve spent all my time on these little things and I still don’t have a game! But it doesn’t matter, maybe I can...
Arduino Blog
Giving a teenage pet turtle a synthetic pizza-ordering voice
If B. F. Skinner’s famous research proved anything, it is that virtually all animals are capable of...
3 months ago
If B. F. Skinner’s famous research proved anything, it is that virtually all animals are capable of some degree of training. Training is really just taking advantage of an animal’s natural inclination to adapt for survival, which is something all living organisms do. With that in...
Notes on software...
Container scheduling strategies for integration testing 14 different databases in Github Actions
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Jonas Hietala
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...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Notes on Blockchain Governance
over a year ago
Jonas Hietala
Entering Pintos
First week of school is over and it’s been full throttle from the start, in a good way. We’re having...
over a year ago
First week of school is over and it’s been full throttle from the start, in a good way. We’re having four courses and for once I like them all. We have an interesting math course, a useful course “Software Development in Theory” (boring but useful) and a big project course where...
Arduino Blog
Kick off the Monaco Grand Prix weekend with these Formula 1-inspired Arduino projects
The Monaco Grand Prix is just days away and will likely be one of the most exciting races of the...
7 months ago
The Monaco Grand Prix is just days away and will likely be one of the most exciting races of the season. While most fans can’t participate directly — except as spectators — they can celebrate their passion through DIY projects. That’s why we’ve scoured the community to find the...
Notes on software...
Surveying SQL parser libraries in a few high-level languages
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.
Vitalik Buterin's...
Why we need wide adoption of social recovery wallets
over a year ago
Louwrentius
Experiences running ZFS on Ubuntu Linux 12.04
I really like ZFS because with current data sets, I do believe that data corruption may start...
over a year ago
I really like ZFS because with current data sets, I do believe that data corruption may start becoming an issue. The thing is that the license under which ZFS is released does not permit it to be used in the Linux kernel. That's quite unfortunate, but there is hope. There is a...
./techtipsy
So you want to migrate to Kubernetes: observations from a software developer
Kubernetes: everyone wants to do it, regardless of their scale and business objectives.1
Common...
2 months ago
Kubernetes: everyone wants to do it, regardless of their scale and business objectives.1
Common justifications include better scalability, cost savings, standardization and being super modern and stuff. It’s
the future!
In my personal experience, Kubernetes is far from the...
latest projects -...
Robot Slide Whistle Orchestrion
[Hardware] Army of Robot Slide Whistles
8 months ago
[Hardware] Army of Robot Slide Whistles
Willem's Blog
Influencing purchase behaviour
For my work I am continuously looking into scientific sources to improve e-commerce performance,...
over a year ago
For my work I am continuously looking into scientific sources to improve e-commerce performance, conversion rates and online revenue. Use this useful report to apply behavioural sciences principles to your advantage.
Arduino Blog
GLEWBOT scales buildings like a gecko to inspect wall tiles
A great deal of building maintenance expenses are the result of simple inaccessibility. Cleaning the...
7 months ago
A great deal of building maintenance expenses are the result of simple inaccessibility. Cleaning the windows are your house is a trivial chore, but cleaning the windows on a skyscraper is serious undertaking that needs specialized equipment and training. To make exterior wall...
Matt Mullenweg
On with Theo / T3.gg
On Thursday, a prominent developer, YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and journalist posted a video titled...
2 months ago
On Thursday, a prominent developer, YouTuber, Twitch streamer, and journalist posted a video titled This might be the end of WordPress. It was very harsh. In that video you’ll hear him say about me, “he’s a chronic hater” (7:55), “seems like he’s been a pretty petty bastard for a...
Louwrentius
The iPad will be the death of Flash
So Apple finally released their tablet computer: the iPad. One of the most
debated drawbacks is that...
over a year ago
So Apple finally released their tablet computer: the iPad. One of the most
debated drawbacks is that it lacks support for Adobe Flash. The iPhone does
not support Flash either, and since the iPad is based on the iPhone OS, this
should not come as a surprise.
Now many people see...
Yazin Alirhayim
Part 1: Will greater access to capital spark Bahrain’s economy?
Today, I was on a panel discussing lending and access to capital (not a wooden panel, mind you — but...
over a year ago
Today, I was on a panel discussing lending and access to capital (not a wooden panel, mind you — but a panel of speakers. Now that I think about it, we may have been sitting on wooden panel flooring).
At any rate, the discussion covered alot of ground, all as part of the larger...
Notes on software...
First few hurdles writing a Scheme interpreter
I started working on BSDScheme last October, inspired to get back
into language implementation after...
over a year ago
I started working on BSDScheme last October, inspired to get back
into language implementation after my coworker built bshift, a
compiler for a C-like language. BSDScheme is an interpreter for a
(currently small subset of) Scheme written in D. It implements a few
substantial...
Lighthouse Blog
How to import feeds in Lighthouse
8 months ago
Lighthouse Blog
Updates November 17: Content classification and summary
a year ago
Simply Explained
Filtering spam on YouTube with TensorFlow & AI
My YouTube channel has been attracting a lot of spammers. They try to trick people by saying they...
over a year ago
My YouTube channel has been attracting a lot of spammers. They try to trick people by saying they know how to profit from trading cryptocurrencies or that they can recover lost wallet keys.I've been marking these comments as spam, thinking that YouTube would learn to recognize...
Notes on software...
Writing a minimal in-memory storage engine for MySQL/MariaDB
I spent a week
looking at MySQL/MariaDB internals along with ~80 other devs. Although
MySQL and...
11 months ago
I spent a week
looking at MySQL/MariaDB internals along with ~80 other devs. Although
MySQL and MariaDB are mostly the same (more on that later), I focused
on MariaDB specifically this week.
Before last week I had never built MySQL/MariaDB before. The first day
of this hack week,...
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...
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...
Jonas Hietala
Postmortem: A Geek Valentine
Ah man the mush in my brain is finally letting go and I’m starting to feel this tiny little...
over a year ago
Ah man the mush in my brain is finally letting go and I’m starting to feel this tiny little programming urge again… This time it’s not Haskell or a new experimental game that’s luring me on, no this time it’s me longing to create this fantastic awesome epic RTS game. Sadly it’s a...
Home on Erik...
Black Box Machine Learning in the Cloud
There's a bunch of companies working on machine learning as a service. Some old companies like...
over a year ago
There's a bunch of companies working on machine learning as a service. Some old companies like Google, but now also Amazon and Microsoft.
Then there's a ton of startups: PredictionIO ($2.7M funding), BigML ($1.6M funding), Clarifai, etc, etc.
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.
Notes on software...
A minimal REST API in Java
There's a style of Java that is a joy to write. This post will cover
how to set up a basic...
over a year ago
There's a style of Java that is a joy to write. This post will cover
how to set up a basic PostgreSQL-integrated REST API using
Jersey and
JOOQ in a style not dissimilar to Flask and
SQLAlchemy in Python.
In particular, we'll try to avoid as much runtime
reflection/class-loading...
On Life and Lisp
The Federation Fallacy
Throughout the free software community, an unbridled aura of justified mistrust fills the air:...
over a year ago
Throughout the free software community, an unbridled aura of justified mistrust fills the air: mistrust of large corporations, mistrust of governments, and of course, mistrust of proprietary software. Each mistrust is connected by a critical thread: centralisation.
Thus,...
GitButler
Fearless Rebasing
GitButler now supports first class conflicts, which makes rebasing much less annoying. What is...
2 months ago
GitButler now supports first class conflicts, which makes rebasing much less annoying. What is "fearless rebasing"?
Simply Explained
Integrate Home Assistant with Apple Reminders
I recently integrated Home Assistant with Apple Reminders so that automations can create new todos....
over a year ago
I recently integrated Home Assistant with Apple Reminders so that automations can create new todos. This is trickier as it sounds, because Reminders has no API that can be accessed from Home Assistant. Here's how I worked around that problem with a script, input text helper and...
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.
Arduino Blog
This DIY smart chicken coop features AI-based predator detection
Raising chickens can be a very rewarding endeavor, as they can provide fresh daily eggs and help get...
a month ago
Raising chickens can be a very rewarding endeavor, as they can provide fresh daily eggs and help get rid of pests in the yard. But, like all animals, they require care. Most importantly, you’ll need to ensure that they have regular food and water, and you’ll need to protect them...
Louwrentius
'Linux: show graphical layout of disk temperatures'
graphic, representation
To get a visual representation of hard drive temperatures, I wrote a...
over a year ago
graphic, representation
To get a visual representation of hard drive temperatures, I wrote a small
script. The output of this script looks like this:
This output is tailored to the exact disk lay-out of my storage
server. However, it is also usable for other servers. You have to...
Jonas Hietala
addwatch: resource exhausted
While tampering with Hakyll and running site preview I stumbled upon this error message:
site:...
over a year ago
While tampering with Hakyll and running site preview I stumbled upon this error message:
site: addWatch: resource exhausted (No space left on device)
At first I tried to clear /tmp but, so clearly the device did have some space left. After a bit of googling I found a solution...
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...
./techtipsy
OpenWRT, ISP modem and dynamic IP addresses: how to fix connectivity issues without rebooting your...
My current ISP provides an internet connection over a
copper wire. To use it,
I have a crappy modem...
7 months ago
My current ISP provides an internet connection over a
copper wire. To use it,
I have a crappy modem (Technicolor CGA2121, DOCSIS 3.0). It’s running in bridge
mode,
meaning that all it does is convert the signal running over the coax cable
into plain old Ethernet.
My main...
On Life and Lisp
Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux
We’re excited to announce our first Apple GPU driver release!
We’ve been working hard over the past...
over a year ago
We’re excited to announce our first Apple GPU driver release!
We’ve been working hard over the past two years to bring this new driver to everyone, and we’re really proud to finally be here. This is still an alpha driver, but it’s already good enough to run a smooth desktop...
Louwrentius
The kind of sound you never want to hear from your computer
The sounds of hard drives that have perished
These sounds are only frightening or scary if you...
over a year ago
The sounds of hard drives that have perished
These sounds are only frightening or scary if you imagine your precious data
only exists on that failing drive. If you make consistent and frequent backups
and/or you run a fault-tolerant RAID flavour, it is but a nuisance.
Good Enough
TIL: Listen for JavaScript events only once!
A common thing I find myself doing in Javascript is adding some event driven behavior that I only...
a year ago
A common thing I find myself doing in Javascript is adding some event driven behavior that I only want to happen once. Let’s say I have a big button that starts the process of lowering a certain spy into a pool of certain doom — I don’t want a second button press to awkwardly...
Jonas Hietala
Rising from the Dead, it's Ludum Dare
I’ve been a long time gone, been busy with school then having summer vacation and generally not...
over a year ago
I’ve been a long time gone, been busy with school then having summer vacation and generally not making games or blogging. But I have revived! I scrambled to push my new website live because today it’s Ludum Dare time! The theme is “Evolution” and it’s the 24th time for Ludum Dare...
Buck on Software
Category velocity
People make decisions, not businesses.
over a year ago
People make decisions, not businesses.
Jonas Hietala
Competition Feedback
The voting is over and I got a few ratings I want to comment on. You can view all ratings and...
over a year ago
The voting is over and I got a few ratings I want to comment on. You can view all ratings and comments here.
They’re all from 1 to 5.
Innovation: 3.75
Fun: 3.29
Theme: 3.17
Graphics: 2.54
Audio: 2.14
Humor: 2.54
that ugly.
Overall: 3.13
something playable out of this.
Community:...
Willem's Blog
Off the grid: Working on 100% renewable energy
Learning from powering my personal devices using nothing but self generated electricity using a...
over a year ago
Learning from powering my personal devices using nothing but self generated electricity using a solar panel and power banks.
lcamtuf’s thing
A 15-minute intro to involute gears
Involute gears are everywhere: toys, kitchen appliances, cars. But what's so special about their...
a month ago
Involute gears are everywhere: toys, kitchen appliances, cars. But what's so special about their shape?
Opsbros
Tasmota Quad Switch Breakout
The Tasmota Quad Switch Breakout is designed to make connecting a custom quad light switch to a...
over a year ago
The Tasmota Quad Switch Breakout is designed to make connecting a custom quad light switch to a Wemos D1 mini running Tasmota super super easy.
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...
Jonas Hietala
Soda
These quotes are from hacker news and I found them all too funny.
It’s hard for me to understand the...
over a year ago
These quotes are from hacker news and I found them all too funny.
It’s hard for me to understand the whole soda phenomenon in Canada and the US. Is it as addictive as cigarettes? Does it make you crave for more? Or it simply tastes so good that you can’t get enough of it? Why not...
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"}'...
Good Enough
TIL: Rails has_one Nested Attributes Tweaking
In a project I'm working on right now I've been using a Rails nested form and a couple of things...
a year ago
In a project I'm working on right now I've been using a Rails nested form and a couple of things caught me off guard.
has_one Nested Form Sending id Attribute
In this case I have a nested form that is in a has_one relationship with the parent model.
I think this is a common thing...
Louwrentius
Parallel / distributed password cracking with John the Ripper and MPI
This article has been updated to reflect the changes for John version 1.7.8 as released in june...
over a year ago
This article has been updated to reflect the changes for John version 1.7.8 as released in june 2011.
The most important change is the fact that MPI support is now integrated in the jumbo patch.
The original John the Ripper off-line password cracker only uses a single processor...
Computer Ads from...
MicroSpeed PC-TRAC
Let's Get Right To the Point
7 months ago
Let's Get Right To the Point
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...
Louwrentius
FreeBSD 10.1 unattended install over PXE & HTTP (no NFS)
To gain some more experience with FreeBSD, I decided to make a PXE-based unattended installation of...
over a year ago
To gain some more experience with FreeBSD, I decided to make a PXE-based unattended installation of FreeBSD 10.1.
My goal is to set something up similar to Debian/Ubuntu + preseeding or Redhat/CentOS + kickstart.
Getting a PXE-based unattended installation of FreeBSD 10.1 was...
Jonas Hietala
Getting the book into my hands
Around a month ago I placed an order for a reference copy of my upcoming book Why Cryptocurrencies?....
over a year ago
Around a month ago I placed an order for a reference copy of my upcoming book Why Cryptocurrencies?. I took the cheapest shipping option at IngramSpark, without tracking and, apparently, without customs declarations as it got stuck in customs for several weeks.
But it’s here...
Willem's Blog
Riding with a power meter on your bike
In this post I describe my experience with installing the 4iiii Precision Powermeter on my road...
over a year ago
In this post I describe my experience with installing the 4iiii Precision Powermeter on my road bike.
Applied Cartography
Tailwind black magic: styling paragraphs within tables
The new version of the Buttondown docs site is all in on Keystatic, Markdoc, and Tailwind's...
8 months ago
The new version of the Buttondown docs site is all in on Keystatic, Markdoc, and Tailwind's typography plugin — which makes it really easy to author beautiful docs in plaintext.
We ran into one small issue, which is that the Markdoc renderer likes to place paragraph tags in table...
Jonas Hietala
fish_update_completions in Slackware 14.1
I’ve been trying out fish shell lately. A cool feature with fish is that it can automatically...
over a year ago
I’ve been trying out fish shell lately. A cool feature with fish is that it can automatically generate completions by parsing the installed man pages by running fish_update_completions.
Unfortunately this is what I got:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File...
Jonas Hietala
Resurrection
Aah what a nice summer!
It was nice to be back in Övertorneå, doing nothing in particular. Just not...
over a year ago
Aah what a nice summer!
It was nice to be back in Övertorneå, doing nothing in particular. Just not having to make lunch and dinner every day is such a relief, and if you do slip up food with grandma or Veronica’s parents is only a phone call away. I watched TV, played...
Louwrentius
Don't use cloud services if you care about secrecy of your data
When you use cloud services, you are storing your data on other people's hard drives.
The moment you...
over a year ago
When you use cloud services, you are storing your data on other people's hard drives.
The moment you put your data within a cloud service, that data is no longer under your control. You don't know who will access that data. Secrecy is lost.
Instead of using services like Gmail...
Jonas Hietala
Exploring the Gleam FFI
My brain is a curious thing.
I’m on a business trip right now and I’ve set aside time to finish some...
11 months ago
My brain is a curious thing.
I’m on a business trip right now and I’ve set aside time to finish some important todos I want and need to get done.
But instead of focusing on them, I started playing around with Gleam—a young and interesting programming language.
My (current)...
Bryan Braun - Blog
Goodbye Evernote, Hello Obsidian
I use note-taking software every day. I use it for journaling, blogging, capturing ideas,...
6 months ago
I use note-taking software every day. I use it for journaling, blogging, capturing ideas, researching technologies, managing my projects, and many other things. Writing is how I think through problems, and note-taking software makes all that thinking easy to search and...
axio.ms
MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5
A microcontroller Macintosh
This all started from a conversation about the RP2040 MCU, and building...
6 months ago
A microcontroller Macintosh
This all started from a conversation about the RP2040 MCU, and building a simple desktop/GUI for it. I’d made a comment along the lines of “or, just run some old OS”, and it got me thinking about the original Macintosh.
The original Macintosh was...
Applied Cartography
Bozos
Kevin Twohy has a list of heuristics for new projects/clients, and my favorite is simple:
No Bozos....
a month ago
Kevin Twohy has a list of heuristics for new projects/clients, and my favorite is simple:
No Bozos. Simple policy. No exceptions. You know it when you see it.
Every founder has a story about the time that they ignored the red flags and bent over backwards for a particularly...
lcamtuf’s thing
RAM: the forgotten history
We owe computers not to Charles Babbage, but to the invention of electronically-controlled working...
2 months ago
We owe computers not to Charles Babbage, but to the invention of electronically-controlled working memory.
Arduino Blog
Arduino CLI 1.0 is out!
We are excited to share some incredible news with you all! We recently released the Arduino CLI...
3 months ago
We are excited to share some incredible news with you all! We recently released the Arduino CLI version 1.0.0, marking a significant milestone for our software. This release is a big deal because it signifies the stabilization of the software API, bringing greater reliability and...
Posts on Made of...
Towards solving Ultimate Tic Tac Toe
Summary: Read about my efforts to solve the game of Ultimate Tic Tac Toe. It’s been a fun journey...
over a year ago
Summary: Read about my efforts to solve the game of Ultimate Tic Tac Toe. It’s been a fun journey into interesting algorithms and high-performance parallel programming in Rust.
Backstory Starting around the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown, I’ve gotten myself deeply nerdsniped...
./techtipsy
I looked at this site on the Wayback Machine
Yesterday was election day in Estonia and the results are in, which is why
I remembered that one...
a year ago
Yesterday was election day in Estonia and the results are in, which is why
I remembered that one time I looked at my website on the Wayback Machine.
This domain used to point to a Wordpress site that hosted
content for a candidate in the local elections,
at least around...
Notes on software...
Checking linearizability in Go
You want to check for strict consistency
(linearizability)
for your project but you don't want to...
a month ago
You want to check for strict consistency
(linearizability)
for your project but you don't want to have to deal with the
JVM. Porcupine,
used by a number of real-world systems like etcd and TiDB, has you
covered!
Importantly, neither Jepsen projects nor Porcupine can...
Old Vintage...
Virtualizing the 6502 on a 6502 with 6o6 (and The Incredible KIMplement goes 1.0)
Okay, promises, promises. Here's the first of my bucket list projects I'm completing which I've...
7 months ago
Okay, promises, promises. Here's the first of my bucket list projects I'm completing which I've intermittently worked on for literally two decades. Now that I've finally shaken out more bugs, tuned it up and cleaned it off, it's time to let people play with the source...
./techtipsy
This page looks better in the app
You’re a web developer at a social media company that has recently made a big push for
modernizing...
over a year ago
You’re a web developer at a social media company that has recently made a big push for
modernizing their frontend for the mobile-first era. It has taken a lot of time and effort from many people.
Countless challenges, arguments, testing.
The release is near. You’re probably a bit...
Home on Erik...
Deep learning for… Go
This is the last post about deep learning for chess/go/whatever. But this really cool paper by...
over a year ago
This is the last post about deep learning for chess/go/whatever. But this really cool paper by Christopher Clark and Amos Storkey was forwarded to me by Michael Eickenberg. It's about using convolutional neural networks to play Go.
Posts on Made of...
A Brief Introduction to termios
If you’re a regular user of the terminal on a UNIX system, there are probably a large number of...
over a year ago
If you’re a regular user of the terminal on a UNIX system, there are probably a large number of behaviors you take mostly for granted without really thinking about them. If you press ^C or ^Z it kills or stops the foreground program – unless it’s something like emacs or vim, in...
Vitalik Buterin's...
La Guía Incompleta de los Rollups
over a year ago
Arduino Blog
Clone your IoT projects with Arduino Cloud Custom Templates
Whether you are an IoT enthusiast, an enterprise developer or a high school teacher, we all know the...
4 months ago
Whether you are an IoT enthusiast, an enterprise developer or a high school teacher, we all know the thrill of bringing a new IoT project to life. But we also understand the frustration of repetitive setup processes and the time sink of configuring the same elements over and over...
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...
Arduino Blog
A new Plug and Make Kit challenge! A game of rhythm and creativity
The Arduino Plug and Make Kit is all about unleashing creativity while simplifying the process of...
a week ago
The Arduino Plug and Make Kit is all about unleashing creativity while simplifying the process of turning ideas into reality. It enables everyone to focus on the fun of creating with the power of the UNO R4 WiFi and a user-friendly, modular design – bypassing the complexities of...
Notes on software...
Studying foreign languages with inbox zero
The only time I've been able to seriously, rapidly improve my ability
to speak a foreign language...
over a year ago
The only time I've been able to seriously, rapidly improve my ability
to speak a foreign language was through intensive language courses in
college. I was forced to actively speak, read, and write Chinese for
6-8 hours a week (1-2 hours every day). Then study another 5-10 hours
a...
Applied Cartography
You should build this:
A prior iteration of this site had a page called "Project ideas" that listed a bunch of things that...
2 months ago
A prior iteration of this site had a page called "Project ideas" that listed a bunch of things that I'd like to build. This was a good idea and useful in its own right (I got a few people to build companies and projects based on them, and it was a useful avenue by which folks...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Inside an IBM/Motorola mainframe controller chip from 1981
In this article, I look inside a chip in the IBM 3274 Control Unit.1
But before I discuss the chip,...
5 months ago
In this article, I look inside a chip in the IBM 3274 Control Unit.1
But before I discuss the chip, I need to give some background on mainframes.
(I didn't completely analyze the chip, so don't expect a nice narrative or solid conclusions.)
Die photo of the Motorola/IBM SC81150...
watchTowr Labs -...
QNAP QTS - QNAPping At The Wheel (CVE-2024-27130 and friends)
Infosec is, at it’s heart, all about that data. Obtaining access to it (or disrupting access to it)...
7 months ago
Infosec is, at it’s heart, all about that data. Obtaining access to it (or disrupting access to it) is in every ransomware gang and APT group’s top-10 to-do-list items, and so it makes sense that our research voyage would, at some point, cross paths with products
Arduino Blog
Move Mario remotely with this online N64 controller system
For obvious reasons, video game console controls provide input commands directly to the console....
a week ago
For obvious reasons, video game console controls provide input commands directly to the console. Modern consoles may do so wirelessly, but the effect is the same: direct input. But what if you connected a “controller” to the internet? Then you could play from anywhere and that is...
Nabeel S. Qureshi
May Updates + New Essay On Moral AI
A few months back, I read a tweet from Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) which stuck in my...
a year ago
A few months back, I read a tweet from Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) which stuck in my mind: “the long term goal is to build AGI that loves people the way parents love their children”.
Ken Shirriff's blog
Reverse-engineering an analog Bendix air data computer: part 4, the Mach section
MathJax = {
tex: {
inlineMath: [['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)']]
},
svg: {
fontCache:...
10 months ago
MathJax = {
tex: {
inlineMath: [['$', '$'], ['\\(', '\\)']]
},
svg: {
fontCache: 'global'
},
chtml: { displayAlign: 'left' }
};
MathJax.Hub.Config({
"HTML-CSS": { scale: 175}
});
.MathJax {font-size: 1em !important}
In the 1950s, many fighter...
Jonas Hietala
Writing lessons learned after writing a book
A good writer isn’t born; a good writer is created
It may sound dumb, but one of my reasons for...
a year ago
A good writer isn’t born; a good writer is created
It may sound dumb, but one of my reasons for writing a book was to improve my writing ability.
Maybe I could’ve practiced on the blog instead, but putting things on paper gave it some added weight I don’t think I would’ve gotten...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Reverse-engineering a three-axis attitude indicator from the F-4 fighter plane
We recently received an attitude indicator for the F-4 fighter plane, an instrument that
uses a...
2 months ago
We recently received an attitude indicator for the F-4 fighter plane, an instrument that
uses a rotating ball to show the aircraft's orientation and direction.
In a normal aircraft, the artificial horizon shows the orientation in two axes (pitch and roll), but the F-4...
computers are bad
2023-11-19 Centrex
I have always been fascinated by the PABX - the private automatic branch
exchange, often shortened...
a year ago
I have always been fascinated by the PABX - the private automatic branch
exchange, often shortened to "PBX" in today's world where the "automatic" is
implied. (Relatively) modern small and medium business PABXs of the type I like
to collect are largely solid-state devices that...
Louwrentius
Why Debian/Ubuntu Linux is to be preferred
There are many Linux distributions around. However, I always come back to just
one: Debian. The...
over a year ago
There are many Linux distributions around. However, I always come back to just
one: Debian. The reason why so many people use Debian is the same reason I
like it so much: software management. With good old apt-get or the new
aptitude, software is installed within minutes. Due to...
Jonas Hietala
Why Cryptocurrencies? is now available in print
Today is a big milestone for me, as this marks a big milestone in the biggest personal project I’ve...
over a year ago
Today is a big milestone for me, as this marks a big milestone in the biggest personal project I’ve undertaken.
My book ‘Why Cryptocurrencies?’ is released in print today! It’s my attempt to explain what cryptocurrencies are and what problems they solve, in a simple and...
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...
Willem's Blog
Repairing a Giro AEON bicycle helmet
Try fixing your Giro bicycle helmet? I went through some trouble to do it! Read along to find out...
over a year ago
Try fixing your Giro bicycle helmet? I went through some trouble to do it! Read along to find out how.
Odds and Ends of...
Christmas Mailbag - Questions Wanted!
Ask me stuff!
a week ago
./techtipsy
btrbk is awesome
I like having a safety net whenever I’m doing something potentially destructive,
which is why I use...
over a year ago
I like having a safety net whenever I’m doing something potentially destructive,
which is why I use the btrfs file system for my operating system and my data.
Snapshots are one half of my “whoops, there goes all my work” strategy (backups
are the other half).
I’ve written about...
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,...
Arduino Blog
Can this tiny lawn mower robot cut it in the real world?
We’re finally starting to see robotic lawn mowers gain a little bit of traction as prices come down...
6 months ago
We’re finally starting to see robotic lawn mowers gain a little bit of traction as prices come down and consumer trust goes up. They work a bit like Roomba vacuums and pathfinding sophistication varies from one model to the next. But even the most basic models are still a lot...
Jonas Hietala
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...
Neil Madden
How do you use a bearer URL?
In “Towards a standard for bearer token URLs”, I described a URL scheme that can be safely used to...
over a year ago
In “Towards a standard for bearer token URLs”, I described a URL scheme that can be safely used to incorporate a bearer token (such as an OAuth access token) into a URL. That blog post concentrated on the technical details of how that would work and the security properties of the...
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...
Willem's Blog
Apple Watch as Phone
Embark on a digital detox journey as I swap my smartphone for an Apple Watch Ultra, exploring the...
a year ago
Embark on a digital detox journey as I swap my smartphone for an Apple Watch Ultra, exploring the liberating yet challenging world of wearable tech.
computers are bad
2023-11-25 the curse of docker
I'm heading to Las Vegas for re:invent soon, perhaps the most boring type of
industry extravaganza...
a year ago
I'm heading to Las Vegas for re:invent soon, perhaps the most boring type of
industry extravaganza there could be. In that spirit, I thought I would write
something quick and oddly professional: I'm going to complain about Docker.
Packaging software is one of those fundamental...
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...
Active and influential NYC infrastructure people
These are some of the most influential (mostly due to experience or
expertise) and active folks (I...
a month ago
These are some of the most influential (mostly due to experience or
expertise) and active folks (I actually see them attend events) in the
NYC infrastructure scene (that I have a personal connection to).
If you're running a dinner or are just looking to meet interesting
people in...
GitButler
Why GitHub Actually Won
How GitHub _actually_ became the dominant force it is today, from one of it's cofounders.
3 months ago
How GitHub _actually_ became the dominant force it is today, from one of it's cofounders.
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...
Notes on software...
Generating a full-stack application from a database
DBCore can now generate a TypeScript/React CRUD
UI that is automatically hooked up to the generated...
over a year ago
DBCore can now generate a TypeScript/React CRUD
UI that is automatically hooked up to the generated REST API (in Go).
The UI has full support for login, viewing (and filtering), editing,
and creating database entities.
PostgreSQL, SQLite and MySQL are supported.
How to use?
The...
Lighthouse Blog
Overview of the reading view
6 months ago
Computer Ads from...
Apple IIe and IIc Design Manager Peter Quinn Interviewed by BYTE's Gregg Williams
A behind-the-scenes look at the development of the Apple IIe and IIc.
9 months ago
A behind-the-scenes look at the development of the Apple IIe and IIc.
Computer Ads from...
Bible Research Systems' THE WORD Processor
For Those Who Seek.
5 months ago
Old Vintage...
So thieves broke into your storage unit - again
If you've been wondering why entries have been a little slow lately, let me tell you a story.
All...
2 months ago
If you've been wondering why entries have been a little slow lately, let me tell you a story.
All collectors tend to be a bit obsessive by nature, and us classic computer nerds probably pick up more hardware than we can (or should) store in our residence — especially if the...
Willem's Blog
Traffic shaping using iptables and tc
This month I responded to an automated alert indicating excessive bandwidth usage on a server,...
over a year ago
This month I responded to an automated alert indicating excessive bandwidth usage on a server, requiring me to apply traffic shaping to mitigate the traffic.
Jonas Hietala
Understanding the Computer
When I discovered programming it felt like a whole new world opened up for me with endless...
over a year ago
When I discovered programming it felt like a whole new world opened up for me with endless possibilities. It granted unlimited power and I could create virtually anything and it explained so much to me - how did a program work? How could you make a game or a website? But there...
Arduino Blog
Easily build an energy meter with the Arduino Nano Matter
The primary appeal of microcontrollers is their versatility. They are, essentially, the embedded...
2 months ago
The primary appeal of microcontrollers is their versatility. They are, essentially, the embedded equivalent of computers — general purpose devices that can perform a wide range of functions. And to get the most out of a microcontroller, you’ll also want connectivity suitable for...
./techtipsy
How I ended up working as a software developer
I’ve officially worked as a software developer since August 2016, and by now I
have a fair share of...
4 months ago
I’ve officially worked as a software developer since August 2016, and by now I
have a fair share of stories to tell from those years. But those are stories for
another time.
Today I’d like to focus on where it all got started.
The early days
I never considered myself good with...
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...
Arduino Blog
Transform trash into treasure with the DIY Bottle Plotter
Manufacturers put a lot of effort into their packaging (there is an entire engineering discipline...
3 months ago
Manufacturers put a lot of effort into their packaging (there is an entire engineering discipline just for that) and some of it can be quite beautiful. But it usually still ends up in the landfill or, at best, in a recycling center. However, if you’re the type of person who can...
Notes on software...
Finding memory leaks in Postgres C code
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
9 months ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Neil Madden
Some incomplete thoughts about Gödel
I saw another article on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems linked from Reddit today. It’s a topic I’ve...
over a year ago
I saw another article on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems linked from Reddit today. It’s a topic I’ve wanted to write about for some time. Although many articles do a decent job in giving an idea of what the big deal is (and this one is pretty good), they can sometimes give a...
Matt Mullenweg
RIP Quincy Jones
Quincy Jones had such an impact on the culture that it’s impossible to summarize. His discography is...
a month ago
Quincy Jones had such an impact on the culture that it’s impossible to summarize. His discography is amazing. I feel so lucky to have met him in 2012 when I was much earlier in my career, and he didn’t have any reason to give me time, but he treated everyone as if they were...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Engineering Security Through Coordination Problems
over a year ago
Posts on Made of...
How I Write Tests
The longer I spend as a software engineer, the more obsessive I get about testing. I fully subscribe...
over a year ago
The longer I spend as a software engineer, the more obsessive I get about testing. I fully subscribe to the definition of legacy code as “code without an automated test suite.” I’m convinced that the best thing you can do to encourage fast progress in a test suite is to design...
Notes on software...
React without webpack: fast path to a working app from scratch
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Construction Physics
How We Got the Lithium-ion Battery
It took decades of research, performed around the world, before a practical lithium-ion battery was...
3 weeks ago
It took decades of research, performed around the world, before a practical lithium-ion battery was possible.
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.
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.
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…
Home on Erik...
We are still early with the cloud: why software development is overdue for a change
This is is in many respects a successor to a blog post I wrote last year about what I want from...
over a year ago
This is is in many respects a successor to a blog post I wrote last year about what I want from software infrastructure, but the ideas morphed in my head into something sort of wider.
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...
Computer Ads from...
ViaGrafix Computer Training Videos
Learn...by Simply Watching TV
a month ago
Learn...by Simply Watching TV
Jonas Hietala
2013 Read Books
I actually read more books in 2013 than in 2012.
In a somewhat unorganized list:
Fiction
Livet...
over a year ago
I actually read more books in 2013 than in 2012.
In a somewhat unorganized list:
Fiction
Livet Deluxe - Jens Lapidius
Escape from camp 14 - Blaine Harden
Wonderful. A great book.
Edge - Jeffery Deaver
Dollar - Lee Child
Gisslan - Lee Child
Bränd - Lee Child
Besökaren - Lee...
Notes on software...
io_uring basics: Writing a file to disk
King and I wrote a blog
post
about building an event-driven cross-platform IO library that...
a year ago
King and I wrote a blog
post
about building an event-driven cross-platform IO library that used
io_uring on Linux. We sketched out how it works at a high level but I
hadn't yet internalized how you actually code with io_uring. So I
strapped myself down this week and wrote...
Jonas Hietala
Long Term Goals Update
During my vacation I suddenly got a bunch of “life crisis” type thoughts in an almost panic inducing...
over a year ago
During my vacation I suddenly got a bunch of “life crisis” type thoughts in an almost panic inducing intensity. They were mostly thoughts about not having accomplished anything and that the future looks bleak and meaningless and it’s not worth to do anything. As usual they are...
./techtipsy
The optimization treadmill: why I keep changing my computing setup all the time
I have a bad habit of changing my computing setups all the time. I tend to see new gear, then I...
a year ago
I have a bad habit of changing my computing setups all the time. I tend to see new gear, then I get
some new ideas, and then I obsessively think about it for weeks and months until I just buy it.
And then the cycle repeats.
I’ve had time to think about why that keeps happening...
Simply Explained
Why I don't take sponsorships
Last year I made that video in response to a sponsorship offer that I got from various VPN...
over a year ago
Last year I made that video in response to a sponsorship offer that I got from various VPN providers. They all told me the same thing: our service is the best way to protect your privacy, and we were hoping you could convey this message in one of your videos.So I decided to do...
Good Enough
Bad Ideas Are Fun
Once I was complaining to Arun about how hard it is to come up with ideas, and he pointed out that...
a year ago
Once I was complaining to Arun about how hard it is to come up with ideas, and he pointed out that coming up with ideas is actually very easy––what makes it hard is that we’re aiming for good ideas.
The next time you're coming up with ideas, tell yourself, Forget about good...
Home on Erik...
More Luigi: Presentation from OSCON
I was in Portland, OR for a few days hanging out at OSCON. Was fun. I also talked a bit about...
over a year ago
I was in Portland, OR for a few days hanging out at OSCON. Was fun. I also talked a bit about Luigi:
Next week I'm presenting at the NYC Predictive Analytics meetup together with Blake Shaw from Foursquare.
Simply Explained
Analyzing Link Rot in My Newsletter (After 31 Editions)
I've been writing a monthly newsletter for the past 2.5 years. In every edition, I link to...
a year ago
I've been writing a monthly newsletter for the past 2.5 years. In every edition, I link to interesting articles related to science and technology. I thought it would be interesting to analyze how many of those links are still accessible, and how many have succumbed to link rot....
Applied Cartography
Buttondown Analytics 3.0
Working on a new analytics engine — a scant eleven months after the previous 'new analytics...
10 months ago
Working on a new analytics engine — a scant eleven months after the previous 'new analytics engine'.
Calling this 3.0 is a bit of a misnomer: most of the code, design, and plumbing from the 2023 redesign is sticking around, just in a more modular format. The goal here is to...
Willem's Blog
Helping people with free software
This week I helped a man with repairing and reinstalling his computer with Debian GNU/Linux.
over a year ago
This week I helped a man with repairing and reinstalling his computer with Debian GNU/Linux.
Willem's Blog
Using the reMarkable paper tablet
The paper-like display makes you forget about reMarkable's digital innards, working with this tablet...
over a year ago
The paper-like display makes you forget about reMarkable's digital innards, working with this tablet is therefore quite remarkable!
Lighthouse Blog
How to rate content and find it again
6 months ago
Posts on Made of...
Exploiting misuse of Python's "pickle"
If you program in Python, you’re probably familiar with the pickle serialization library, which...
over a year ago
If you program in Python, you’re probably familiar with the pickle serialization library, which provides for efficient binary serialization and loading of Python datatypes. Hopefully, you’re also familiar with the warning printed prominently near the start of pickle’s...
Posts on Made of...
Using wpa_supplicant on Debian/Ubuntu
I’ve been using wpa_supplicant to manage wifi on my Ubuntu laptop for a while, and have found that...
over a year ago
I’ve been using wpa_supplicant to manage wifi on my Ubuntu laptop for a while, and have found that it’s pretty close to what I want for managing wireless — closer than anything else I’ve found, at least. I figured I should document my setup and experiences.
Some Background You...
Good Enough
How We Built Unique Social Preview Images for Pika
One of the goals of Pika,
the happy blogging software that we recently launched,
is to help you find...
10 months ago
One of the goals of Pika,
the happy blogging software that we recently launched,
is to help you find your own place on the internet.
Along with a nice place on the internet, when you share links to your blog we want them to represent your internet home,
which you've likely taken...
Arduino Blog
Arduino Cloud is now available in AWS Marketplace!
We’re excited to announce that Arduino Cloud is now available in AWS Marketplace, making it easier...
2 months ago
We’re excited to announce that Arduino Cloud is now available in AWS Marketplace, making it easier than ever for developers and businesses worldwide to integrate our powerful IoT platform into their AWS infrastructure. This development is particularly relevant for those in...
./techtipsy
Life is maintenance, maintenance is life
Over my relatively short career (6+ years), I’ve noticed a change in the way I approach building...
a year ago
Over my relatively short career (6+ years), I’ve noticed a change in the way I approach building things.
When I was still an inexperienced junior developer who barely survived operating in a Linux
environment and saw backend development as a black box, I was happy to get...
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...
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...
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...
Matt Mullenweg
Response to DHH
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal,...
2 months ago
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH,...
Engineers Need Art
VPX Scripting - Part 3 (Cut & Paste)
Sound code is added in this third in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
8 months ago
Sound code is added in this third in a series of posts about scripting Visual Pinball tables.
Notes on software...
Interview With Phil of DataStation
This is an external interview. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external interview. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Home on Erik...
Model benchmarks
A lot of people have asked me what models we use for recommendations at Spotify so I wanted to share...
over a year ago
A lot of people have asked me what models we use for recommendations at Spotify so I wanted to share some insights. Here's benchmarks for some models. Note that we don't use all of them in production.
Louwrentius
Recovering a lost partition using gpart
Even today people do not understand how important it is for the safety of your
data to make backups....
over a year ago
Even today people do not understand how important it is for the safety of your
data to make backups. I was asked to perform some data recovery on a hard
drive of an old computer, which still contained important documents and
photo's.
The first thing I did was to make a disk image...
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...
Matt Mullenweg
Bezos at Dealbook
It looks like the Dealbook Summit had a number of great interviews this year, major props to Andrew...
2 weeks ago
It looks like the Dealbook Summit had a number of great interviews this year, major props to Andrew Ross Sorkin, but this one with Jeff Bezos was particularly good.
Louwrentius
Why I Do Use ZFS as a File System for My NAS
On February 2011, I posted an article about my motivations why I did not use ZFS as a file system...
over a year ago
On February 2011, I posted an article about my motivations why I did not use ZFS as a file system for my 18 TB NAS.
You have to understand that at the time, I believe the arguments in the article were relevant, but much has changed since then, and I do believe this article is...
Willem's Blog
Write your own words
Why not to use AI for writing - a blog post on the underestimated long term costs of AI tools for...
a month ago
Why not to use AI for writing - a blog post on the underestimated long term costs of AI tools for human creativity.
Louwrentius
Raspberry Pi as a router using a single network interface
Introduction
Disclaimer: this article is intended for consumers and hobbyists.
If you want to run...
over a year ago
Introduction
Disclaimer: this article is intended for consumers and hobbyists.
If you want to run your own router at home, the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B1 can be an excelent hardware choice:
it's fairly cheap
it's fast enough
it can saturate it's gigabit network port
it is...
Christian Selig
Autonomous Standing Desk and Chair Review
Autonomous was nice enough to send me one of both their Smart Desk Pro standing desks and ErgoChair...
a year ago
Autonomous was nice enough to send me one of both their Smart Desk Pro standing desks and ErgoChair Pro chairs in exchange for posting about them on Twitter, and I wanted to cover them in more detail on my blog as well so I could give my full thoughts on them for anyone in the...
Arduino Blog
It’s silver, it’s green, it’s the Batteryrunner! An Arduino-powered, fully custom electric car
Inventor Charly Bosch and his daughter Leonie have crafted something truly remarkable: a fully...
3 weeks ago
Inventor Charly Bosch and his daughter Leonie have crafted something truly remarkable: a fully electric, Arduino-powered car that’s as innovative as it is sustainable. Called the Batteryrunner, this vehicle is designed with a focus on environmental impact, simplicity, and custom...
Willem's Blog
Refining my tablet OS experience
Installing Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go 2 with LTE/4G to replace my iPad Pro as daily driver.
over a year ago
Installing Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go 2 with LTE/4G to replace my iPad Pro as daily driver.
Louwrentius
HighPoint RocketRAID and staggered spinup with Samsung F1
I have experienced problems using a HighPoint RocketRaid 2320 and 2340 when
they are using...
over a year ago
I have experienced problems using a HighPoint RocketRaid 2320 and 2340 when
they are using 'staggered spinup' in combination with Samsung Spinpoint F1, 1
(one) terrabyte disks.
The problem is that the F1 disks spinup very slowly and often seem to 'hang'
while making ticking...
Jonas Hietala
The games that make me who I am
I read an article the other day where he met someone who didn’t read fiction:
He suggested that...
over a year ago
I read an article the other day where he met someone who didn’t read fiction:
He suggested that fiction was a waste of his time — he read to learn, not for "mere" entertainment
I don’t agree with this view and neither did he:
Fiction allows you to be part of situations that are...
Louwrentius
Setting up a Jabber instant messaging server |_http-title: Site doesn't have a title (text/html;...
I wanted to see how dificult it is to setup an instant messaging server based on open source...
over a year ago
I wanted to see how dificult it is to setup an instant messaging server based on open source software. Now I know that it is very easy, unless you are stubborn and do things your own way. In this example, I'm setting up a small IM server that is only for internal company use, but...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 5: The Purge
a month ago
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....
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...
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...
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...
Arduino Blog
Controlling a drum machine with the Arduino Opta
Makers have long asked the question “why bother with an expensive PLC when I can just use an...
5 months ago
Makers have long asked the question “why bother with an expensive PLC when I can just use an Arduino?” The answer comes down to the priorities and needs of industrial clients. In a factory automation setting, the client will prioritize durability, reliability, and serviceability...
Arduino Blog
The new Auxivo EduExo Pro helps students with exoskeleton research
Emerging technologies initially develop at a slow pace and that is due in large part to the lack of...
5 months ago
Emerging technologies initially develop at a slow pace and that is due in large part to the lack of resources available to students. Complex technology is built on existing knowledge and higher education students need the tools to gain hands-on experience. To help educate the...
Style over Substance
Leitz Summicron 50mm f/2 rigid (type 2) lens
My newest lens acquisition wasn’t actually originally on my wishlist. I already had a 50mm Summicron...
over a year ago
My newest lens acquisition wasn’t actually originally on my wishlist. I already had a 50mm Summicron lens, though that was the first generation collapsible model known as a Type 1. This lens has lived on my Leica M3 permanently for the past few years, and I have enjoyed the hell...
Opsbros
Artemis 1 Countdown
I've been following the Artemis 1 Launch Schedule quite closely on a few forums and discussing it...
over a year ago
I've been following the Artemis 1 Launch Schedule quite closely on a few forums and discussing it with serveral people, and I had been regularly posting updated DateandTime countdown links for the revised launch attempts. With the schedule chnages and scrubs that have happened...
Home on Erik...
Exploding offers are bullshit
I do a lot of recruiting and have given maybe 50 offers in my career. Although many companies do, I...
over a year ago
I do a lot of recruiting and have given maybe 50 offers in my career. Although many companies do, I never put a deadline on any of them. Unfortunately, I've often ended up competing with other companies who do, and I feel really bad that this usually tricks younger developers...
Home on Erik...
Where do locals go in NYC?
One obvious thing to anyone living in NYC is how tourists cluster in certain areas. I was curious...
over a year ago
One obvious thing to anyone living in NYC is how tourists cluster in certain areas. I was curious about the larger patterns around this, so I spent some time looking at data. The thing I wanted to understand is: what areas are dominated by tourists?
Jonas Hietala
What's up
It’s been a while again since the last time we met mr. Blog. I’ve been busy with school and other...
over a year ago
It’s been a while again since the last time we met mr. Blog. I’ve been busy with school and other stuff. I’ve thought about you but I just never really picked up emacs to write to you. I know it’s my fault but I beg of your mercy mr. Blog. You know that I had laid off school for...
Matt Blewitt
Thoughts on User Safety
We need to move beyond mere security and towards safety for our customers and our users. This is how...
over a year ago
We need to move beyond mere security and towards safety for our customers and our users. This is how we can do that.
Vitalik Buterin's...
Exploring Fully Homomorphic Encryption
over a year ago
Arduino Blog
Adjusting office chair height with simple voice commands
A month ago, ElectronicLab modified his office chair with an electric car jack, giving it motorized...
4 months ago
A month ago, ElectronicLab modified his office chair with an electric car jack, giving it motorized height adjustment. That worked well, but required that he push buttons to raise or lower the seat. Pushing those buttons is a hassle when one’s hands are full, so ElectronicLab...
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.
Ken Shirriff's blog
Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993,
a chip
to "separate the really power-hungry...
5 months ago
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993,
a chip
to "separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals."
The original Pentium was followed by the Pentium Pro, the Pentium II, and others, spawning a long-running brand of high-performance processors, Intel's...
Jonas Hietala
Let's build a VORON: Wrap-up
It’s finally done™.
I’ve built a VORON that prints reliably and I’ve modded it enough to be able to...
9 months ago
It’s finally done™.
I’ve built a VORON that prints reliably and I’ve modded it enough to be able to leave it alone for a while, so I think it’s time to wrap up this build series with a little retrospective.
Building the printer was really fun and rewarding
I’ve always seen...
csvbase blog
You can't just assume UTF-8
How to infer character encodings with statistics
7 months ago
How to infer character encodings with statistics
Notes on software...
Effective unemployment and social media
Being unemployed can be incredibly depressing. So much
rejection. Everything seems to be out of your...
a month ago
Being unemployed can be incredibly depressing. So much
rejection. Everything seems to be out of your control. Everything
except for one thing: what you produce.
You might know that repeatedly posting on social media that you are
looking for work is ineffective. That it looks (or...
Home on Erik...
Luigi Presentation @ NYC Data Science, Dec 16, 2014
More Luigi presentations!
over a year ago
More Luigi presentations!
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...
Lighthouse Blog
Introducing Lighthouse - The RSS reader, newsletter reader, and read-it-later app to fight content...
8 months ago
Jonas Hietala
An update on my book 'Why Cryptocurrencies?'
Five months ago I gloriously declared that “my book was done”. Since then I’ve been working hard to...
over a year ago
Five months ago I gloriously declared that “my book was done”. Since then I’ve been working hard to finish the book.
Sorry that’s a bit of a lie, I’ve had a nice long vacation where I didn’t work on the book and I’m also on part-time parental leave. And believe me there’s not a...
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.
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...
Vitalik Buterin's...
What else could memecoins be?
8 months ago
Jonas Hietala
Going into Being Busy mode
I’m in the civil service atm and, sadly, we’re going to be extremely busy the coming… two months or...
over a year ago
I’m in the civil service atm and, sadly, we’re going to be extremely busy the coming… two months or something? So I can’t promise a game the next two months. Kinda beats the point of this site doesn’t it? I’m really sorry and that’s all I can say really…
Hopefully I’ll get a week...
Jonas Hietala
I beat FTL on Hard with all ships in the game
For 2023 I wanted to do something different than usual—I wanted to start playing computer games...
a year ago
For 2023 I wanted to do something different than usual—I wanted to start playing computer games again.
So I gave myself a late Christmas gift and bought a Steam Deck (and like any self-serving gentleman I took care to pitch it as being for my kids) and I started loading it up...
Electronics etc…
Analyzing the Monoprice Blackbird HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Down Converter
Introduction
Some Words about HDCP
Inside the Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro
The Test
Digging Deeper:...
a year ago
Introduction
Some Words about HDCP
Inside the Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro
The Test
Digging Deeper: UART Transactions
Decoding HDCP I2C Transactions
The Legality of It All
References
Footnotes
Introduction
I got my hands on a
Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro HDCP 2.2 to 1.4...
Jonas Hietala
The End of the Tunnel
Lately I’ve been feeling like there’s been a shit-ton of stuff going on, quite a turn-around from...
over a year ago
Lately I’ve been feeling like there’s been a shit-ton of stuff going on, quite a turn-around from the last time.
One course about data structure and algorithms (super fun to be honest) has wrapped up. We thought we were ahead with the assignments but in the end it got very...
./techtipsy
Cool projects
This is an unsorted list of projects that really cool and neat.
Chromebook cluster
someone took...
a year ago
This is an unsorted list of projects that really cool and neat.
Chromebook cluster
someone took some old Chromebooks, stripped them down and built a cluster. I love this kind of jank!
Neil Madden
On PBKDF2 iterations
There has been a lot of discussion recently around the LastPass breach, especially with regards to...
a year ago
There has been a lot of discussion recently around the LastPass breach, especially with regards to the number of PBKDF2 iterations applied to the master password to derive the vault encryption key. Other people have already dissected this particular breach, but I want to more...
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...
Arduino Blog
An ultra-affordable DIY underwater ROV
ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) let us explore bodies of water and it is hard not to be excited by...
7 months ago
ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) let us explore bodies of water and it is hard not to be excited by the possibilities. But traditional ROVs cost a lot of money and often require serious expertise to operate and maintain. Luckily there are affordable alternatives, such as this...
Old Vintage...
xa (xa65) 2.4.1
A quick one: xa (xa65), André Fachat's compatible fast two-pass cross-assembler for 6502, 65C02,...
9 months ago
A quick one: xa (xa65), André Fachat's compatible fast two-pass cross-assembler for 6502, 65C02, R65C02 and 65816 processors that André and I maintain is now at version 2.4.1. This optionally expands the syntax from 2.4.0 and fixes some bugs primarily with relocatable .o65...
Jonas Hietala
Going down
Ah my first game was so painless so I thought I could do any game I could imagine! Shooters, and...
over a year ago
Ah my first game was so painless so I thought I could do any game I could imagine! Shooters, and mario bros kinda stuff. Well now I’m not so upbeat anymore, I’ve worked on this game for 7 days now and it’s not playable at all. With seven days I don’t mean a week, I’ve had a big...
Arduino Blog
Save money by making your own MKR WiFi 1010-powered smart thermostat
Go browse your favorite store for a smart thermostat and take a look at the prices. They aren’t...
5 months ago
Go browse your favorite store for a smart thermostat and take a look at the prices. They aren’t cheap and the more affordable models tend to lock you into proprietary ecosystems. But a decent smart thermostat can save you money on energy costs, so you might want to consider this...
Home on Erik...
Books I consumed in 2017
Turns out having a toddler isn't super compatible with reading. I used to read ~100 books/year as a...
over a year ago
Turns out having a toddler isn't super compatible with reading. I used to read ~100 books/year as a teenager, but it has slowly deteriorated to maybe 20-30 books, at most. And I don't even finish all of them because life is too short!
Willem's Blog
Moving to the countryside
Join me on a journey from the bustle of Amsterdam to the tranquility of Noord-Limburg's countryside.
over a year ago
Join me on a journey from the bustle of Amsterdam to the tranquility of Noord-Limburg's countryside.
Jonas Hietala
5 Kup
After a season with very bad attendence, I blame school and lack of motivation, I still went to...
over a year ago
After a season with very bad attendence, I blame school and lack of motivation, I still went to grading. I slept well but I was super stressed all weekend so I had to constantly run to the bathroom and I couldn’t eat lunch or breakfast properly, and I don’t usually get...
Louwrentius
Determining smartphone market share using wireless sniffing
I started a project to see if I could track smartphone users by sniffing for
wifi-clients. Most...
over a year ago
I started a project to see if I could track smartphone users by sniffing for
wifi-clients. Most smartphones support wifi and most people don't bother disabling
wifi when they go outdoors1. If wifi is left on, it is possible to detect these
smartphones and track their movement. To...
./techtipsy
They make USB-C cables with displays now!
I’ve reached a point in my setup where most of the devices that I use are
based around the coveted...
6 months ago
I’ve reached a point in my setup where most of the devices that I use are
based around the coveted USB-C port. This meant that I had a valid reason to get
a few extra because I didn’t yet have a stockpile of good USB-C cables.
That’s when I found out that there exist cables that...
Willem's Blog
Wearing two watches
Why you should wear two watches, don't choose between a mechanical watch and a smartwatch!
over a year ago
Why you should wear two watches, don't choose between a mechanical watch and a smartwatch!
computers are bad
2024-01-31 multi-channel audio part 2
Last time, we left off at the fact that modern films are distributed with their
audio in multiple...
10 months ago
Last time, we left off at the fact that modern films are distributed with their
audio in multiple formats. Most of the time, there is a stereo version of the
audio, and a multi-channel version of the audio that is perhaps 5.1 or 7.1 and
compressed using one of several codecs that...
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...
Arduino Blog
This robotic kalimba plays melodies with an Arduino Nano
With roots in Africa, the kalimba is a type of hand piano featuring an array of keys that are each...
3 months ago
With roots in Africa, the kalimba is a type of hand piano featuring an array of keys that are each tuned for a specific note, and upon plucking or striking one, a pleasant xylophone-like sound can be heard. Taking inspiration from his mini kalimba, Axel from the YouTube channel...
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Learning incident response with problem sets
It’s hard to teach good incident response. A good understanding of how the system runs in production...
over a year ago
It’s hard to teach good incident response. A good understanding of how the system runs in production is essential, but how do you build that…
Arduino Blog
Harness the power and connectivity of your Arduino UNO R4 WiFi with this IoT lamp
It can be tough to get started with building an Internet of Things (IoT) project from the ground-up,...
7 months ago
It can be tough to get started with building an Internet of Things (IoT) project from the ground-up, as getting connected, serving a webpage, and managing other devices can all be a challenge to a beginner. This is why the YouTuber known as “Mario’s Ideas” made an end-to-end...
Applied Cartography
Git one-liner: get the earliest commit from X hours ago
I wanted to get a commit that was temporally some distance back as part of my experimentation with...
7 months ago
I wanted to get a commit that was temporally some distance back as part of my experimentation with git cliff. This took some time to do, but here's what I ended up with:
git log --since="72 hours ago" --until="now" --reverse --pretty=format:"%h" | head -1
Nothing particularly...
Jonas Hietala
Starcraft 2 Keycaps
When I ordered this computer I was compelled, utterly compelled to buy a mechanical keyboard. Sure...
over a year ago
When I ordered this computer I was compelled, utterly compelled to buy a mechanical keyboard. Sure they cost almost 10x as much as a “regular” one and they didn’t even have these funky multimedia keys, what gives? Did I loose my insanity? It was supposed to give a great typing...
Home on Erik...
σ-driven project management: when is the optimal time to give up?
Hi! It's your friendly project management theorician. You might remember me from blog posts such as...
over a year ago
Hi! It's your friendly project management theorician. You might remember me from blog posts such as Why software projects take longer than you think, which is a blog post I wrote a long time ago positing that software projects completion time follow a log-normal distribution.
Good Enough
TIL: System Colors are supported in CSS, but they’re unreliable
I’ve said this before: We’re primarily a web shop here at Good Enough, but occasionally we come up...
a year ago
I’ve said this before: We’re primarily a web shop here at Good Enough, but occasionally we come up with ideas that we think would work really well as a native desktop or mobile application. Still, we prototype those ideas on the web first.
Recently, I wanted to try and make one...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Against overuse of the Gini coefficient
over a year ago
Willem's Blog
Creating a minimal road bike
I wondered how hard it would be to make a bike from spare parts I had in my garage
over a year ago
I wondered how hard it would be to make a bike from spare parts I had in my garage
Arduino Blog
Check out these Arduino-powered research projects from CHI 2024
Held in Hawaii this year, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) hosted its annual conference...
6 months ago
Held in Hawaii this year, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) hosted its annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) that focuses on the latest developments in human-computer interaction. Students from universities all across the world attended the...
Posts on Made of...
Performance engineering, profilers, and seeing the invisible
I was recently introduced to the paper “Seeing the Invisible: Perceptual-Cognitive Aspects of...
a year ago
I was recently introduced to the paper “Seeing the Invisible: Perceptual-Cognitive Aspects of Expertise” by Gary Klein and Robert Hoffman. It’s excellent and I recommend you read it when you have a chance.
Klein and Hoffman discuss the ability of experts to “see what is not...
Matt Blewitt
Unreasonably Effective Patterns
Much of my current job is maintaining and enhancing control planes for Heroku’s managed data...
over a year ago
Much of my current job is maintaining and enhancing control planes for Heroku’s managed data services. This post explores three patterns used to reduce operational burden and increase system safety and resiliency: state machines (and associated state-transition tables),...
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!
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...
Louwrentius
ZFS performance on HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 G1610T
I think the HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 is a very interesting little box if you want to build your...
over a year ago
I think the HP Proliant Microserver Gen8 is a very interesting little box if you want to build your own ZFS-based NAS. The benchmarks I've performed seem to confirm this.
The Microserver Gen8 has nice features such as:
iLO (KVM over IP with dedicated network interface)
support...
Good Enough
Our Favorite Video Games Right Now
While everyone at Good Enough is their own kind of nerd, thank you very much, as builders of the web...
a year ago
While everyone at Good Enough is their own kind of nerd, thank you very much, as builders of the web you probably expect that we also play video games. And we do! Well, collectively we do, but not to an unhealthy degree. Usually.
I asked the team to share with me what their...
Arduino Blog
Marble art madness from a marvelous machine
Marbles are underrated. They’re very round, roll well, tend to be pretty shiny, and come in all...
2 months ago
Marbles are underrated. They’re very round, roll well, tend to be pretty shiny, and come in all sorts of neat colors. That last characteristic makes them suitable for artwork, like orbicular pixels. In his most ambitious project to date, Engineezy took advantage of those...
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...
axio.ms
A small ode to the CRT
Built October 2018
I used to hate Cathode Ray Tubes. As a kid in Europe, everything flickered at...
over a year ago
Built October 2018
I used to hate Cathode Ray Tubes. As a kid in Europe, everything flickered at 50Hz, or made a loud whistle at 15.625KHz (back when I could still hear it). CRTs just seemed crude, “electro-brutalist” contraptions from the valve era. They were heavy, and...
Louwrentius
The iPhone, iPad and iOS are powering a revolution
Most people just don't understand computers. Are these people dumb? Some may
be dumb, but the people...
over a year ago
Most people just don't understand computers. Are these people dumb? Some may
be dumb, but the people who make them are maybe even dumber. Because they
can't seem to figure out how to create a computer that the majority of people
understand.
When the original macintosh arrived at...