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.
Arduino Blog
Arduino Nicla Sense Env: adding advanced environmental sensing to a broad range of applications
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Nicla Sense Env: the latest addition to our portfolio of...
2 months ago
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Nicla Sense Env: the latest addition to our portfolio of system-on-modules and sensor nodes, empowering innovators with the tools to unlock new possibilities. This tiny yet powerful sensor node is designed to elevate your environmental...
Jonas Hietala
FTL got a new victim
Faster than Light the great game I lost a ton of time on, has found a new victim. It’s not someone...
over a year ago
Faster than Light the great game I lost a ton of time on, has found a new victim. It’s not someone you’d expect, it’s even someone who said: “What a bad game” when she saw me playing it. But nevertheless this Saturday she played it more than 2.5 hours!
I told Veronica I wanted...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Review of Gitcoin Quadratic Funding Round 4
over a year ago
Jonas Hietala
The I'm Great quote
A new semester at the uni and so far it looks promising; I got a hold of some new books even though...
over a year ago
A new semester at the uni and so far it looks promising; I got a hold of some new books even though the bookstore had a snakelike queue similar to the Jörmungandr (the snake that encircled the earth in nordic mythology) and our new programming course started. This time it’s Ada’s...
Good Enough
Season 1, Issue 5: Promotes Regularity
Good Enough is taking a summer pause! We each have travel plans lined up for the summer. We each...
over a year ago
Good Enough is taking a summer pause! We each have travel plans lined up for the summer. We each have at least two children in our homes, begging for attention. And we each truly appreciate extended breaks as a means of reinvigorating ourselves to the ever important task of...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Don't overload Ethereum's consensus
a year ago
Arduino Blog
This small device enables users to feel braille through haptics
For the visually impaired community, most of their interactions on mobile phones are confined to...
7 months ago
For the visually impaired community, most of their interactions on mobile phones are confined to text-to-speech (TTS) interfaces that read portions of the screen aloud. Dynamic braille displays also exist as a tactile means of communication, but their prices can get close 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...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Two interesting XOR circuits inside the Intel 386 processor
Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a...
a year ago
Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a 32-bit processor but also switching to a CMOS implementation.
I've been reverse-engineering parts of the 386 chip and came across two interesting and completely different
circuits...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge
2 months ago
./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...
Christian Selig
Smart Open Xcode
If you’re like me, you often have multiple versions of Xcode installed. One or two beta versions, a...
a year ago
If you’re like me, you often have multiple versions of Xcode installed. One or two beta versions, a stable version, and maybe another version in case the most recent stable version has something weird about it.
I also really like mapping my Caps Lock key to something more useful,...
computers are bad
2023-06-07 something up there - nasa and uaps
A brief note on Grusch
First, a disclaimer of sorts: I am posting another article on UAPs, yet I...
a year ago
A brief note on Grusch
First, a disclaimer of sorts: I am posting another article on UAPs, yet I am
not addressing the recent claims by David Grusch. This is for a couple of
reasons. First, I am skeptical of Grusch. He is not the first seemingly
well-positioned former...
Electronics etc…
Setting Up a Symmetricom SyncServer S200 Network Time Protocol Server
Introduction
What was the SyncServer S200 Supposed to be Used For?
IMPORTANT: Use the Right GPS...
5 months ago
Introduction
What was the SyncServer S200 Supposed to be Used For?
IMPORTANT: Use the Right GPS Antenna!
The SyncServer S200 Outside and Inside
Installing the Missing BNC Connectors
Setting Up a SyncServer S200 from Scratch
Opening up the SyncServer S200
The SyncServer File...
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...
a month ago
It took decades of research, performed around the world, before a practical lithium-ion battery was possible.
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...
3 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...
Odds and Ends of...
Odds and Ends #47: I think this YouTube video just changed my life
Plus vertical farming, the Russia/EU border, and more on why the Lobby is bad.
2 weeks ago
Plus vertical farming, the Russia/EU border, and more on why the Lobby is bad.
Good Enough
TIL: Turbo Frames
DoEvery.Day calendar navigation was broken. We built it using Turbo Rails as it was being developed....
a year ago
DoEvery.Day calendar navigation was broken. We built it using Turbo Rails as it was being developed. As we have updated libraries, including Rails, the API has changed. In order to get the calendar navigation working again, I had to pull out some old hacks that made use of...
Lars Lofgren
How Live Chat Tools Impact Conversions and Why I Launched a Bad Variant
Do those live chat tools actually help your business? Will they get you more customers by allowing...
over a year ago
Do those live chat tools actually help your business? Will they get you more customers by allowing your visitors to chat directly with your team? Like most tests, you can come up with theories that sound great for both sides. Pro Live Chat Theory: Having a live chat tool helps...
Louwrentius
Compiling Multicore PAR2 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin
If you want to compile PAR2 with multicore support on Linux, it may not work right away from source....
over a year ago
If you want to compile PAR2 with multicore support on Linux, it may not work right away from source. I used this version of PAR2 with multicore support.
Update 2015: the original link is dead, I foud a copy of the source and put it on my own site here for you to download.
First,...
lcamtuf’s thing
How do wood finishes hold up?
A quick 18-month experiment to shed light on traditional woodworking lore.
3 months ago
A quick 18-month experiment to shed light on traditional woodworking lore.
Electronics etc…
Increasing Frequency Counter Precision with Linear Regression
MathJax.Hub.Config({
jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"],
tex2jax: {
inlineMath: [...
a year ago
MathJax.Hub.Config({
jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"],
tex2jax: {
inlineMath: [ ['$', '$'], ["\\(", "\\)"] ],
displayMath: [ ['$$', '$$'], ["\\[", "\\]"] ],
processEscapes: true,
skipTags: ['script', 'noscript', 'style', 'textarea', 'pre',...
detreville
A writer's autobiography
(Just not mine.)
a year ago
Louwrentius
Got myself a Norco RPC-4020
I've got this fetish for storage. So I bought a case that gives me some room
for future expantion....
over a year ago
I've got this fetish for storage. So I bought a case that gives me some room
for future expantion. The current 6 TB RAID 6 storage server does not have any
room for expantion.
This Norco RPC-4020 case with 20 hot swap drive bays does however. Don't know
what to fill it with yet.
Vitalik Buterin's...
Why Proof of Stake (Nov 2020)
over a year ago
Applied Cartography
A good H1
Buttondown was kindly featured in H1 Gallery last week, and Ryan asked me to opine a bit on how we...
a month ago
Buttondown was kindly featured in H1 Gallery last week, and Ryan asked me to opine a bit on how we arrived at our current iteration, which is the anodyne yet pointed Email for you. Yes, you.
Historically, we've called Buttondown a 'newsletter tool' — the h1 before this was 'The...
Notes on software...
Responsibility and ownership
Responsibility is only possible by granting ownership and setting
expectations. If you don't turn...
over a year ago
Responsibility is only possible by granting ownership and setting
expectations. If you don't turn over ownership, don't expect folks to
take responsibility. When you grant ownership and set expectations,
you'll be astounded what folks will accomplish without you.
I am astounded.
Arduino Blog
Top Arduino Cloud IoT dashboard ideas with the new Image widget
Recently, we announced the exciting new Image widget for Arduino Cloud. This powerful feature opens...
2 months ago
Recently, we announced the exciting new Image widget for Arduino Cloud. This powerful feature opens up a world of possibilities for enhancing your IoT dashboards. But the true potential of the Image widget lies in the applications that you create. Today, we’re excited to dive...
Opsbros
Debug Header
After watching a livestream by UnexpectedMaker struggling to put probe pins on his Stepper Motor...
over a year ago
After watching a livestream by UnexpectedMaker struggling to put probe pins on his Stepper Motor driver connected to a Raspberry Pi, I thought a breakout header might help; so I whipped up this little board.
Home on Erik...
Delivering Music Recommendations
I've turned into a lazy bastard and I'm just posting presentations on this blog, but here's one from...
over a year ago
I've turned into a lazy bastard and I'm just posting presentations on this blog, but here's one from Rohan Singh at Spotify talking about the backend infrastructure of the Discover page.
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...
Arduino Blog
This machine automatically creates chain art
Art is very personal and we often consider the process of creation itself when evaluating the...
5 months ago
Art is very personal and we often consider the process of creation itself when evaluating the resulting piece. Does a sculpture have more artistic value when molded by human hands rather than a 3D printer? Most would say that it does. But what if the automation was, itself, part...
Applied Cartography
PSA: mess around with Keystatic
We've been using Keystatic in Buttondown for around six months now: we migrated most of the content...
9 months ago
We've been using Keystatic in Buttondown for around six months now: we migrated most of the content on the marketing site (which is backed by Next) from MDX onto Keystatic, and were so happy with the experience that the upcoming rebuild of the docs site will be featuring...
Old Vintage...
Commodore does the iPad "crush" concept right ... in 1985
I get what Apple was trying to say with their infamous Crush ad, even though they made it a little...
7 months ago
I get what Apple was trying to say with their infamous Crush ad, even though they made it a little weird. They should have simply done what Commodore did for the C128 — ironically, competing with the Apple IIc. Notice the emphasis on audio and sound, plus the Commodore 64 perched...
Louwrentius
Affordable server with server-grade hardware part II
If you want to build a home server, it may be advised to actually use server-grade components. I...
over a year ago
If you want to build a home server, it may be advised to actually use server-grade components. I documented the reasons for choosing server-grade hardware already in an earlier post on this topic.
It is recommended to read the old post first. In this new post, I only show new...
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...
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
Vitalik Buterin's...
Governance, Part 2: Plutocracy Is Still Bad
over a year ago
./techtipsy
Overcoming hardware limitations: the time-to-sleep script
As some of you might own, I’m still rocking a ThinkPad T430, a laptop model
originally released in...
over a year ago
As some of you might own, I’m still rocking a ThinkPad T430, a laptop model
originally released in 2012.
It’s not the fastest laptop out there, but it is plenty fast for a number of
tasks, even most software development work.
I also try to keep my machines up to date and properly...
Louwrentius
Debian Linux Preseeding - an installation framework
Look Ma!
No hands!
just watching a system PXE-boot and install itself into a fully...
over a year ago
Look Ma!
No hands!
just watching a system PXE-boot and install itself into a fully operational
system is fun. PXE boot and preseeding is not enough however to accomplish
this.
By itself, preseeding only installs a basic operating system. Next, you need
to configure all sorts of...
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...
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...
Jonas Hietala
Why is my file so huge?
My latest game was absolutely huge! And I’m not talking about the music (which was pretty huge too -...
over a year ago
My latest game was absolutely huge! And I’m not talking about the music (which was pretty huge too - roughly 20mb) but the little .exe file.
It was 14,6mb!!
Now every way you look at it, that’s incredibly huge. It’s like comparing an ant to a human. Normally the little ant is the...
computers are bad
2024-11-23 cablesoft
As an American, I often feel an intense jealousy of Ceefax, one of several
commercially successful...
a month ago
As an American, I often feel an intense jealousy of Ceefax, one of several
commercially successful teletext services in the UK and Europe. "Teletext" is
sometimes a confusing term because of its apparent relation to telecom-industry
technologies like the teletypewriter and...
Notes on software...
Writing a lisp compiler from scratch in JavaScript: 6. LLVM system calls
Previously in compiler basics:
1. lisp to assembly
2. user-defined functions and variables
...
over a year ago
Previously in compiler basics:
1. lisp to assembly
2. user-defined functions and variables
3. LLVM
4. LLVM conditionals and compiling fibonacci
5. an x86 upgrade
In this post we'll extend the ulisp
compiler's LLVM backend to
support printing integers to...
Vitalik Buterin's...
In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism
over a year ago
Vitalik Buterin's...
Should Ethereum be okay with enshrining more things in the protocol?
a year ago
Jonas Hietala
The T-34/2 keyboard layout
The T-34/2 layout.
QMK Heatmap Generator, with all layers and combos.
It’s been 6 months since my...
over a year ago
The T-34/2 layout.
QMK Heatmap Generator, with all layers and combos.
It’s been 6 months since my last update on the T-34 keyboard layout, and I’ve made some changes I’d like to document here.
As seen in the heatmap above, the layout seems quite decent. There’s still an issue...
Home on Erik...
Music recommendations using cover images (part 1)
Scrolling through the Discover page on Spotify the other day it occurred to me that the album is in...
over a year ago
Scrolling through the Discover page on Spotify the other day it occurred to me that the album is in fact a fairly strong visual proxy for what kind of content you can expect from it. I started wondering if the album cover can in fact be used for recommendations.
Jonas Hietala
New Year, New Theme: 100 Things
Happy New Year, Everyone! 2009 was great in many ways; I drove a submarine (yeah quite literally), I...
over a year ago
Happy New Year, Everyone! 2009 was great in many ways; I drove a submarine (yeah quite literally), I released 6 experimental games and recently I discovered the completely amazing game Evil Genius but lets try to make 2010 even better!
So let’s forget our small mishaps (yes I’m...
Gwern.net Newsletter
August 2020 gwern.net newsletter
with an essay on sidenotes; links on human competence, efficient-computing/hardware-overhangs; no...
over a year ago
with an essay on sidenotes; links on human competence, efficient-computing/hardware-overhangs; no reviews.
computers are bad
2023-02-07 secret government telephone numbers
Very nearly a year ago, I wrote a popular article about secret military
telephone
buttons.
To be...
a year ago
Very nearly a year ago, I wrote a popular article about secret military
telephone
buttons.
To be clear, the "secret" here was a joke and these buttons are in fact well
documented. The buttons I was talking about were the AUTOVON call precedence
buttons, used for a five-level...
Computer Ads from...
The Grand Stand
Joystick Stabilizer Support & Score Enhancer
a month ago
Joystick Stabilizer Support & Score Enhancer
computers are bad
2023-08-07 STIRred AND SHAKEN
In a couple of days, I pack up my bags to head for DEFCON. In a rare moment of
pre-planning, perhaps...
a year ago
In a couple of days, I pack up my bags to head for DEFCON. In a rare moment of
pre-planning, perhaps spurred by boredom, I looked through the schedule to see
what's in store in the world of telephony. There is a workshop on SS7, of
course [1], plenty of content on cellular, but...
Vitalik Buterin's...
On Nathan Schneider on the limits of cryptoeconomics
over a year ago
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...
Notes on software...
Implementing the Raft distributed consensus protocol in Go
As part of bringing myself up-to-speed after joining TigerBeetle, I
wanted some background on how...
a year ago
As part of bringing myself up-to-speed after joining TigerBeetle, I
wanted some background on how distributed consensus and replicated state
machines protocols work. TigerBeetle uses Viewstamped
Replication. But I
wanted to understand all popular protocols and I decided to start...
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...
Engineers Need Art
Kim-1 User Manual
For sale: a few KIM-1 User Manuals I printed up.
a year ago
For sale: a few KIM-1 User Manuals I printed up.
Arduino Blog
Innovative new tactile sensor helps assess fine motor skills
Fine motor skills correlate strongly with cognition and the accurate assessment of an individual’s...
7 months ago
Fine motor skills correlate strongly with cognition and the accurate assessment of an individual’s motor skills can be critical in diagnosing and treating a variety of conditions. But objective evaluation has been a challenge, as suitable sensors weren’t available. To help...
Neil Madden
API Security in Action is published!
I wasn’t expecting it so quickly, so it caught me a little off guard, but API Security in Action is...
over a year ago
I wasn’t expecting it so quickly, so it caught me a little off guard, but API Security in Action is now finally published. PDF copies are available now, with printed copies shipping by the end of the month. Kindle/ePub take a little bit longer but should be out in a few weeks...
Notes on software...
We put a distributed database in the browser – and made a game of it
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Willem's Blog
Fietselfstedentocht 2017
Cycling the 235KM long Fietselfstedentocht through Friesland
over a year ago
Cycling the 235KM long Fietselfstedentocht through Friesland
Home on Erik...
My favorite management failures
For most people straight out of school, work life is a bit of a culture shock. For me it was an...
over a year ago
For most people straight out of school, work life is a bit of a culture shock. For me it was an awesome experience, but a lot of the constraints were different and I had to learn to optimize for different things.
Louwrentius
LFS - Linux Firewall Script released
I started a small new Google project for a new script I wrote called LFS.
It stands for Linux...
over a year ago
I started a small new Google project for a new script I wrote called LFS.
It stands for Linux Firewall Script.
I run a small Linux box as an internet router that doubles as a firewall. The
firewall is configured using iptables. In my opinion, iptables is not the
easiest tool to...
Good Enough
Pika: Start Your Happy Blog
Have you thought about starting or restarting a blogging habit? Have you wanted to write on the...
11 months ago
Have you thought about starting or restarting a blogging habit? Have you wanted to write on the internet, but at your own place and at your own address rather than on a social network? Have you been overwhelmed by the online writing options that you’ve found? Well, have we got...
csvbase blog
Client libraries are better when they have no API
fsspec is secretly everywhere, and boss
8 months ago
fsspec is secretly everywhere, and boss
Good Enough
How We Built Quack (Beta)
We recently launched Quack, a simple utility for you to share a beautifully rendered version of any...
a year ago
We recently launched Quack, a simple utility for you to share a beautifully rendered version of any Markdown text. This software is completely front-end based, and for me personally it was a bit of a challenging puzzle to implement. Thankfully we have genius hackers like Arun...
Jonas Hietala
Establishing Habits with Habitica
I have used Habitica the last 18 months to organize my habits and things I want to get done. I...
over a year ago
I have used Habitica the last 18 months to organize my habits and things I want to get done. I believe it all started with an amazing book called The Power of Habit which describes the amazing benefits habits can give, both in the context of your own life but also in business....
Louwrentius
Lustre and the risk of Serious Data Loss
Personally I have a weakness for big-ass storage. Say 'petabyte' and I'm
interested. So I was...
over a year ago
Personally I have a weakness for big-ass storage. Say 'petabyte' and I'm
interested. So I was thinking about how you would setup a large, scalable
storage infrastructure. How should such a thing work?
Very simple: you should be able just to add hosts with some bad-ass huge...
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...
Notes on software...
Writing a simple JSON path parser
Let's say we want to implement a simple list filtering language so
we can enter a.b = 12 and return...
over a year ago
Let's say we want to implement a simple list filtering language so
we can enter a.b = 12 and return only results in a
list where the a column is an object that contains a
field b that is set to the value 12. What would a
filter(jsonPath, equals, listOfObjects) function...
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...
Louwrentius
Benefits of hyper-threading on a Core 7i processor
I had some wave files that I wanted to encode to mp3. I wrote a small parallel
processing framework...
over a year ago
I had some wave files that I wanted to encode to mp3. I wrote a small parallel
processing framework for this job. It executes parallel jobs so I can benefit
from the 4 cores + 4 virtual cores of my new Core 7i 920 processor.
The framework is based on some shell scripts running...
Arduino Blog
Meet Real Robot One V2: A mini DIY industrial robot arm
Started in 2022 as an exploration of what’s possible in the field of DIY robotics, Pavel Surynek’s...
5 months ago
Started in 2022 as an exploration of what’s possible in the field of DIY robotics, Pavel Surynek’s Real Robot One (RR1) project is a fully-featured 6+1-axis robot arm based on 3D-printed parts and widely available electronics. The initial release was constructed with PETG...
Computer Ads from...
Black Friday - Happy Birthday sale
Let's mix things up!
a month ago
axio.ms
Internet of kitchen lighting, with OSC
This project was completed in June 2015. Wow, is it 2017 already?
In this post, I’d like to say...
over a year ago
This project was completed in June 2015. Wow, is it 2017 already?
In this post, I’d like to say that I wrote a useful little bit of software and built up a crappy hack to demonstrate it but, secretly, the crappy hack came first and I’ve retroactively found something vaguely...
Jonas Hietala
2015 in Review
Previous reviews: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
2015 Geek Achievements
Finished my university...
over a year ago
Previous reviews: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.
2015 Geek Achievements
Finished my university studies and got a Master in Computer Science.
Discovered a new boardgame love: Android Netrunner.
Finished top 4 in my first Netrunner Store Championship.
Won a small local Netrunner...
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...
Birchtree
Squashing links on social media
Anil Dash: “Link in Bio” Is a Slow Knife
For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are...
3 weeks ago
Anil Dash: “Link in Bio” Is a Slow Knife
For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly
Birchtree
X Premium Plus now costs well more than running my own damn Mastodon server
Jess Weatherbed: X Raises Premium Plus Subscription Pricing by Almost 40 Percent - The Verge
X has...
a week ago
Jess Weatherbed: X Raises Premium Plus Subscription Pricing by Almost 40 Percent - The Verge
X has substantially raised the price of its top-tier user subscription in multiple regions to help bolster the platform’s creator payouts. The increase for Premium Plus came into effect...
Vitalik Buterin's...
From prediction markets to info finance
a month ago
Simply Explained
EZStore: a tiny serverless datastore for IoT data (DynamoDB + Lambda)
I've been working on a few IoT projects recently, and while prototyping, I need a simple but...
over a year ago
I've been working on a few IoT projects recently, and while prototyping, I need a simple but flexible data store. I just want to push data to an API and query and visualize it later on.There are many solutions for this, but most are expensive or very limited. So I set out to...
Posts on Made of...
Getting carried away with hack value
Recently, I’ve been working on some BarnOwl branches that move more of the core functionality of...
over a year ago
Recently, I’ve been working on some BarnOwl branches that move more of the core functionality of BarnOwl into perl code, instead of C (BarnOwl is written in an unholy mix of C and perl code that call each other back and forth obsessively).
Moving code into perl has many...
Louwrentius
Wake On Lan not working with realtek r8168 card
After messing around with different kernels on Debian Lenny, I noticed that my
system did no longer...
over a year ago
After messing around with different kernels on Debian Lenny, I noticed that my
system did no longer respond to WOL packets. The system is using an on-board
Realtek R8168 chip which supports wake on lan.
After searching and reading i found the problem. The system is using an...
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...
Willem's Blog
Syncing files seamlessly between smartphone and tablet
In order to optimise my workflow, I was looking for a way to seamlessly access the same files on...
over a year ago
In order to optimise my workflow, I was looking for a way to seamlessly access the same files on both my computer and smartphone. Read along to find out how I did it.
Arduino Blog
Boring rice cooker becomes uruchimai powerhouse
Rice cookers are staple appliances in about half of the world and basic models are very affordable....
5 months ago
Rice cookers are staple appliances in about half of the world and basic models are very affordable. But those are simple machines that are about as “dumb” as electric kettles. The result is often rice that has been sitting in the warming stage for too long, making the bottom...
./techtipsy
What changing the CPU on a laptop looks like
This post illustrates something that is not common on modern laptops:
changing the...
over a year ago
This post illustrates something that is not common on modern laptops:
changing the CPU.
Background
One of the modifications that you can do to a ThinkPad T430 laptop is changing
the CPU to a more powerful quad core model. That’s exactly what I did back in 2017,
but due to the...
Computer Ads from...
Vote for the April 2004 Plus Post Topic
If you are a paid subscriber, voting is open for one week
9 months ago
If you are a paid subscriber, voting is open for one week
Ken Shirriff's blog
Talking to memory: Inside the Intel 8088 processor's bus interface state machine
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor.
IBM's...
8 months ago
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor.
IBM's decision to use the 8088 processor in the IBM PC (1981) was a critical point in computer history,
leading to the success of the x86 architecture.
The designers of the IBM PC selected...
Willem's Blog
Art of visualisation
You learn from experts if you have the privilege to work with them, this month I had a chance to...
over a year ago
You learn from experts if you have the privilege to work with them, this month I had a chance to help a professional food photographer.
Posts on Made of...
Some Android reverse-engineering tools
I’ve spent a lot of time this last week staring at decompiled Dalvik assembly. In the process, I...
over a year ago
I’ve spent a lot of time this last week staring at decompiled Dalvik assembly. In the process, I created a couple of useful tools that I figure are worth sharing.
I’ve been using dedexer instead of baksmali, honestly mainly because the former’s output has fewer blank lines and so...
Arduino Blog
Exercise while you game with this interactive treadmill add-on
Motion-based controls for games have been around for decades, but even with the latest generation of...
4 months ago
Motion-based controls for games have been around for decades, but even with the latest generation of virtual reality headsets, gaming is still done with relatively limited movement unless one has access to an expensive VR walking/running setup. As an effort to get more physical...
Home on Erik...
Plotting author statistics for Git repos using Git of Theseus
I spent a few days during the holidays fixing up a bunch of semi-dormant open source projects and I...
over a year ago
I spent a few days during the holidays fixing up a bunch of semi-dormant open source projects and I have a couple of blog posts in the pipeline about various updates. First up, I made a number of fixes to Git of Theseus which is a tool (written in Python) that generates...
Notes on software...
Controlled HTML select element in React has weird default UX
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over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
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Good Enough
Lettini is Good Enough
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know...
a year ago
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re starting a new Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time, starting with our resident designer…
Who the hell do you think you are?
👋 Hello, I’m...
Good Enough
TIL: Fixing Broken Social Share Images in Twitter/X
I have an admission to make.
Social share images for Pika were broken on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and...
a month ago
I have an admission to make.
Social share images for Pika were broken on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and Apple Messages for months.
And it made me sad.
But in the past few months we got it fixed.
And that made me very happy!
We really love our Pika social share images.
They are...
Computer Ads from...
Ampere WS-1
A cool Japanese clamtop
9 months ago
Willem's Blog
Building a product platform
Leverage platform capabilities to quickly launch new products, designing for reusability,...
over a year ago
Leverage platform capabilities to quickly launch new products, designing for reusability, flexibility and extensibility.
latest projects -...
Portable Probability Panel
[Misc] Laser-cut Galton board
5 months ago
[Misc] Laser-cut Galton board
Good Enough
Grassroots
TLDNR: If you have an interest in Good Enough succeeding, we need your help! Telling friends,...
8 months ago
TLDNR: If you have an interest in Good Enough succeeding, we need your help! Telling friends, shouting on socials, and sharing links to our stuff with your favorite influencers–all of these things will help Good Enough succeed and continue making amazing stuff!
As we’ve been...
computers are bad
2023-04-30 los alamos - compound to county pt II
Where we left off, Los Alamos had become a county, but the town itself
continued to be directly...
a year ago
Where we left off, Los Alamos had become a county, but the town itself
continued to be directly administered by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
The Atomic Energy Communities Act (AECA) mandated the AEC to dispose of the
towns it owned by transferring the property to private...
Willem's Blog
Improve your sleep by blocking light
I have been wearing a sleep mask in bed, blocking all light. It has been amazing for my sleep's...
over a year ago
I have been wearing a sleep mask in bed, blocking all light. It has been amazing for my sleep's quality. Read along for my findings!
Louwrentius
Things you should consider when building a ZFS NAS
ZFS is a modern file system designed by Sun Microsystems, targeted at enterprise environments. Many...
over a year ago
ZFS is a modern file system designed by Sun Microsystems, targeted at enterprise environments. Many features of ZFS also appeal to home NAS builders and with good reason. But not all features are relevant or necessary for home use.
I believe that most home users building their...
Notes on software...
Intercepting and modifying Linux system calls with ptrace
How software fails is interesting. But real-world errors can be
infrequent to manifest....
a year ago
How software fails is interesting. But real-world errors can be
infrequent to manifest. Fault
injection
is a formal-sounding term that just means: trying to explicitly
trigger errors in the hopes of discovering bad logic, typically
during automated tests.
Jepsen
and ChaosMonkey...
Style over Substance
My grandfather’s Rolleiflex 2.8D twin-lens reflex (TLR) camera
One of the first vintage cameras I ever got was my dad’s old Polaroid SX-70. Like so many family...
over a year ago
One of the first vintage cameras I ever got was my dad’s old Polaroid SX-70. Like so many family cameras it had disappeared into a closet decades ago and was only found again recently. When he gave it to me, he told me there was another classic camera he wanted to give me – if...
Good Enough
TIL: JavaScript Turbo Stream Requests
I am working on search for Album Whale and I was very confused when my JavaScript fetch requests...
a year ago
I am working on search for Album Whale and I was very confused when my JavaScript fetch requests were not resulting in turbo_stream rendering getting displayed on my page. I checked my logs to see if the render was happening. I looked for missing <%= tags. Debugged and...
Home on Erik...
Tumblr's awesome project names
Not sure how I managed to miss this, but I'm watching this Tumblr presentation and they talk about...
over a year ago
Not sure how I managed to miss this, but I'm watching this Tumblr presentation and they talk about their projects named after Arrested Development topics: Gob, Parmesan, Buster, Jetpants, Oscar, George and Motherboy.
Still, the best software project name is probably still Apple's...
Home on Erik...
Missing the point about microservices: it's about testing and deploying independently
Ok, so I have to first preface this whole blog post by a few things:
I really struggle with the...
over a year ago
Ok, so I have to first preface this whole blog post by a few things:
I really struggle with the term microservices. I can't put my finger on exactly why. Maybe because the term is hopelessly ill-defined, maybe because it's gotten picked up by the hype train.
Opsbros
Volumer
I've always wanted a good USB volume control, so I decided to design one.
over a year ago
I've always wanted a good USB volume control, so I decided to design one.
Willem's Blog
Giving AI Training
Explore the transformative power of AI in everyday work: Dive into firsthand insights from a recent...
a year ago
Explore the transformative power of AI in everyday work: Dive into firsthand insights from a recent AI training session that's reshaping professional landscapes.
Electronics etc…
HP 8656A Signal Generator Schematics
Agilent has made the 8656A Signal Generator Operating & Service Manual
available as a PDF, but the...
10 months ago
Agilent has made the 8656A Signal Generator Operating & Service Manual
available as a PDF, but the schematics of chapter 8 are all spread over 3 or 4 pages, which makes
them hard to follow.
I spent a good evening extracting the schematics pages, cutting-and-pasting
them together...
Posts on Made of...
Configuring dnsmasq with VMware Workstation
I love VMware workstation. I keep VMs around for basically every version of every major Linux...
over a year ago
I love VMware workstation. I keep VMs around for basically every version of every major Linux distribution, and use them heavily for all kinds of kernel testing and development.
This post is a quick writeup of my networking setup with VMware Workstation, using dnsmasq to assign...
Old Vintage...
CAP-X and COMP-X: how the Tandy Pocket Computers got a sucky Japanese assembler
I grew up primarily with the Commodore 64, where if you wanted to do anything really cool and...
10 months ago
I grew up primarily with the Commodore 64, where if you wanted to do anything really cool and useful, you had to do it in 6502 assembly language. Today I still write 6502 assembly, plus some Power ISA and even a little TMS9900. I like assembly languages and how in control of 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...
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...
Simply Explained
Retrospective: 4 years on YouTube
Every year I sit down and take a look at how my YouTube channel has been doing. I reflect, evaluate,...
over a year ago
Every year I sit down and take a look at how my YouTube channel has been doing. I reflect, evaluate, and set goals for the coming year. This year is no exception. January 13th, 2020, marks my fourth year on YouTube. Time to do a little retrospective.
Computer Ads from...
Maxell's MF 2-DD Floppies
The Gold Standard
a month ago
Home on Erik...
New approximate nearest neighbor benchmarks
As some of you may know, one of my side interests is approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. I'm...
over a year ago
As some of you may know, one of my side interests is approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. I'm the author of Annoy, a library with 3,500+ stars on Github as of today. It offers fast approximate search for nearest neighbors with the additional benefit that you can load data...
Home on Erik...
Giving more tools to software engineers: the reorganization of the factory
It's a popular attitude among developers to rant about our tools and how broken things are. Maybe...
over a year ago
It's a popular attitude among developers to rant about our tools and how broken things are. Maybe I'm an optimistic person, because my viewpoint is the complete opposite! I had my first job as a software engineer in 1999, and in the last two decades I've seen software engineering...
Home on Erik...
Domains for sale
Contact me at mail at erik bern dot com!
over a year ago
Contact me at mail at erik bern dot com!
Computer Ads from...
Gould Electronic's PowerNode 6000
The Firebreathers from Gould blast the competition into oblivion.
5 months ago
The Firebreathers from Gould blast the competition into oblivion.
Louwrentius
What home NAS builders should understand about silent data corruption
Introduction
When it comes to dealing with storage in a DIY NAS context, two important topics come...
over a year ago
Introduction
When it comes to dealing with storage in a DIY NAS context, two important topics come up:
Unrecoverable read errors (UREs) or what old people like me call 'bad sectors'
Silent data corruption (data corruption unnoticed by the storage layers)
I get a strong impression...
Louwrentius
'A Moment Of Silence: OpenSolaris Is Dead'
The last release of OpenSolaris dates back to July 2009. The next release was
scheduled for March...
over a year ago
The last release of OpenSolaris dates back to July 2009. The next release was
scheduled for March 2010, but Oracle did not release anything. It is dead
silent around OpenSolaris.
On 12 July 2010, the OpenSolaris Government Board sent out an ultimatum
to Oracle: "please...
Bryan Braun - Blog
Made in 2024
Here are some things I made in 2024:
Music Box Fun: Advanced Editing (a new major feature):
...
2 days ago
Here are some things I made in 2024:
Music Box Fun: Advanced Editing (a new major feature):
Adds multiple-note selection for bulk operations on notes (like deletion, copy/paste, nudging and dragging)
Also includes a “space editor” for arbitrarily adding/removing space...
Arduino Blog
Shop vac becomes a Roomba on steroids
A robotic vacuum, such as a Roomba, offers a lot of convenience. Instead of having to vacuum and...
8 months ago
A robotic vacuum, such as a Roomba, offers a lot of convenience. Instead of having to vacuum and sweep your own floors, you have a little maid robot to do the job for you. But these devices have very little power and capacity, which makes them useless for anything other than...
Jonas Hietala
A *
After a few hours of coding I’ve made a little, little, bit of progress but it took a lot longer...
over a year ago
After a few hours of coding I’ve made a little, little, bit of progress but it took a lot longer than I would have liked.
I’ve basically managed to make a world and some tiles in the world and we have a worker who can move around on the tiles and he can’t move on all...
Jonas Hietala
Long Term Goals
I have a lot of things I want to do. Right now I want to go to the kids training tomorrow and also...
over a year ago
I have a lot of things I want to do. Right now I want to go to the kids training tomorrow and also to our training time. I haven’t trained a lot lately so it feels good to do something again and training the kids is very rewarding. On Monday I have the next graph theory lecture...
Willem's Blog
Commuting by bike
One week on the VanMoof Electrified S E-bike testing it for commuting and comparing it to a normal...
over a year ago
One week on the VanMoof Electrified S E-bike testing it for commuting and comparing it to a normal bike.
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...
Home on Erik...
NoDoc
We had an unconference at Spotify last Thursday and I added a semi-trolling semi-serious topic about...
over a year ago
We had an unconference at Spotify last Thursday and I added a semi-trolling semi-serious topic about abolishing documentation. Or NoDoc, as I'm going to call this movement. This was meant to be mostly a thought experiment, but I don't see it as complete madness.
Lighthouse Blog
Browser extensions to add articles
a week ago
Notes on software...
Delightful, production-grade replication for Postgres
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5 months ago
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here
if you are not redirected.
Old Vintage...
Programming the Convergent WorkSlate's spreadsheet microcassette future
In this particular future, we will all use handheld spreadsheets stored on microcassettes, talking...
4 months ago
In this particular future, we will all use handheld spreadsheets stored on microcassettes, talking to each other via speakerphone, and probably listening to Devo and New Order a lot. (Though that part isn't too different from my actual present.)
a computer whose manufacturer...
Home on Erik...
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by opportunity cost
Hanlon's razor is a classic aphorism I'm sure you have heard before: Never attribute to malice that...
over a year ago
Hanlon's razor is a classic aphorism I'm sure you have heard before: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I've found that neither malice nor stupidity is the most common reason when you don't understand why something is in a certain way.
computers are bad
2023-06-02 the reinvention of owens lake
Programming note: In an effort to introduce an exciting new social aspect to
Computers Are Bad (a...
a year ago
Programming note: In an effort to introduce an exciting new social aspect to
Computers Are Bad (a functional necessity to appease early-stage investor
demands for "engagement")¸ I am launching a Matrix room for CAB readers.
You can join it! Do whatever you do to join rooms in...
Willem's Blog
For the love of mini
The iPhone Mini has intangible greatness that most folks don't know about: read along for the love...
over a year ago
The iPhone Mini has intangible greatness that most folks don't know about: read along for the love of mini!
Notes on software...
How I run a software book club
I've been running software book clubs almost continuously since last
summer, about 12 months ago. We...
7 months ago
I've been running software book clubs almost continuously since last
summer, about 12 months ago. We read through Designing Data-Intensive
Applications, Database
Internals,
Systems
Performance, and
we just started Understanding Software
Dynamics.
The DDIA discussions were...
Jonas Hietala
Netrunner Winter Kit Tournament Linköping
After quite the hiatus from Netrunner I had a chance to join a tournament here in Linköping with 14...
over a year ago
After quite the hiatus from Netrunner I had a chance to join a tournament here in Linköping with 14 participants. The number of players has grown a lot since the previous tournament which is really great.
As I really wanted to win the wonderful Day Job playmat I went with two of...
Old Vintage...
Refurb weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on...
7 months ago
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more in the near future. So we'll start with one that's widely considered to be a remarkable cul-de-sac in computing history: the Canon...
Home on Erik...
Snakebite
Just promoting Spotify stuff here: check out the Snakebite repo on Github, written by Wouter de Bie....
over a year ago
Just promoting Spotify stuff here: check out the Snakebite repo on Github, written by Wouter de Bie. It's a super fast tool to access HDFS over CLI/Python, by accessing the namenode directly over sockets/protobuf.
Spotify's developer blog features a nice blog post outlining what...
computers are bad
2023-10-22 cooler screens
Audible even over the squeal of an HVAC blower with a suffering belt, the whine
of small, high...
a year ago
Audible even over the squeal of an HVAC blower with a suffering belt, the whine
of small, high velocity fans pervades the grocery side of this Walgreens. Were
they always this loud? I'm not sure; some of the fans sound distinctly
unhealthy. Still, it's a familiar kind of noise to...
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...
Old Vintage...
Scenes from the Solbourne Computer corporate video, March 1992
Solbourne Computer, which for a number of years was probably Sun's most significant early competitor...
a year ago
Solbourne Computer, which for a number of years was probably Sun's most significant early competitor in SPARC-based systems. Solbourne was the first to market in 1989 with multiprocessing SPARC servers based on their custom circuit-switched 108MB/s KBus interconnect, running a...
Louwrentius
Which file system for a large storage array under Linux?
There are many file systems available under Linux, however only a few of them
can be used for a...
over a year ago
There are many file systems available under Linux, however only a few of them
can be used for a large storage array.
I am assuming that you want to create a single file system. I don't care if
you use LVM or other layers beneath, this is about which file system to use.
I will...
Notes on software...
General book recommendations
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over a year ago
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here
if you are not redirected.
Louwrentius
The Raspberry Pi 5 is no match for a tini-mini-micro PC
I've always been fond of the idea of the Raspberry Pi. An energy efficient, small, cheap but capable...
6 months ago
I've always been fond of the idea of the Raspberry Pi. An energy efficient, small, cheap but capable computer. An ideal home server. Until the Pi 4, the Pi was not that capable, and only with the relatively recent Pi 5 (fall 2023) do I feel the Pi is OK performance wise, although...
Good Enough
Asking the Right Question
Lately I've been pondering the future for Album Whale. It does what we'd like it to do, and we've...
a year ago
Lately I've been pondering the future for Album Whale. It does what we'd like it to do, and we've spread the word enough that there's now a steady stream of new users coming in each day. So, what's next?
Portrait of the author pondering
My first impulse was to answer this...
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?
Engineers Need Art
Stereographer
Experimenting in stereo photography and I write an app to create old-fashioned stereoscopic cards.
5 months ago
Experimenting in stereo photography and I write an app to create old-fashioned stereoscopic cards.
Willem's Blog
MUSE in Carré
MUSE's legendary rock fused with Amsterdam's Royal Theatre Carré for an unforgettable, electrifying...
over a year ago
MUSE's legendary rock fused with Amsterdam's Royal Theatre Carré for an unforgettable, electrifying experience - read about my experience!
Good Enough
Actual Customer Support Is Remarkable
What a sad thing to write.
We believe in good software around here.
There is a lot of poorly built...
a year ago
What a sad thing to write.
We believe in good software around here.
There is a lot of poorly built software on the Internet and in the app stores.
Our motivation with Good Enough is to try to put together a few products that feel just right to the folks using them.
The things we...
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.
Posts on Made of...
Why the Sorbet typechecker is fast
This is the second in an indefinite series of posts about things that I think went well in the...
over a year ago
This is the second in an indefinite series of posts about things that I think went well in the Sorbet project. The previous one covered our testing approach.
Sorbet is fast. Numerous of our early users commented specifically on how fast it was, and how much they appreciated this...
Notes on software...
Favorite compiler and interpreter resources
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a year ago
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Arduino Blog
See how this homemade spectrometer analyzes substances with an Arduino Mega
Materials, when exposed to light, will reflect or absorb certain portions of the electromagnetic...
a week ago
Materials, when exposed to light, will reflect or absorb certain portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that can give valuable information about their chemical or physical compositions. Traditional setups use a single lamp to emit white light before it is split apart into a...
Willem's Blog
Upgrading a 27-inch iMac 5K to 14 terabytes
This month I nearly destroyed my iMac during an attempt to upgrade it. Thanks to determination and...
over a year ago
This month I nearly destroyed my iMac during an attempt to upgrade it. Thanks to determination and some spare time I was able to resurrect it from the death!
Electronics etc…
ThinMachine - a $25 Thin Client MacOS Time Machine Appliance
The instructions below set up Time Machine using the Apple File Protocol
(AFP). After publishing...
a year ago
The instructions below set up Time Machine using the Apple File Protocol
(AFP). After publishing this blog post, I’ve been told that this is now
deprecated and that Samba should be used instead. I’ll update this blog
post in the near future.
Introduction
The HP t520 Thin...
watchTowr Labs
Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire - Mitel MiCollab CVE-2024-35286, CVE-2024-41713 And An 0day
It is not just APTs that like to target telephone systems, but ourselves at watchTowr too.
We can't...
4 weeks ago
It is not just APTs that like to target telephone systems, but ourselves at watchTowr too.
We can't overstate the consequences of an attacker crossing the boundary from the 'computer system' to the 'telephone system'. We've seen attackers realise this in 2024,
Louwrentius
RAID array size and rebuild speed
When a disk fails of a RAID 5 array, you are no longer protected against
(another) disk failure and...
over a year ago
When a disk fails of a RAID 5 array, you are no longer protected against
(another) disk failure and thus data loss. During this rebuild time, you are
vulnerable. The longer it takes to rebuild your array, the longer you are
vulnerable. Especially during a disk-intensive period,...
Louwrentius
Neato XV-15 / XV-11 Robotic Vacuum cleaner review
Update 18 February 2012
There is one problem. When the robot is not connected to the charger, the...
over a year ago
Update 18 February 2012
There is one problem. When the robot is not connected to the charger, the batteries are depleted very fast. Even if the batteries are not entirely depleted and the robot can still display the menu, the clock loses it's time. Every time the robot gets a too...
Bryan Braun - Blog
Links #10
How to Get on a Podcast - This is a short and invaluable post for anyone who wants to be a podcast...
5 months ago
How to Get on a Podcast - This is a short and invaluable post for anyone who wants to be a podcast guest. It puts you in the shoes of a podcaster, showing you what they need, and how you can be a “sure thing” for them. As usual, there are no short cuts. You gotta do the work!
A...
./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!
Jonas Hietala
Migrating to rocks.nvim
My relationship with my Neovim config is best described as an On-again, off-again relationship.
At...
7 months ago
My relationship with my Neovim config is best described as an On-again, off-again relationship.
At times I’m deeply in love and spend all my time caressing the config—like how in September I did a complete rewrite in Lua—while other times I’m busy with other love interests and...
Jonas Hietala
2011 in Review
It’s time to wrap up the year that’s been. Be warned for slight ego boosting here.
2011 Geek...
over a year ago
It’s time to wrap up the year that’s been. Be warned for slight ego boosting here.
2011 Geek Achievements
Wrote three games this year:
My Minions
Grand Thief Arto
Sat-E
Bought a new computer!
Bought a mechanical keyboard.
Bought custom Starcraft 2 keycaps for the...
Louwrentius
Compiling Ceph on the Raspberry Pi 3B+ (armhf) using Clang/LLVM
UPDATE 2019 / 2020
There are official ARM64 binaries of Ceph that you can run on a 64-bit version of...
over a year ago
UPDATE 2019 / 2020
There are official ARM64 binaries of Ceph that you can run on a 64-bit version of Ubuntu 18.04.
Important: I consider this page obsolete. I will keep it up for transparency's sake
Introduction
In this blog post I'll show you how to compile Ceph Luminous for...
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...
Notes on software...
The impact of management teams as a decision-making group, in startups and enterprise
Ambitious companies form management teams at every level above you,
sometimes including you....
over a year ago
Ambitious companies form management teams at every level above you,
sometimes including you. Management teams meet periodically and have
private chat rooms. They discuss customers, product and organizational
direction. Sometimes discussions are well documented and...
Willem's Blog
Escaping the flat tires
Finding the answer to the question how resilient a puncture-proof tire really is took me quite some...
over a year ago
Finding the answer to the question how resilient a puncture-proof tire really is took me quite some time, but alas - here it is!
Willem's Blog
Realtime service uptime monitoring
Downtime happens and it is nothing to be ashamed of, just make sure that you set yourself up to...
over a year ago
Downtime happens and it is nothing to be ashamed of, just make sure that you set yourself up to discover problems as soon as possible! Know about problems before your customers do!
./techtipsy
Dell Latitude 5411: the Linux compatibility sweet spot
Oh boy, here I go testing a new laptop again!
Well, it was new back in 2020.
You might remember my...
a year ago
Oh boy, here I go testing a new laptop again!
Well, it was new back in 2020.
You might remember my article on why I went back to a ThinkPad T430 in 2022.
Or that other time when I got a new HP laptop for testing and got so frustrated that I wrote about it.
Well, today I’m writing...
Simply Explained
Secure Home Assistant Access with Cloudflare and Ubiquiti Dream Machine
I've become increasingly reliant on Home Assistant to automate various tasks around the house. But...
over a year ago
I've become increasingly reliant on Home Assistant to automate various tasks around the house. But how do you safely expose your instance to the internet for remote access?You want to be able to log in from a remote location, but how to keep others out? This post will show how...
Posts on Made of...
amd64 and va_arg
A while back, I was poking around LLVM bugs, and discovered, to my surprise, that LLVM doesn’t...
over a year ago
A while back, I was poking around LLVM bugs, and discovered, to my surprise, that LLVM doesn’t support the va_arg intrinsic, used by functions to accept multiple arguments, at all on amd64. It turns out that clang and llvm-gcc, the compilers that backend to LLVM, have their own...
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...
Abort Retry Fail
The History of Windows NT 3.1
A Highly Portable Future
a year ago
./techtipsy
AMD Ryzen 7 5700G: first impressions on Fedora 34
Introduction
I’ve covered my self-hosting setup in a previous post. It has been a couple of
months...
over a year ago
Introduction
I’ve covered my self-hosting setup in a previous post. It has been a couple of
months and the setup has mostly been fine. Sure, the power usage was pretty big under load, and yes, my internet did cut
out every time I turned the VM on with all the services starting,...
Jonas Hietala
Changes
A lot has been going on lately and it feels like I’m being swamped. I can’t complain too much but...
over a year ago
A lot has been going on lately and it feels like I’m being swamped. I can’t complain too much but there are things I’d like to change after the exam period this week.
Program more!
nothing since christmas or someting. I need to finish:
Ada project for school. Can’t believe I...
Notes on software...
Writing an x86 emulator from scratch in JavaScript: 1. a stack and register machine
Better yet, take a look at this post walking through emulating x86 ELF binaries in Go:
Emulating...
over a year ago
Better yet, take a look at this post walking through emulating x86 ELF binaries in Go:
Emulating linux/AMD64 userland: interpreting an ELF binary
2. system calls
In this post we'll create a small virtual machine in JavaScript and
use it to run a simple C program compiled...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Degen communism: the only correct political ideology
9 months ago
Louwrentius
Benchmarking storage with Fio and generating charts of the results
Introduction
Fio is a widely-used tool for performing storage benchmarks. Fio offers a lot of...
over a year ago
Introduction
Fio is a widely-used tool for performing storage benchmarks. Fio offers a lot of options to create a storage benchmark that would best reflect your needs. Fio allows you to assess if your storage solution is up to its task and how much headroom it has.
Fio outputs...
Willem's Blog
Programming on Apple Watch
Programming with VIM over SSH on Apple Watch using a bluetooth keyboard
over a year ago
Programming with VIM over SSH on Apple Watch using a bluetooth keyboard
Jonas Hietala
Rewriting my Neovim config in Lua
This screenshot betrays just how much productive time was wasted setting this up.
I’ve got tons of...
a year ago
This screenshot betrays just how much productive time was wasted setting this up.
I’ve got tons of things to do; clean the bathrooms, prototype an idea for a SaaS and ponder world peace.
So naturally the procrastination took over and I rewrote my Neovim configuration in...
./techtipsy
ASRock X570M Pro4 motherboard overview
Not too long ago, I had the goal of consolidating all my computing needs onto a
single desktop PC....
over a year ago
Not too long ago, I had the goal of consolidating all my computing needs onto a
single desktop PC. That meant moving from an mITX-based build to something that
had a bit more expandability. Since I already had a
Fractal Meshify C Mini,
I decided to go for an mATX motherboard. And...
Jonas Hietala
The eBook for 'Why Cryptocurrencies?' is now available for free
The eBook for my book Why Cryptocurrencies? is now available for free.
It’s been almost 4 years...
10 months ago
The eBook for my book Why Cryptocurrencies? is now available for free.
It’s been almost 4 years since the web version was done, and 3 since the physical copy was available…
Which can hardly be called a success.
Things happened, so let’s do a quick retrospective to, maybe, learn...
Jonas Hietala
Language spec in code blocks
Even though I just recently restyled the blog and wasn’t going to touch it, there was one thing I...
a year ago
Even though I just recently restyled the blog and wasn’t going to touch it, there was one thing I wanted to add, but it felt a little bothersome so I skipped it.
It was to display the highlighted language in code blocks:
The code spec displays what programming language the code...
Arduino Blog
Storing ephemeral micropoetry on RFID cards for bite-sized readings
Most people don’t consume poetry in the same way that they do novels. Instead of reading a book of...
4 months ago
Most people don’t consume poetry in the same way that they do novels. Instead of reading a book of poetry from cover-to-cover over the course of a few sessions, the majority of people seem to prefer enjoying poetry in occasional little chunks. And unlike the epic poems of Greek...
./techtipsy
Shrinkflation, SanDisk style
2023-02-16 update: this post is not about the “GB vs GiB” issue, or the “lost disk space” that...
a year ago
2023-02-16 update: this post is not about the “GB vs GiB” issue, or the “lost disk space” that you
notice after formatting the device in an OS. Please read the article in full before
making inaccurate comments online.
For many years, I have used two SanDisk Ultra 16 GB USB flash...
Electronics etc…
Tesla’s FSD - First and Last Impressions
TLDR: It’s a useless technology demo.
Introduction
Rules of Engagement
Test Ride 1: from Kings Beach...
7 months ago
TLDR: It’s a useless technology demo.
Introduction
Rules of Engagement
Test Ride 1: from Kings Beach to Truckee (11 miles)
Test Ride 2: I-80 from Truckee to Blue Canyon (36 miles)
Test Ride 3: from West-Valley College to I-85 Entrance (1 mile)
Conclusion
Introduction
In the past...
Lighthouse Blog
Updates November 24: Content parsing improvements
a year 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...
Ken Shirriff's blog
The transparent chip inside a vintage Hewlett-Packard floppy drive
While repairing an eight-inch HP floppy drive, we found that the problem was a broken interface...
a year ago
While repairing an eight-inch HP floppy drive, we found that the problem was a broken interface chip.
Since the chip was bad, I decapped it and took photos.
This chip is very unusual: instead of a silicon substrate, the chip is formed on
a base of sapphire, with silicon and metal...
Willem's Blog
Abandoning my own tablet OS
After a year of experimenting with Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go 2 I have returned to iPad Pro...
over a year ago
After a year of experimenting with Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go 2 I have returned to iPad Pro and the Mac.
Louwrentius
Mounting a file system or partition from a disk image
You cannot just make a disk copy with dd and then just mount it as a regular
disk. You must know...
over a year ago
You cannot just make a disk copy with dd and then just mount it as a regular
disk. You must know where the partition starts on the disk. So first, you need
to get the partition table with sfdisk:
sfdisk -l -uS image_file.dd
The output is something like:
Disk...
./techtipsy
LattePanda V1 - my experience with a Raspberry Pi alternative
As with many homelab experiments around 2022/2023, it all started with Raspberry Pi-s
being either...
a year ago
As with many homelab experiments around 2022/2023, it all started with Raspberry Pi-s
being either out of stock or absurdly overpriced.
I once noticed a listing for a LattePanda V1 on a local auction site.
The price was reasonable at 45 EUR, and after I looked at the...
Home on Erik...
3D
Andy Sloane decided to call my 2D visualization and raise it to 3D.
(Looks a little weird in the...
over a year ago
Andy Sloane decided to call my 2D visualization and raise it to 3D.
(Looks a little weird in the iframe but check out the link). It's based on a LDA model with 200 topics, so the artists tend to stick to clusters where each cluster is a topic.
Style over Substance
Using the Olympus XA as an everyday carry camera
The Olympus XA has been my EDC camera this year and I gotta say – it’s a ton of fun. The concept of...
over a year ago
The Olympus XA has been my EDC camera this year and I gotta say – it’s a ton of fun. The concept of EDC – Every Day Carry – is that a piece of equipment should be light and compact enough to have with you every day, yet still versatile enough to be useful in […]
The post Using...
Jonas Hietala
Tufte style sidenotes and marginnotes in Pollen
When evaluating Pollen I complained about markdown/pandoc’s lack of sidenote handling. I have solved...
over a year ago
When evaluating Pollen I complained about markdown/pandoc’s lack of sidenote handling. I have solved it for Pollen but felt it deserved it’s own post.
A caveat: I generated Tufte CSS style sidenotes and marginnotes which made it more complex than if I had simply generated...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Notes on Blockchain Governance
over a year ago
Applied Cartography
Incumbency
Andrew Rea with an interesting and increasingly familiar take about how AI will disrupt...
5 months ago
Andrew Rea with an interesting and increasingly familiar take about how AI will disrupt software-focused private equity:
Distribution and brand moats can protect your legacy products for a while (esp in enterprise) but eventually you get lapped by competitors with better...
Jonas Hietala
2019 in Review
As is tradition a quick rundown of the year is due. It’s been good to do as it makes me reflect on...
over a year ago
As is tradition a quick rundown of the year is due. It’s been good to do as it makes me reflect on the past year, and see that I did indeed do some things, and to look ahead a little.
2019 Non-Geek Achievements
Played around with Isidor.
It’s hard to describe how happy a kid can...
Computer Ads from...
Oberon International' Omni-Reader
Audio Engineers announce a revolution in taking words from page to your computer
2 weeks ago
Audio Engineers announce a revolution in taking words from page to your computer
Willem's Blog
Fighting backscatter spam at server level
Deal with backscatter spam by implementing a stringent SMTP delivery policy at MTA level.
over a year ago
Deal with backscatter spam by implementing a stringent SMTP delivery policy at MTA level.
Notes on software...
1 million page views
I was delighted to notice this morning that this site has recently
passed 1M page views. And since...
a month ago
I was delighted to notice this morning that this site has recently
passed 1M page views. And since Murat
wrote
about his 1M page view accomplishment at the time, I felt compelled to
now too.
I started regularly blogging in 2018. For some reason I decided to
write a blog post...
Notes on software...
Writing a lisp compiler from scratch in JavaScript: 6. an x86 upgrade
Previously in compiler basics:
1. lisp to assembly
2. user-defined functions and variables
...
over a year ago
Previously in compiler basics:
1. lisp to assembly
2. user-defined functions and variables
3. LLVM
4. LLVM conditionals and compiling fibonacci
5. LLVM system calls
This post upgrades the ulisp x86 backend from using a limited set of
registers (with no spilling...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Moving beyond coin voting governance
over a year ago
Home on Erik...
Stuff that bothers me: “100x faster than Hadoop”
The simple way to get featured on big data blog these days seem to be
Build something that does 1...
over a year ago
The simple way to get featured on big data blog these days seem to be
Build something that does 1 thing super well but nothing else Benchmark it against Hadoop Publish stats showing that it's 100x faster than Hadoop $$$ Spark claims their 100x faster than Hadoop and there's a...
Louwrentius
Understanding IOPS, latency and storage performance
Update 2020: I've written another blogpost about this topic, including some benchmark examples.
When...
over a year ago
Update 2020: I've written another blogpost about this topic, including some benchmark examples.
When most people think about storage performance, they think about throughput. But throughput is similar to the top speed of a car. In reality, you will almost never reach the top...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Making Ethereum alignment legible
3 months ago
Jonas Hietala
MenuCity: Level 0 Walkthrough
It hasn’t even been a week since I released my latest game MenyCity and already so much positive...
over a year ago
It hasn’t even been a week since I released my latest game MenyCity and already so much positive feedback! I’m so thrilled :) However, all isn’t blue skies and nice sunshine. A lot of times the first question is: How do you play it? or How do you get past the first level? I admit...
Arduino Blog
Meet Mr. Wallplate, an animatronic wall plate that speaks to you
Interactive robots always bring an element of intrigue, and even more so when they feature unusual...
7 months ago
Interactive robots always bring an element of intrigue, and even more so when they feature unusual parts and techniques to perform their actions. Mr. Wallplate, affectionately named by Tony K on Instructables, is one such robot that is contained within an electrical wall plate...
Louwrentius
Using InfiniBand for cheap and fast point-to-point Networking
InfiniBand networking is quite awesome. It's mainly used for two reasons:
low latency
high...
over a year ago
InfiniBand networking is quite awesome. It's mainly used for two reasons:
low latency
high bandwidth
As a home user, I'm mainly interested in setting up a high bandwidth link between two servers.
I was using quad-port network cards with Linux Bonding, but this solution has some...
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...
Willem's Blog
Optical vs chest strap heart rate monitors
Understanding the differences in common HR monitors used in wearables, smartwatches and fitness...
over a year ago
Understanding the differences in common HR monitors used in wearables, smartwatches and fitness trackers
Good Enough
Cosmic Maelstrom
As Barry wrote in his recent blogpost, we're busy building prototypes here at Good Enough.
It's...
a year ago
As Barry wrote in his recent blogpost, we're busy building prototypes here at Good Enough.
It's weird to be in this situation. Most of the Good Enough team are used to working on just one software at a time, focusing on steadily improving it. But right now we're doing the...
Matt Mullenweg
Age-gating
I’m not opposed to age-gating at all, I think it’s appropriate in many situations and useful, and...
a month 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...
lcamtuf’s thing
Lies, damned lies, and photodiodes
Diffusion and drift currents: depending on what you're trying to do, photodiodes can be really fast...
3 weeks ago
Diffusion and drift currents: depending on what you're trying to do, photodiodes can be really fast or infuriatingly slow.
Azad's Blog
Apple Vision Pro—A Revolution for Home Video Formats
Apple has always been at the forefront of home video with Apple TV (the device), iTunes Movies,...
3 months ago
Apple has always been at the forefront of home video with Apple TV (the device), iTunes Movies, Spatial Audio, and the vivid displays of iPhones, iPads, and Mac displays. With Apple Vision Pro, Apple is once again pushing the boundaries of the movie watching experience by...
Willem's Blog
Using Google Free Android
Using a Google Free Android phone is uncommon these days, yet I decided to try the Volla Phone to...
over a year ago
Using a Google Free Android phone is uncommon these days, yet I decided to try the Volla Phone to experience its freedom and privacy.
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...
Willem's Blog
Tips for Long-Distance Cycling
Embark on your own long-distance cycling adventure by learning from my post-COVID...
a year ago
Embark on your own long-distance cycling adventure by learning from my post-COVID Fietselfstedentocht experience, packed with invaluable tips and tricks.
Arduino Blog
The web-based Arduino Lab for MicroPython Editor is out! With Chromebook support to code Alvik and...
We’re excited to announce the release of the web-based version of the Arduino Lab for MicroPython...
2 months ago
We’re excited to announce the release of the web-based version of the Arduino Lab for MicroPython Editor. This lightweight platform makes it even easier to code with MicroPython using Arduino hardware such as Alvik, Nano ESP32, Nano RP2040 Connect, Nano 33 BLE Sense – and more!...
Louwrentius
Fully unattended deployment of Windows clients using limited resources
Introduction
Anyone who ever installed Windows on a computer by hand must have wished for a solution...
over a year ago
Introduction
Anyone who ever installed Windows on a computer by hand must have wished for a solution that automate this task. It's just waiting a lot and pressing a button now and then. But installing the operating system itself is only the beginning. Once installed, you need to...
Notes on software...
What's the big deal about key-value databases like FoundationDB and RocksDB?
Let's assume you're familiar with basic SQL databases like PostgreSQL
and MySQL, and document...
over a year ago
Let's assume you're familiar with basic SQL databases like PostgreSQL
and MySQL, and document databases like MongoDB and Elasticsearch. You
probably know Redis too.
But you're hearing more and more about embedded key-value stores like
RocksDB,
LevelDB,
PebbleDB, and so on....
Old Vintage...
One-parting some Commodore 64 utilities for fun and profit
I've got a few retrocomputing bucket list items I'm slowly working down, and a couple of them...
a month ago
I've got a few retrocomputing bucket list items I'm slowly working down, and a couple of them involve some little Commodore 64 games I've had kicking around on the backburner. However, every game needs media assets, and while there are many great tools for doing art on your...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Review: museums of the future, Dubai and Tokyo
5 months ago
Applied Cartography
Klarna: nineteen years, twenty billion kroner
I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay...
a month ago
I tend to ignore the entire genre of what we now refer to as BNPL businesses — Affirm, Afterpay (RIP), Klarna, et al — not for any particular sin I feel that they are committing, but because they in my mind are much less interesting companies with less volatile upside than the...
Louwrentius
Benchmarking cheap SSDs for fun, no profit (be warned)
The price of Solid-state drives (SSDs) has dropped significantly over the last few years. It's now...
a year ago
The price of Solid-state drives (SSDs) has dropped significantly over the last few years. It's now possible to buy a 1TB solid-state drive for less than €60. However, at such low price points, there is a catch.
Although cheap SSDs do perform fine regarding reads, sustained write...
Willem's Blog
Listen to your body
Using health data gathered by sensors and wearables I learned to listen to my body. Now I have...
over a year ago
Using health data gathered by sensors and wearables I learned to listen to my body. Now I have stopped using bluetooth sensors all together.
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...
Buck on Software
Thinking incrementally about SaaS
An overview of the key output of the growth software machine
over a year ago
An overview of the key output of the growth software machine
Old Vintage...
After 41 years, my first assembly program on my first computer, the Tomy Tutor
We got it in 1983, I think, so it only took me about 41 years to get around to it. This Tomy Tutor...
9 months ago
We got it in 1983, I think, so it only took me about 41 years to get around to it. This Tomy Tutor isn't a replacement system I secondarily acquired, nor is it a Ship of Theseus Frankenstein rebuild. This is my actual first computer, in its original case, on its original...
Engineers Need Art
Building Quarter-Cab - Phase I
Lets build a simple virtual pinball controller to bring more immersion to your game.
7 months ago
Lets build a simple virtual pinball controller to bring more immersion to your game.
Odds and Ends of...
Book now! Where we're going, we need roads (and trains)
My next in-person event/meet-up, with transport policy expert Michael Dnes!
a month ago
My next in-person event/meet-up, with transport policy expert Michael Dnes!
Vitalik Buterin's...
Blockchain voting is overrated among uninformed people but underrated among informed people
over a year ago
Home on Erik...
Microsoft's new marketing strategy: give up
I think it's funny how MS at some point realized they are not the cool kids and there's no reason to...
over a year ago
I think it's funny how MS at some point realized they are not the cool kids and there's no reason to appeal to that target audience. Their new marketing strategy finally admits what's been long known: the correlation between “business casual” and using Microsoft products:
Home on Erik...
Software Engineers and Automation
Every once in a while when talking to smart people the topic of automation comes up. Technology has...
over a year ago
Every once in a while when talking to smart people the topic of automation comes up. Technology has made lots of occupations redundant, so what's next?
Switchboard operator, a long time ago
What about software engineers?
Louwrentius
'lm-sensors: hardware monitoring with the w83627ehf module'
I have two systems that use the w83627ehf driver for hardware monitoring.
However, if this driver is...
over a year ago
I have two systems that use the w83627ehf driver for hardware monitoring.
However, if this driver is installed with a regular modprobe like:
modprobe w83627ehf
The result will be:
FATAL: Error inserting w83627ehf
(/lib/modules/2.6.28-1-amd64/kernel/drivers/hwmon/w83627ehf.ko):...
Jonas Hietala
Poking at Emacs
I’ve been a vim vim fan for a while now and with some recent configs I’m starting to feel pretty...
over a year ago
I’ve been a vim vim fan for a while now and with some recent configs I’m starting to feel pretty confident and happy with it. For those who don’t know it’s basically a text editor, like notepad, but with a lot of keycommands which allows you to edit code (and text in general)...
Construction Physics
What Learning by Doing Looks Like
The evolution of polycrystalline diamond drill bits
3 weeks ago
The evolution of polycrystalline diamond drill bits
Posts on Made of...
Some musings on ORMs
I’m pretty sure every developer who has ever worked with a modern database-backed application,...
over a year ago
I’m pretty sure every developer who has ever worked with a modern database-backed application, particularly a web-app, has a love/hate relationship with their ORM, or object-relational mapper.
On the one hand, ORMs are vastly more pleasant to work with than code that constructs...
computers are bad
2023-01-29 the parallel port
A few days ago, on a certain orange website, I came across an article about an
improvised parallel...
a year ago
A few days ago, on a certain orange website, I came across an article about an
improvised parallel printer capture device.
This contains the line:
There are other projects out there, but when you google for terms such as
"parallel port to usb", they drown in a sea of "USB to...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Reverse-engineering an analog Bendix air data computer: part 4, the Mach section
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10 months ago
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In the 1950s, many fighter...
computers are bad
2023-09-10 the Essex GWEN site
Programming note: this post is in color. I will not debase myself to the
level of sending HTML...
a year ago
Programming note: this post is in color. I will not debase myself to the
level of sending HTML email, so if you receive Computers Are Bad by email
and want the benefit of the pictures, consider reading this online instead
(the link is at the top of the email).
In the aftermath of...
Willem's Blog
Swimming and cycling with Apple Watch
This month I tested the newest watchOS while swimming and cycling.
over a year ago
This month I tested the newest watchOS while swimming and cycling.
Matt Blewitt
Leadership Power Tools: SQL and Statistics
A common pattern I’ve seen over the years have been folks in engineering leadership positions that...
a month ago
A common pattern I’ve seen over the years have been folks in engineering leadership positions that are not super comfortable with extracting and interpreting data from stores, be it databases, CSV files in an object store, or even just a spreadsheet. We’re going to cover SQL &...
Old Vintage...
Refurb weekend: PowerBook Duo 2300c
Jerry Seinfeld had one.
many other TV shows and even movies, most notoriously Hackers:
my...
a year ago
Jerry Seinfeld had one.
many other TV shows and even movies, most notoriously Hackers:
my favourite PowerBook 1400: the metal hinges are starting to tear out of their attachment points in the plastic back of the display, and naturally it's the one with all the upgrades in...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Inside the Intel 386 processor die: the clock circuit
Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip.
In this...
a year ago
Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip.
In this blog post, I'll examine the clock-generation circuitry inside the Intel 386 processor.
Earlier processors such as the 8086 (1978) were simpler, using two clock phases internally.
The...
Computer Ads from...
Ergotron's MacTilt
MacTilt is the Solution
a month ago
Louwrentius
Automated install of Debian Linux based on PXE net booting
Every honest and good system administrator is continue bussy with automating
his work. For two...
over a year ago
Every honest and good system administrator is continue bussy with automating
his work. For two reasons:
Repeating the same task over and over again is friggin boring. A system
administrator has better things to do, such as drinking coffee.
Humans make mistakes, especially if...
Louwrentius
Lion's Disk Utility not compatible with CoreStorage and Filevault
My 1 TB hard drive of my 2011 27" iMac was partitioned with:
A bootable partition with Mac OS X...
over a year ago
My 1 TB hard drive of my 2011 27" iMac was partitioned with:
A bootable partition with Mac OS X Lion
Time machine partition (I use an external SSD as my main OS)
Bootcamp partition with windows
A data partition containg... data.
The problem is that CoreStorage is too new. Disk...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Engineering Security Through Coordination Problems
over a year ago
Ken Shirriff's blog
Reverse engineering the 59-pound printer onboard the Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could
receive procedures, mission...
5 months ago
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could
receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans, and other documents.
Needed for the first Shuttle launch in 1981, this printer was designed in just 7 months, built around an Army...
Arduino Blog
This ‘smocking display’ adds data physicalization to clothing
Elastic use in the textile industry is relatively recent. So, what did garment makers do before...
5 months ago
Elastic use in the textile industry is relatively recent. So, what did garment makers do before elastic came along? They relied on smocking, which is a technique for bunching up fabric so that it can stretch to better fit the form of a body. Now a team of computer science...
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Why some engineers get trusted with high-impact work
It’s fun and rewarding to work on critical tasks. But there’s only so much important work to go...
a week ago
It’s fun and rewarding to work on critical tasks. But there’s only so much important work to go around. Worse still, the chances to work on…
Willem's Blog
Different ways to visualise health
To better understand how to visualise health I looked at different health/fitness apps and games.
over a year ago
To better understand how to visualise health I looked at different health/fitness apps and games.
Old Vintage...
The W65C265SXB gets a SXY case
Don't worry — my favourite single-board computer remains the 6502-based classic MOS/Commodore KIM-1,...
a year ago
Don't worry — my favourite single-board computer remains the 6502-based classic MOS/Commodore KIM-1, and I've got some future projects in the works. But these were recently on sale on Amazon and I couldn't resist getting a little sort-of RPi-sized SBC that runs the 16-bit 65816,...
Home on Erik...
Fermat's principle
I was browsing around on the Internet and the physics geek in me started reading about Fermat's...
over a year ago
I was browsing around on the Internet and the physics geek in me started reading about Fermat's principle. And suddenly something came back to me that I've been trying to suppress for many years – how I never understood why there's anything fundamental about the principal of...
Notes on software...
Let's build a distributed Postgres proof of concept
What is CockroachDB under the hood? Take a look at
its go.mod
and notice a number of dependencies...
over a year ago
What is CockroachDB under the hood? Take a look at
its go.mod
and notice a number of dependencies that do a lot of work: a
PostgreSQL wire protocol
implementation, a storage
layer, a Raft implementation
for distributed consensus. And not
part of go.mod but still building on 3rd...
Posts on Made of...
Iron Blogger: Blogging for Beer
So, you may have noticed that I suddenly started updating this blog for the first time in a while....
over a year ago
So, you may have noticed that I suddenly started updating this blog for the first time in a while. The reason is that I’ve recently started an ongoing event with a whole bunch of friends around here to encourage us to blog more.
Like so many good ideas, it all started with a...
Louwrentius
Linux RAID 6 performance using software RAID
So after toying around with RAID 0 just for fun, time to get serious. I
created a RAID 6 of 10 x 1...
over a year ago
So after toying around with RAID 0 just for fun, time to get serious. I
created a RAID 6 of 10 x 1 TB disks. This gives me raw device read speeds
of 850 MB/s and write speeds of 300 MB/s. I think this is exactly
what should be expected, but boy it is damn fast. Especially the...
Arduino Blog
DexteriSync lets you walk a mile in the gloves of a user with manual disability
Good designers prioritize the user experience — particularly the experience of users with...
a month ago
Good designers prioritize the user experience — particularly the experience of users with disabilities that affect their perception and fine motor skills. A young person without disabilities, for example, may feel that jars are easy to open, while an elderly person with reduced...
Louwrentius
Tracking down a faulty Storage Array Controller with ZFS
One day, I lost two virtual machines on our DR environment after a storage vMotion.
Further...
over a year ago
One day, I lost two virtual machines on our DR environment after a storage vMotion.
Further investigation uncovered that any storage vMotion of a virtual machine residing on our DR storage array would corrupt the virtual machine's disks.
I could easily restore the affected...
Odds and Ends of...
Odds and Ends #46: The transformation of London's skyline, a big week for nuclear, and installing...
Plus how to avoid the road pricing landmine
4 weeks ago
Plus how to avoid the road pricing landmine
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...
a year ago
This is my yearly review #14.
Amazing that I’ve kept up with this for 14 years.
Even though it’s not anything advanced, I really like looking back at the year to see what has happened.
Maybe it’s a very light version of a reverse bucket list, and I can see that it provides some...
Louwrentius
I made my blog solar-powered, then things escalated
In 2020 I wondered if I could run my blog on solar power, being inspired by Low-tech Magazine, doing...
a year ago
In 2020 I wondered if I could run my blog on solar power, being inspired by Low-tech Magazine, doing the same thing (but better)1. The answer was 'yes', but only through spring and summer.
I live in an apartment complex in The Netherlands and my balcony is facing west. This...
Louwrentius
How traffic shaping can dramatically improve internet responsiveness
At work, access to the internet is provided by a 10 Mbit down / 1 Mbit up ADSL-connection. As we are...
over a year ago
At work, access to the internet is provided by a 10 Mbit down / 1 Mbit up ADSL-connection. As we are a mid-size company, bandwidth is clearly a severe constraint. But it was not our biggest problem. Even simple web-browsing was very slow.
As I was setting up a monitoring...
Notes on software...
AOT-compilation of Javascript with V8
tldr; I'm working on a AOT-compiled Javascript implementation called
jsc.
Many dynamically typed...
over a year ago
tldr; I'm working on a AOT-compiled Javascript implementation called
jsc.
Many dynamically typed programming languages have implementations that
compile to native binaries:
Python: Cython
Common Lisp: SBCL
Scheme: Chicken Scheme
The benefits of compiling dynamically typed...
./techtipsy
How to save an old printer from the e-waste pile with a Raspberry Pi
A family member has a Canon PIXMA MP250 printer, originally released in 2009.
It has been a very...
6 months ago
A family member has a Canon PIXMA MP250 printer, originally released in 2009.
It has been a very reliable piece of hardware, especially for a printer.
Then came Windows 10. The printer would not work out of the box with it and
the official drivers got stuck during installation....
Posts on Made of...
Versioning dotfiles in git
I’ve been looking for a good solution for versioning and synchronizing my dotfiles between machines...
over a year ago
I’ve been looking for a good solution for versioning and synchronizing my dotfiles between machines for some time. I experimented with keeping all of ~ in subversion for a while, but it never worked out well for me.
I’ve finally settled on a solution that I like using git, and so...
On Life and Lisp
Software freedom isn't about licenses -- it's about power.
A restrictive end-user license agreement is one way a company can exert power over the user. When...
over a year ago
A restrictive end-user license agreement is one way a company can exert power over the user. When the free software movement was founded thirty years ago, these restrictive licenses were the primary user-hostile power dynamic, so permissive and copyleft licenses emerged as...
Christian Selig
Waterfield's weirdly compact Apple Vision Pro Case
Disclosure: Waterfield sent this in exchange for a review. Yeah, that probably colors something on a...
9 months ago
Disclosure: Waterfield sent this in exchange for a review. Yeah, that probably colors something on a deep-down, subconscious level, but I won’t say anything that I don’t truly believe.
Unlike a phone or laptop, the Vision Pro is one of those products that is particularly tricky...
Home on Erik...
Luigi: complex pipelines of tasks in Python
I'm shamelessly promoting my first major open source project. Luigi is a Python module that helps...
over a year ago
I'm shamelessly promoting my first major open source project. Luigi is a Python module that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs, handle dependency resolution, and create visualizations to help manage multiple workflows. It also comes with Hadoop support built in...
Opsbros
WetSocks Revival
How to get a broken METAR/TAF Toolbar application working again; the fun way! Seeing what we can do...
over a year ago
How to get a broken METAR/TAF Toolbar application working again; the fun way! Seeing what we can do to get WetSocks Windows 98 tray weather app working again.
Vitalik Buterin's...
[Mirror] Zk-SNARKs: Under the Hood
over a year ago
Willem's Blog
Three tips to make a content strategy work
Consider these three things to maximise the effect of the words you write for your website, blog or...
over a year ago
Consider these three things to maximise the effect of the words you write for your website, blog or company.
Lars Lofgren
My 7 Rules for A/B Testing That Triple Conversion Rates
I really don’t care how any given A/B test turns out. That’s right. Not one bit. But wait, how do I...
over a year ago
I really don’t care how any given A/B test turns out. That’s right. Not one bit. But wait, how do I double or triple conversion rates without caring how a test performs? I actually care about the whole SYSTEM of testing. All the pieces need to fit together just right. If not,...
Applied Cartography
Finding null JSON values in Postgres
Postgres' JSONB functionality is fast and useful but when I find myself dropping down from the...
8 months ago
Postgres' JSONB functionality is fast and useful but when I find myself dropping down from the Django ORM into
SQL to do weird things, the syntax strikes me as confusing and arcane. As such, when I need to do esoteric things it
takes me longer time than I'd like, and in hopes...
Home on Erik...
My issue with GPU-accelerated deep learning
I've been spending several hundred bucks renting GPU instances on AWS over the last year. The...
over a year ago
I've been spending several hundred bucks renting GPU instances on AWS over the last year. The speedup from a GPU is awesome and hard to deny. GPUs have taken over the field. Maybe following the footsteps of Bitcoin mining there's some research on using FPGA (I know very little...
Home on Erik...
Buffet lines are terrible, but let's try to improve them using computer simulations
My company has a buffet every Friday, and the lines grow to epic proportions when the food arrives....
over a year ago
My company has a buffet every Friday, and the lines grow to epic proportions when the food arrives. I've suspected for years that the “classic” buffet line system is a deeply flawed and inefficient method, and every time I'm stuck in the line has made me more convinced.
Vitalik Buterin's...
Exploring Fully Homomorphic Encryption
over a year ago
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...
Vitalik Buterin's...
The near and mid-term future of improving the Ethereum network's permissionlessness and...
7 months ago
./techtipsy
The hidden media play/pause/stop keys on the Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga
ThinkPad keyboards were once well known for their great layouts, feel and
functionality. This...
8 months ago
ThinkPad keyboards were once well known for their great layouts, feel and
functionality. This included the media playback control keys.
On the ThinkPad T430, the new chiclet keyboard layout moved the media keys to
the function row. Still there, but less convenient to access.
The...
./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...
Arduino Blog
Light up the holiday season, with a new Plug and Make Kit tutorial!
Looking for a fun and creative way to brighten up the holiday season? With the Arduino Plug and Make...
3 weeks ago
Looking for a fun and creative way to brighten up the holiday season? With the Arduino Plug and Make Kit, you can build an interactive LED light installation that reacts when someone walks by – perfect for spreading cheer and adding a high-tech twist to your decorations. This...
Azad's Blog
Traveling with Apple Vision Pro
The Vision Pro has quickly become an essential item that I take onto every flight. It’s a fantastic...
2 months ago
The Vision Pro has quickly become an essential item that I take onto every flight. It’s a fantastic device to travel with—Be it by train or by plane, it offers an unparalleled opportunity to selectively tune out your environment and sink into an engaging activity like watching a...
Louwrentius
Ubuntu and full disk encryption (FDE)
Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux. As part of a regular Debian installation, you
can choose to create...
over a year ago
Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux. As part of a regular Debian installation, you
can choose to create an encrypted disk volume based on LUKS. This is different
from the option within the Ubuntu installation to encrypt home directories. To
be able to install Ubuntu and use full disk...
Computer Ads from...
UNIX Review Magazine Interviews Larry Tesler
They discuss Tesler's involvement with Xerox, Apple and office automation with Unix.
3 months ago
They discuss Tesler's involvement with Xerox, Apple and office automation with Unix.
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