Willem's Blog
Working with special hardware from China
This month I reversed engineered my way into developing software for a Chinese Android device with...
over a year ago
This month I reversed engineered my way into developing software for a Chinese Android device with an embedded printer!
Avestura's Blog
How to change visibility in massive GitHub organizations like EpicGames?
How to publicize and un-publicize your visibility in massive GitHub orgs?
over a year ago
How to publicize and un-publicize your visibility in massive GitHub orgs?
Arduino Blog
Adjusting office chair height with simple voice commands
A month ago, ElectronicLab modified his office chair with an electric car jack, giving it motorized...
4 months ago
A month ago, ElectronicLab modified his office chair with an electric car jack, giving it motorized height adjustment. That worked well, but required that he push buttons to raise or lower the seat. Pushing those buttons is a hassle when one’s hands are full, so ElectronicLab...
Engineers Need Art
Tom Dowdy
Tom Dowdy was a software engineer at Apple back in 1995 when I was still writing Macintosh games in...
over a year ago
Tom Dowdy was a software engineer at Apple back in 1995 when I was still writing Macintosh games in Lawrence, Kansas.
Notes on software...
Generating a full-stack application from a database
DBCore can now generate a TypeScript/React CRUD
UI that is automatically hooked up to the generated...
over a year ago
DBCore can now generate a TypeScript/React CRUD
UI that is automatically hooked up to the generated REST API (in Go).
The UI has full support for login, viewing (and filtering), editing,
and creating database entities.
PostgreSQL, SQLite and MySQL are supported.
How to use?
The...
Notes on software...
An intuition for distributed consensus in OLTP systems
Distributed consensus in transactional databases (e.g. etcd or
Cockroach) is a big deal these days....
11 months ago
Distributed consensus in transactional databases (e.g. etcd or
Cockroach) is a big deal these days. Most often under the hood are
variations of log-based Paxos-like algorithms such as MultiPaxos,
Viewstamped Replication, or Raft. While there are new variations that
come out each...
Electronics etc…
Guide Technology GT300 Frequency Standard Teardown
MathJax.Hub.Config({
jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"],
tex2jax: {
inlineMath: [...
9 months ago
MathJax.Hub.Config({
jax: ["input/TeX", "output/HTML-CSS"],
tex2jax: {
inlineMath: [ ['$', '$'], ["\\(", "\\)"] ],
displayMath: [ ['$$', '$$'], ["\\[", "\\]"] ],
processEscapes: true,
skipTags: ['script', 'noscript', 'style', 'textarea', 'pre',...
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...
./techtipsy
My blog successfully survived a scheduled power outage
I had the opportunity to test the resiliency of my home server setup due to a scheduled power outage...
3 months ago
I had the opportunity to test the resiliency of my home server setup due to a scheduled power outage on 2024-09-13.
It was also Friday the 13th. I’m not superstitious, but I’m a little stitious.
My setup usually consists of the home server, a Wifi AP/router combo box, a converter...
Jonas Hietala
Black and White
Here it is at last! Boasting a unoriginal name, themed Bare Minimum. My thoughts where to create a...
over a year ago
Here it is at last! Boasting a unoriginal name, themed Bare Minimum. My thoughts where to create a game where graphics where included into the gameplay but sadly it didn’t come out nearly as good as I expected it too.
Yes I know there are a lot of things bad and wrong with this...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Sidechains vs Plasma vs Sharding
over a year ago
Yazin Alirhayim
Tracking where a WhatsApp user came from
At Amal, we have an AI chat bot that works over WhatsApp — allowing our customers to speak to their...
over a year ago
At Amal, we have an AI chat bot that works over WhatsApp — allowing our customers to speak to their bank account, asking questions like “What’s my balance” and “How much have I spent on Uber’s this month?”.
A problem we faced really early on when connecting to WhatsApp was that...
Notes on software...
Book Review: ANSI Common Lisp
Score: 4.5 / 5
Paul Graham and his editor(s) are excellent. His prose is light and
easy to follow....
over a year ago
Score: 4.5 / 5
Paul Graham and his editor(s) are excellent. His prose is light and
easy to follow. The only awkward component of the book's organization
is that he tends to use a concept one section before explicitly
introducing and defining that concept. I'm not sure yet if this...
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...
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...
Posts on Made of...
CVE-2007-4573: The Anatomy of a Kernel Exploit
CVE-2007-4573 is two years old at this point, but it remains one of my favorite vulnerabilities. It...
over a year ago
CVE-2007-4573 is two years old at this point, but it remains one of my favorite vulnerabilities. It was a local privilege-escalation vulnerability on all x86_64 kernels prior to v2.6.22.7. It’s very simple to understand with a little bit of background, and the exploit is...
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.
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...
Willem's Blog
Creating the ultimate commuter bike
Creating the ultimate commuter bike by upgrading the Sensa Cintura belt drive bike.
over a year ago
Creating the ultimate commuter bike by upgrading the Sensa Cintura belt drive bike.
Yazin Alirhayim
How do you know that an API does what it says it does?
Having been in fintech for a while, I’ve noticed something in common between the many new startups...
over a year ago
Having been in fintech for a while, I’ve noticed something in common between the many new startups that come and go. They all require access to personal information.
A specific example that comes to mind is the Plaid-like solution we developed while working on amal. We’d ask...
Christian Selig
Theming Apps on iOS is Hard
Theming apps (the ability to change up the color scheme for an app from say, a white background with...
over a year ago
Theming apps (the ability to change up the color scheme for an app from say, a white background with blue links to a light green background with green links) is a pretty common feature across a lot of apps. It’s one of the core features of the new “Twitter Blue” subscription,...
Willem's Blog
Traffic shaping using iptables and tc
This month I responded to an automated alert indicating excessive bandwidth usage on a server,...
over a year ago
This month I responded to an automated alert indicating excessive bandwidth usage on a server, requiring me to apply traffic shaping to mitigate the traffic.
Vitalik Buterin's...
[Mirror] A Proof of Stake Design Philosophy
over a year ago
Home on Erik...
Black Box Machine Learning in the Cloud
There's a bunch of companies working on machine learning as a service. Some old companies like...
over a year ago
There's a bunch of companies working on machine learning as a service. Some old companies like Google, but now also Amazon and Microsoft.
Then there's a ton of startups: PredictionIO ($2.7M funding), BigML ($1.6M funding), Clarifai, etc, etc.
Arduino Blog
Turning a desk mat into a MIDI drum kit
Playing drums is a lot of fun, but drum sets are very big and very loud. They also aren’t cheap....
a month ago
Playing drums is a lot of fun, but drum sets are very big and very loud. They also aren’t cheap. Those factors keep them from being an option for many people who would otherwise be interested. Conventional electronic drum sets are much quieter and a bit more compact, but they...
Louwrentius
Rebooting results in degraded RAID array using Debian Lenny
As described earlier, I setup a RAID 6 array consisting of physical 1 TB disk
and 'virtual' 1 TB...
over a year ago
As described earlier, I setup a RAID 6 array consisting of physical 1 TB disk
and 'virtual' 1 TB disks that are in fact two 0.5 TB disks in RAID 0.
I wanted to upgrade to Lenny because the new kernel that ships with Lenny
supports growing a RAID 6 array. After installing Lenny...
./techtipsy
I finally found an use case for my Raspberry Pi Model B+
You have probably heard about the Raspberry Pi. It’s a nice little affordable
single-board computer...
over a year ago
You have probably heard about the Raspberry Pi. It’s a nice little affordable
single-board computer with a huge community using it for all sorts of projects.
I got my first Raspberry Pi, the Model B+,
during my first year at university, which was around the winter of...
Applied Cartography
Consider the data product
The advice might seem dated these days, but I think the stair step approach to bootstrapping is...
2 months ago
The advice might seem dated these days, but I think the stair step approach to bootstrapping is evergreen:
It’s much easier to sell an add-on to an existing ecosystem like a WordPress plugin, a Shopify app, a Heroku add-on – they’re usually small things to build, relatively...
./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...
Old Vintage...
The Fossil Wrist PDA becomes a tiny Gopher client (with Overbite Palm 0.3)
I don't always often wear watches. But when I do, I prefer Palm PDAs. Wired to my wrist.
all...
a year ago
I don't always often wear watches. But when I do, I prefer Palm PDAs. Wired to my wrist.
all about Palm devices on the Internet.
It turns out there's a reason for that, and we're going to patch the operating system so we can make the Fossil Wrist PDA into what may be the...
Abort Retry Fail
The History of Commodore, Part 2
The VIC-20
a year ago
Arduino Blog
A beautiful custom calculator built with IV-12 VFD tubes
Nixie tubes have been the go-to option for makers looking for retro display aesthetics for many...
7 months ago
Nixie tubes have been the go-to option for makers looking for retro display aesthetics for many years, because their distinct orange glow carries a lot of vintage appeal. But VFD (vacuum fluorescent display) tubes have been gaining in popularity recently and have different —...
Neil Madden
CVE-2022-21449: Psychic Signatures in Java
The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to...
over a year ago
The long-running BBC sci-fi show Doctor Who has a recurring plot device where the Doctor manages to get out of trouble by showing an identity card which is actually completely blank. Of course, this being Doctor Who, the card is really made out of a special “psychic paper“, which...
Notes on software...
Transparency and communication on small teams
I saw a post on
dev.to
that talks about dysfunctional teams. This is a response that...
over a year ago
I saw a post on
dev.to
that talks about dysfunctional teams. This is a response that focuses
specifically on how to prevent burnout from overworking. This is aimed
at senior/lead engineers and engineering/project managers -- because
everyone in a leadership role is responsible...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Interesting double-poly latches inside AMD's vintage LANCE Ethernet chip
I've studied a lot of chips from the 1970s and 1980s, so I usually know what to expect.
But an...
a year ago
I've studied a lot of chips from the 1970s and 1980s, so I usually know what to expect.
But an Ethernet chip from 1982 had something new: a strange layer of yellow wiring on the die.
After some study, I learned that the yellow wiring is a second layer of resistive polysilicon,...
Old Vintage...
So long, Z80
You can still buy 6502s from Western Design Center and others, but Zilog's getting out of Z80s...
8 months ago
You can still buy 6502s from Western Design Center and others, but Zilog's getting out of Z80s (PDF), announcing earlier this week that after June 14th you won't be able to buy them anymore (specifically the last-part-standing Z84C00 which comes in various speeds from 6-20 MHz)...
Willem's Blog
Migrating to the Cloud
Helping a customer clear its on-premise data room and migrate to the cloud: an adventure full of...
over a year ago
Helping a customer clear its on-premise data room and migrate to the cloud: an adventure full of cables, cabinets and bandwidth!
Ken Shirriff's blog
Reverse engineering the barrel shifter circuit on the Intel 386 processor die
The Intel 386 processor (1985) was a large step from the 286 processor, moving x86 to a 32-bit...
a year ago
The Intel 386 processor (1985) was a large step from the 286 processor, moving x86 to a 32-bit architecture.
The 386 also dramatically improved the performance of shift and rotate operations by adding a
"barrel shifter", a circuit that can shift by multiple bits in one step.
The...
Opsbros
Nix Windows Feedback
There turns out to be a far easier way to disable the 'Win+F' Windows Feedback app.
over a year ago
There turns out to be a far easier way to disable the 'Win+F' Windows Feedback app.
Christian Selig
Server side Live Activities guide
iOS 17.2 gained the capability to start Live Activities from a server, which is pretty cool and...
3 months ago
iOS 17.2 gained the capability to start Live Activities from a server, which is pretty cool and handy! I’ve been playing around with it a bit and found some parts a bit confusing, so I thought I’d do a little write up for future me as well as anyone else who could benefit!
(For...
Good Enough
TIL: Victory Symbol
We noticed that the victory symbol at the bottom of our homepage looked different in Chrome than...
a year ago
We noticed that the victory symbol at the bottom of our homepage looked different in Chrome than Safari––it was playing smart and rendered the unicode character as an emoji. Lettini found a fix though! Append this string of code to the symbol: ︎.
So ✌︎ renders...
Posts on Made of...
On git and usability
I’ve been helping a number of people get started working with git over the last couple of weeks, as...
over a year ago
I’ve been helping a number of people get started working with git over the last couple of weeks, as Ksplice has brought on some new interns, and we’ve had to get them up to speed on our internal git repositories. (As you might expect from a bunch of kernel hackers, we use git for...
Home on Erik...
Luigi success
So Luigi, our open sourced workflow engine in Python, just recently passed 1,000 stars on Github,...
over a year ago
So Luigi, our open sourced workflow engine in Python, just recently passed 1,000 stars on Github, then shortly after passed mrjob as (I think) the most popular Python package to do Hadoop stuff. This is exciting!
./techtipsy
Tiered storage: use the right tool for the job
Hard drives are still the default choice for many homelab and data hoarding
enthusiasts. They still...
a year ago
Hard drives are still the default choice for many homelab and data hoarding
enthusiasts. They still hold the gigabytes per dollar advantage over SSD-s (for now),
and if you buy the big external drives and take the drives out of the enclosures,
you can get a pretty good...
Louwrentius
Parallel / distributed password cracking with John the Ripper and MPI
This article has been updated to reflect the changes for John version 1.7.8 as released in june...
over a year ago
This article has been updated to reflect the changes for John version 1.7.8 as released in june 2011.
The most important change is the fact that MPI support is now integrated in the jumbo patch.
The original John the Ripper off-line password cracker only uses a single processor...
Posts on Made of...
reptyr: Changing a process's controlling terminal
reptyr (announced recently on this blog) takes a process that is currently running in one terminal,...
over a year ago
reptyr (announced recently on this blog) takes a process that is currently running in one terminal, and transplants it to a new terminal. reptyr comes from a proud family of similar hacks, and works in the same basic way: We use ptrace(2) to attach to a target process and force...
Louwrentius
Debian Lenny and Dell S300 H200 and H700 RAID controllers
update november 2010: it is reported in the comments that the next release
will support these...
over a year ago
update november 2010: it is reported in the comments that the next release
will support these controllers. However, which controllers are supported is
not clear. Also, we may have to wait for quite some time before squeeze will
be released.
Just a quick note: it seems that the...
Posts on Made of...
Lightweight Linux Kernel Development with KVM
I don’t do a ton of Linux kernel development these days, but I’ve done a fair bit in the past, and...
over a year ago
I don’t do a ton of Linux kernel development these days, but I’ve done a fair bit in the past, and picked up a number of useful techniques for doing kernel development in a relatively painless fashion. This blog post is a writeup of the tools and techniques I use when developing...
Vitalik Buterin's...
On Nathan Schneider on the limits of cryptoeconomics
over a year ago
Good Enough
Season 1, Issue 2: Just the Two of Us
0. Everyone Likes a Giveaway
Stick around to hear how you can win a fabulous prize by hardly doing...
over a year ago
0. Everyone Likes a Giveaway
Stick around to hear how you can win a fabulous prize by hardly doing anything. Take it away, fellas…
1. Still Positive
Did you know that once you acquire COVID-19 your PCR test can be positive for up to 90 days? Did you know that the at-home tests...
Matt Mullenweg
Michael Palmisano on Collier
I’ve been obsessed with Jacob Collier since I first saw his Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing cover on...
2 months ago
I’ve been obsessed with Jacob Collier since I first saw his Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing cover on YouTube, and one of my favorite genres of videos is genius musicians breaking down the incredible musical stuff Jacob is doing. (He even has his own instrument now.) This reaction...
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Porting and hacking Llama2.c for fun and profit
Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing around with the excellent llama2.c repository, which is...
a year ago
Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing around with the excellent llama2.c repository, which is basically a simple one-file C…
Notes on software...
Interview with the D Language Blog: BSDScheme
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Home on Erik...
Pinterest open sources Pinball
Pinterest just open sourced Pinball which seems like an interesting Luigi alternative. There's two...
over a year ago
Pinterest just open sourced Pinball which seems like an interesting Luigi alternative. There's two blog posts: Pinball: Building workflow management (from 2014) and Open-sourcing Pinball (from this week). The author has a comment in the comments thread on Hacker News:
Arduino Blog
KiPneu makes soft robotic biomimetics accessible to STEAM students
Biomimicry, which is a method for developing new technology inspired by nature, has been one of...
5 months ago
Biomimicry, which is a method for developing new technology inspired by nature, has been one of humanity’s greatest assets. But systems reliant on soft tissue, such as an octopus’s tentacles, have been notoriously difficult to reproduce in the robotics world. To give STEAM...
Home on Erik...
Why software projects take longer than you think: a statistical model
Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is...
over a year ago
Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It's hard to come up with an unbiased estimate of how long something will take, when fundamentally the work in itself is about solving something.
Matt Blewitt
Thoughts on User Safety: 2
Following up from last time, let’s explore the internal and insider fronts when moving beyond...
over a year ago
Following up from last time, let’s explore the internal and insider fronts when moving beyond security towards safety for our users.
Construction Physics
The Influence of Bell Labs
We’ve talked previously about Bell Labs’ long, storied history as an innovation engine and a...
a month ago
We’ve talked previously about Bell Labs’ long, storied history as an innovation engine and a generator of new technology.
Jonas Hietala
Ludum Dare 20 Timelapse
So this time I managed to compose a timelapse of my weekend and the making of My Minions. Sadly I...
over a year ago
So this time I managed to compose a timelapse of my weekend and the making of My Minions. Sadly I lost the first few hours as I forgot to turn it on…
Anyway here’s the result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABVPlRaA5iI
Odds and Ends of...
Why we need seven bins
It's time for some #binchat
2 weeks ago
It's time for some #binchat
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...
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...
Louwrentius
The ZFS Event Daemon on Linux
If something goes wrong with my zpool, I'd like to be notified by email. On Linux using MDADM, the...
over a year ago
If something goes wrong with my zpool, I'd like to be notified by email. On Linux using MDADM, the MDADM daemon took care of that.
With the release of ZoL 0.6.3, a brand new 'ZFS Event Daemon' or ZED has been introduced.
I could not find much information about it, so consider...
Louwrentius
Most Technical debt is just bullshit
Introduction
I made an offhand remark about technical debt to a friend and he interrupted me,...
over a year ago
Introduction
I made an offhand remark about technical debt to a friend and he interrupted me, saying: "technical debt is just bullshit". In his experience, people talking about technical debt were mostly trying to:
cover up bad code
cover up unfinished work
source1
Calling...
computers are bad
2023-03-13 the door close button
This will probably be a short one, and I know I haven't written for a while,
but it has always been...
a year ago
This will probably be a short one, and I know I haven't written for a while,
but it has always been the case that you get what you pay for and Computers
Are Bad is nothing if not affordable. Still, this is a topic on which I am
moderately passionate and so I can probably stretch...
Yazin Alirhayim
Serializing and deserializing a Cookie Jar
I was recently working on a way to serialize and deserialize a Faraday connection that uses...
over a year ago
I was recently working on a way to serialize and deserialize a Faraday connection that uses HTTP::CookieJar to manage persistent cookies across requests.
I needed to do this because I wanted a way to “freeze” an HTTP connection instance, and later “thaw” it to resume the...
Arduino Blog
Is there an online Arduino IDE?
Since the inception of Arduino, the Arduino IDE has been a go-to tool for people learning to code...
2 months ago
Since the inception of Arduino, the Arduino IDE has been a go-to tool for people learning to code and creating projects ranging from remote-controlled cars to soil moisture monitoring. No wonder it’s been downloaded over 24 million times this year, so far! Now if you’ve ever...
Style over Substance
My new purchase: a Zeiss Ikon Nettar 517/16
Cheaper than a tank of gas, smaller than a Leica, 6x6 medium format negs - tons of fun. This Nettar...
over a year ago
Cheaper than a tank of gas, smaller than a Leica, 6x6 medium format negs - tons of fun. This Nettar folding camera sure is bang for buck!
The post My new purchase: a Zeiss Ikon Nettar 517/16 appeared first on Style over Substance.
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!
Neil Madden
Macaroon access tokens for OAuth: Part 2 – transactional auth
In part 1, I showed how Macaroon access tokens in ForgeRock Access Management 7.0 can be used as a...
over a year ago
In part 1, I showed how Macaroon access tokens in ForgeRock Access Management 7.0 can be used as a lightweight and easy-to-deploy alternative to proof of possession (PoP) schemes for securing tokens in browser-based apps. The same techniques can be adapted to secure tokens in...
Notes on software...
Writing an x86 emulator from scratch in JavaScript: 2. system calls
Previously in emulator basics:
1. a stack and register machine
In this post we'll extend x86e...
over a year ago
Previously in emulator basics:
1. a stack and register machine
In this post we'll extend x86e to
support the exit and write Linux system calls, or syscalls. A syscall
is a function handled by the kernel that allows the process to
interact with data outside of its memory....
Notes on software...
Why (and how) to read books
The last time I read for fun was in elementary school. Since college I
knew I must read more, but I...
over a year ago
The last time I read for fun was in elementary school. Since college I
knew I must read more, but I never forced myself to build the
habit. Then three years ago I spent time around my brother and a
coworker who were avid readers. This "peer pressure" helped me get
started.
Since...
Arduino Blog
You can now run Arduino and MicroPython side-by-side on multi-core microcontrollers
We’re excited to announce a powerful new feature that we have been working on in collaboration with...
7 months ago
We’re excited to announce a powerful new feature that we have been working on in collaboration with the MicroPython team! Starting with the upcoming release (v1.23), MicroPython will offer support for Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) on multi-core microcontrollers, based on the...
Jonas Hietala
Let's build a VORON: Software
The build continues, now in a little more familiar territory.
Firmware flashing
To flash the...
a year ago
The build continues, now in a little more familiar territory.
Firmware flashing
To flash the firmware I had to order a microSD card reader.
With that on hand the flashing wasn’t difficult. The VORON docs walks you through the installation very well.
Mainsail
I chose to install...
Jonas Hietala
Ludum Dare 29 Entry
After months of procrastination it is time for me to enter Ludum Dare again!
I am totally...
over a year ago
After months of procrastination it is time for me to enter Ludum Dare again!
I am totally unprepared, but I did setup a setup which actually compiles. I never got audio to run but hopefully I can manage something.
Repository: https://github.com/treeman/LD29. Going for C++ this...
GitButler
Fearless Rebasing
GitButler now supports first class conflicts, which makes rebasing much less annoying. What is...
2 months ago
GitButler now supports first class conflicts, which makes rebasing much less annoying. What is "fearless rebasing"?
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,...
Notes on software...
Delightful, production-grade replication for Postgres
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
5 months ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Neil Madden
Machine Learning and the triumph of GOFAI
I’ve been slowly reading Brian Cantwell Smith’s “The Promise of Artificial Intelligence” recently. I...
6 months ago
I’ve been slowly reading Brian Cantwell Smith’s “The Promise of Artificial Intelligence” recently. I haven’t finished reading it yet, and like much of BCS’s writing, it’ll probably take me 3 or 4 read-throughs to really understand it, but there’s one point that I want to pick up...
Posts on Made of...
Three kinds of memory leaks
So, you’ve got a program that’s using more and more over time as it runs. Probably you can...
over a year ago
So, you’ve got a program that’s using more and more over time as it runs. Probably you can immediately identify this as a likely symptom of a memory leak.
But when we say “memory leak”, what do we actually mean? In my experience, apparent memory leaks divide into three broad...
Buck on Software
Crypto and Chasing the Dragon
Marc and Ben’s midlife crisis and the Crypto Crusades
over a year ago
Marc and Ben’s midlife crisis and the Crypto Crusades
Home on Erik...
statself.com
Btw I just put something up online that I spent a couple of evenings in my couch putting together:...
over a year ago
Btw I just put something up online that I spent a couple of evenings in my couch putting together: it's a website where you can track any numerical data on the web. Want to know how many Twitter followers you have?
Christian Selig
Recreating Apple's beautiful visionOS search bar
Many of Apple’s own visionOS apps, like Music, Safari, and Apple TV, have a handy search bar front...
9 months ago
Many of Apple’s own visionOS apps, like Music, Safari, and Apple TV, have a handy search bar front and center on the window so you can easily search through your content. Oddly, as of visionOS 1.1, replicating this visually as a developer using SwiftUI or UIKit is not...
computers are bad
2024-09-14 the national warning system
Previously on Deep Space Nine, we discussed the extensive and variable products
that AT&T and...
3 months ago
Previously on Deep Space Nine, we discussed the extensive and variable products
that AT&T and telephone operating companies sold as private
lines. One of the
interesting properties of private line systems is that they can be ordered as
four-wire. Internally, the telephone network...
anderegg.ca
Maybe Bluesky has “won”
November has sucked so far. One upside of the terrible nonsense is that more people are fleeing X....
a month ago
November has sucked so far. One upside of the terrible nonsense is that more people are fleeing X. Many are choosing Bluesky. I’ve seen a bunch of takes about this recently, but I keep seeing things I disagree with. I figure that’s a good enough excuse to write more about this...
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...
Lars Lofgren
Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host
Are you sick of Forbes appearing in search results? For topics that Forbes doesn’t have any...
3 months ago
Are you sick of Forbes appearing in search results? For topics that Forbes doesn’t have any expertise in? Here’s the organic rankings for “best pet insurance”: Forbes ranks #2. Not sure a business website knows how pet insurance actually works. But okay. They also have the #1...
Jonas Hietala
Netrunner Summer Tournament Linköping
There was another Netrunner tournament this Sunday with 8 entrants. We had two new legal data packs...
over a year ago
There was another Netrunner tournament this Sunday with 8 entrants. We had two new legal data packs with Old Hollywood and The Universe of Tomorrow so a lot of new things were tried. I heard a rumor that a full playset of both Aesop’s Pawnshop and Wyldside were available so I...
Good Enough
Say hello to Jelly: the simplest way to jam on email as a team
Dear readers, we need to apologize. We know some of you have noticed that Good Enough has gotten...
5 months ago
Dear readers, we need to apologize. We know some of you have noticed that Good Enough has gotten much quieter this year than last, across this blog, our newsletter, and socials. We’ve been heads down for the last few months on something new, but we’re now ready to come back up...
Nabeel S. Qureshi
Video Games are the Future of Education
The things you learn by yourself stick; the things that are “taught” to you do not stick.
over a year ago
The things you learn by yourself stick; the things that are “taught” to you do not stick.
computers are bad
2024-07-31 just disconnect the internet
So, let's say that a security vendor, we'll call them ClownStrike, accidentally
takes down most of...
5 months ago
So, let's say that a security vendor, we'll call them ClownStrike, accidentally
takes down most of their Windows install base with a poorly tested content
update. Rough day at the office, huh? There are lots of things you could say
about this, lots of reasons it happens this way,...
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Grifters, believers, grinders, and coasters
Why do engineers get mad at each other so often? I think a lot of programmer arguments bottom out...
a month ago
Why do engineers get mad at each other so often? I think a lot of programmer arguments bottom out in a cultural clash between different…
Louwrentius
71 TiB DIY NAS based on ZFS on Linux
This is my new 71 TiB DIY NAS. This server is the successor to my six year old, twenty drive 18 TB...
over a year ago
This is my new 71 TiB DIY NAS. This server is the successor to my six year old, twenty drive 18 TB NAS (17 TiB). With a storage capacity four times higher than the original and an incredible read (2.5 GB/s)/write (1.9 GB/s) performance, it's a worthy successor.
Purpose
The...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Exit games for EVM validiums: the return of Plasma
a year ago
Home on Erik...
Luigi Presentation @ NYC Data Science, Dec 16, 2014
More Luigi presentations!
over a year ago
More Luigi presentations!
Good Enough
The Element of Surprise
Good Enough happens to be a remote team. This isn't from some strongly-held belief that remote is...
a year ago
Good Enough happens to be a remote team. This isn't from some strongly-held belief that remote is best, but rather as a side effect of how we all happened to meet each other. We met remotely, we did not end up all moving into some commune, and so to work together we must work...
Posts on Made of...
Some notes on CVE-2010-3081 exploitability
Most of you reading this blog probably remember CVE-2010-3081. The bug got an awful lot of publicity...
over a year ago
Most of you reading this blog probably remember CVE-2010-3081. The bug got an awful lot of publicity when it was discovered an announced, due to allowing local privilege escalation against virtually all 64-bit Linux kernels in common use at the time.
While investigating...
Matt Blewitt
Building a PostgreSQL Extension, Line by Line
I’ve been working on a particular problem - how to offer logical replication for a very large number...
6 months ago
I’ve been working on a particular problem - how to offer logical replication for a very large number of Postgres databases, where I don’t have the ability (or capacity) to liaise with the users of the databases one-to-one. In order to mitigate some of the limitations, I wanted to...
Bryan Braun - Blog
The flood of AI website builders
There are so many of them.
instead of markdown to enable lazy-loading -->
How good...
8 months ago
There are so many of them.
instead of markdown to enable lazy-loading -->
How good are these site builders? I don’t know.
Are you worried about job security? I have two thoughts…
1. We’ve seen this before
Wordpress, Squarespace, Shopify, Webflow… all these tools...
Abort Retry Fail
The History of Windows NT 3.1
A Highly Portable Future
a year ago
./techtipsy
Running my ThinkPad T430 with an eGPU in 2024
I probably shouldn’t have written down my notes on the eGPU setup I had years ago.
I’d be lying if I...
4 months ago
I probably shouldn’t have written down my notes on the eGPU setup I had years ago.
I’d be lying if I wasn’t considering remaking this setup with everything I’ve learned 6 years later.
Oops.
I got access to an allegedly-faulty AMD Radeon RX 480 and an NVIDIA GTX 1650 for free...
Vitalik Buterin's...
What even is an institution?
over a year ago
Notes on software...
How to get better at recursion
tldr; reimplement standard library functions in your favorite
language without loops.
Background
For...
over a year ago
tldr; reimplement standard library functions in your favorite
language without loops.
Background
For a few years after college I spent a lot of free time doing
projects in Standard ML and Scheme. As a result I got really
comfortable doing recursion. The two big reasons for this...
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!
Matt Blewitt
Software Sprezzatura
Sprezzatura is “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says...
over a year ago
Sprezzatura is “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it”, coined by Castiglione in 1528’s The Book of the Courtier.
Home on Erik...
Why conversion matters: a toy model
There are often close relationships between top level business metrics. For instance, it's well...
over a year ago
There are often close relationships between top level business metrics. For instance, it's well known that retention has a super strong impact on the valuation of a subscription business. Or that the % of occupied seats is super important for an airline.
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Building multiplayer games with socket.io and HTML5 Canvas
I’ve been building crappy hobby games on and off for my whole coding life. One of my very first apps...
over a year ago
I’ve been building crappy hobby games on and off for my whole coding life. One of my very first apps was a Visual Basic game - I was in…
Jonas Hietala
An invisible Remake
What does a guy like me do when not working on a new game? Except living my life, being a coach for...
over a year ago
What does a guy like me do when not working on a new game? Except living my life, being a coach for my little brother’s hockey team and eating strawberries? The last week or so I’ve been working hard with my webpage, yes this page. If you’ve visited my site before today you’ll...
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.
Louwrentius
Why I bought a digital projector (Panasonic PT-AT5000E)
I don't have a TV. I haven't been watching TV for more than 10 years. But I love to watch movies or...
over a year ago
I don't have a TV. I haven't been watching TV for more than 10 years. But I love to watch movies or great series like Dexter and Game of Thrones. Until recently, I watched movies or series on my 27" iMac. Twenty-seven inch is large for a computer screen but for a TV, it's quite...
lcamtuf’s thing
A 15-minute intro to hobby CNC
In which the author tilts at windmills for a brief while.
3 months ago
In which the author tilts at windmills for a brief while.
Vitalik Buterin's...
A Quick Garbled Circuits Primer
over a year ago
Old Vintage...
MacLynx beta 5: UTF-8, pull-down menus and more dialogue boxes, oh my!
I've been working off and on doing further Mac-ification to my updated fork of MacLynx, the System...
a year ago
I've been working off and on doing further Mac-ification to my updated fork of MacLynx, the System 7-compatible port of the venerable text browser Lynx for classic 68K Macintoshes (and Power Macs) running A/UX 3.x or System 7.x and later. There's still more to do, but a lot has...
Jonas Hietala
2013 in Review
The year is almost over and I think I accomplished a lot this year. You can read my reviews of 2010,...
over a year ago
The year is almost over and I think I accomplished a lot this year. You can read my reviews of 2010, 2011 and 2012.
2013 Geek Achievements
Solved 213 UVa problems.
Got 43rd at NWERC 2013.
Placed high in IMPA, with one turn won.
Completed the online course Programming Languages in...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
over a year ago
Arduino Blog
Make your scary Halloween pumpkin smart with the Plug and Make Kit!
With Halloween just around the corner, we’ve got the perfect project to make your decorations more...
2 months ago
With Halloween just around the corner, we’ve got the perfect project to make your decorations more fun and interactive. All you have to do is take the Arduino UNO R4 WiFi and Modulino nodes included in your Plug and Make Kit to create an awesome jack-o’-lantern that will light up...
Ken Shirriff's blog
The Intel 8088 processor's instruction prefetch circuitry: a look inside
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor.
IBM's...
9 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 dominance of the x86 architecture that continues to the present.1
One...
anderegg.ca
The “Home Alone” / “NiGHTS into Dreams” connection
NiGHTS into Dreams is one of those games I tend to think about when Christmas rolls around. It’s one...
3 weeks ago
NiGHTS into Dreams is one of those games I tend to think about when Christmas rolls around. It’s one of my favourites from the Saturn lineup, and it also had a free Christmas version.
In it, there’s a song I really love that plays on the level select screen called Gate of Your...
./techtipsy
Lenovo ThinkPad P14s gen 4 (AMD): it doesn't suck under Linux
I’ve had the opportunity to try out another new laptop at work. I’ve used a brand new laptop...
8 months ago
I’ve had the opportunity to try out another new laptop at work. I’ve used a brand new laptop recently, and it was horrible.
But this time I’m pleasantly surprised.
The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s gen 4 has great specs:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U (8 cores, 16 threads, up to 5.1 GHz)
GPU:...
Lighthouse Blog
Updates November 17: Content classification and summary
a year ago
Jonas Hietala
Making a Game Again?
I’ve gotta do a lab today at school, tomorrow I need to do the exam I missed when I had my...
over a year ago
I’ve gotta do a lab today at school, tomorrow I need to do the exam I missed when I had my glasses-missing headaches and I’m going to Ikea and some other shops for, you guessed it, shopping! Sure it’s fun and sure I need to do these things but the only thing on my mind now is...
Jonas Hietala
IDA Summer of Code 2014
IDA Summer of Code is Linköping University’s response to Google Summer of Code. Students can send in...
over a year ago
IDA Summer of Code is Linköping University’s response to Google Summer of Code. Students can send in a project of their choice and if selected they get paid to work on it for 4 weeks during the summer. In return the university get to show off the students and their projects in...
Jonas Hietala
Failed mime type for Krita
I thought Krita worked fine… Until I tried to save. Krita crashed whenever I tried to save (or open)...
over a year ago
I thought Krita worked fine… Until I tried to save. Krita crashed whenever I tried to save (or open) a file and gave the error:
Could not find mime type "application/x-krita"
Turns out if you reinstall the package shared-mime-info which comes natively with Slackware the...
Good Enough
Having Trouble Getting Started? Pair Up!
A body at rest tends to stay at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion, unless acted on...
a year ago
A body at rest tends to stay at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion, unless acted on by a net external force.
Sir Isaac Newton
I often find that just getting started is the hardest part of doing something. This is especially true when the project is large or...
Notes on software...
Eight years of organizing tech meetups
This is a collection of random personal experiences. So if you don't
want to read everything, feel...
a year ago
This is a collection of random personal experiences. So if you don't
want to read everything, feel free to skip to the end for takeaways.
I write because I'd like to see more high-quality meetups. And maybe
my little bit of experience will help someone out.
2015: Philadelphia
I...
Posts on Made of...
What MongoDB got Right
MongoDB is perhaps the most-widely-mocked piece of software out there right now.
While some of the...
over a year ago
MongoDB is perhaps the most-widely-mocked piece of software out there right now.
While some of the mockery is out-of-date or rooted in misunderstandings, much of it is well-deserved, and it’s difficult to disagree that much of MongoDB’s engineering is incredibly simplistic,...
Jonas Hietala
Death to the Forum
Well it was fun while it lasted, but now it’s gone and it’ll stay gone for a long time I think. It...
over a year ago
Well it was fun while it lasted, but now it’s gone and it’ll stay gone for a long time I think. It was mainly a test to see if I could do it and I’m really proud of my styling of it but it’s deader than in a grave, which isn’t really surprising, and it bothered me that I didn’t...
Christian Selig
Apollo for Reddit 1.9
Apollo 1.9’s a massive update to Apollo that’s taken months and months to complete, but I’m really...
over a year ago
Apollo 1.9’s a massive update to Apollo that’s taken months and months to complete, but I’m really happy with the result, and it brings together a ton of ideas from the community to make Apollo even nicer to use. The update includes a variety of features around crossposts, flair,...
Computer Ads from...
Bible Research Systems' THE WORD Processor
For Those Who Seek.
5 months ago
Applied Cartography
buttondown.com/alternatives
Some kind words from Chris Krycho on Buttondown's Alternatives page:
This is how I want all my tools...
2 weeks ago
Some kind words from Chris Krycho on Buttondown's Alternatives page:
This is how I want all my tools to be. There is a ton of room in these markets for healthy and friendly competition — and no need at all for winner-take-all or monopolist attitudes.
First off — credit where it's...
Neil Madden
Galois/Counter Mode and random nonces
It turns out you can encrypt more than 2^32 messages with AES-GCM with a random nonce under certain...
7 months ago
It turns out you can encrypt more than 2^32 messages with AES-GCM with a random nonce under certain conditions. It’s still not a good idea, but you can just about do it. #cryptography
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.
Jonas Hietala
The End of the Tunnel
Lately I’ve been feeling like there’s been a shit-ton of stuff going on, quite a turn-around from...
over a year ago
Lately I’ve been feeling like there’s been a shit-ton of stuff going on, quite a turn-around from the last time.
One course about data structure and algorithms (super fun to be honest) has wrapped up. We thought we were ahead with the assignments but in the end it got very...
Jonas Hietala
The Arty Timeline
While working on Jonas IceCream Stand I took a screenshot every day and I thought they looked pretty...
over a year ago
While working on Jonas IceCream Stand I took a screenshot every day and I thought they looked pretty cool so here they are:
And now I’m off with New World Order and (for once) I’ve got a really really good idea!
Lighthouse Blog
Updates December 01: UX improvements
a year ago
Style over Substance
Review of the 2-dial TTArtisan Light Meter
My latest purchase for my analog cameras is the TTArtisan light meter, a hotshoe-mounted meter...
over a year ago
My latest purchase for my analog cameras is the TTArtisan light meter, a hotshoe-mounted meter accessory. The market for these shoe-mounted light meters for vintage cameras has become weirdly competitive. They fit on top of a mechanical camera and provide you with the right...
Jonas Hietala
Entering Pintos
First week of school is over and it’s been full throttle from the start, in a good way. We’re having...
over a year ago
First week of school is over and it’s been full throttle from the start, in a good way. We’re having four courses and for once I like them all. We have an interesting math course, a useful course “Software Development in Theory” (boring but useful) and a big project course where...
Notes on software...
Experimenting with column- and row-oriented datastructures
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Arduino Blog
What if robots could communicate with humans by emitting scents?
Almost all human-robot interaction (HRI) approaches today rely on three senses: hearing, sight, and...
5 months ago
Almost all human-robot interaction (HRI) approaches today rely on three senses: hearing, sight, and touch. Your robot vacuum might beep at you, or play recorded or synthesized speech. An LED on its enclosure might blink to red to signify a problem. And cutting-edge humanoid...
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Acing the design interview
If you haven’t designed an actual system before, design interviews can be tough. Knowing how to work...
over a year ago
If you haven’t designed an actual system before, design interviews can be tough. Knowing how to work with a particular web service or…
Vitalik Buterin's...
DAOs are not corporations: where decentralization in autonomous organizations matters
over a year ago
Christian Selig
Trials and Tribulations of Making an Interruptable Custom View Controller Transition on iOS
I think it’s safe to say while the iOS custom view controller transition API is a very powerful one,...
over a year ago
I think it’s safe to say while the iOS custom view controller transition API is a very powerful one, with that power comes a great deal of complexity. It can be tricky, and I’m having one of those days where it’s getting the better of me and I just cannot get it to do what I want...
Electronics etc…
Measuring the HP 11720A Pulse Modulator and Coax Cables
Introduction
What is a pulse modulator and what are they used for?
The HP 11720A Pulse...
a year ago
Introduction
What is a pulse modulator and what are they used for?
The HP 11720A Pulse Modulator
Inside the HP 11720A
Measurement Setup for a Quick Testing Session
Pin Modulator Power Measurements with HP 432A
Cable Loss Measurements with HP 432A
Cable Power Measurements with...
Notes on software...
The year in books: 2022
In 2022 I finished 20
books
spanning 15,801 pages. 3 more than I read in 2021, but about twice
the...
a year ago
In 2022 I finished 20
books
spanning 15,801 pages. 3 more than I read in 2021, but about twice
the number of pages. 3 fiction and 17 non-fiction. Another ~30 started
but not finished.
I had a hard time reading books while I was trying to start my own
company. But I also...
Arduino Blog
Arduino partners with RS/OKdo strategically to further expand the China Market
Arduino is excited to announce a strategic new partnership with RS/OKdo, a prominent leader in the...
a month ago
Arduino is excited to announce a strategic new partnership with RS/OKdo, a prominent leader in the distribution of industrial and electronic equipment. This collaboration marks a significant step forward in bringing Arduino’s technology closer to China’s thriving maker community...
Louwrentius
'Linux RAID level and chunk size: the benchmarks'
Introduction
When configuring a Linux RAID array, the chunk size needs to get chosen. But
what is...
over a year ago
Introduction
When configuring a Linux RAID array, the chunk size needs to get chosen. But
what is the chunk size?
When you write data to a RAID array that implements striping (level 0, 5, 6,
10 and so on), the chunk of data sent to the array is broken down in to
pieces, each part...
Good Enough
TIL: Turbo Stream and personalised content
Hotwire and Turbo are great for very quickly and easily adding real-time updating of webpages...
a year ago
Hotwire and Turbo are great for very quickly and easily adding real-time updating of webpages without requiring the browser to reload the whole page.
But if the information you want to stream back from your server to the client has anything specific to the current user — like...
Posts on Made of...
A Brief Introduction to termios: Signaling and Job Control
(This is part three of a multi-part introduction to termios and terminal emulation on UNIX. Read...
over a year ago
(This is part three of a multi-part introduction to termios and terminal emulation on UNIX. Read part 1 or part 2 if you’re new here)
For my final entry on termios, I will be looking at job control in the shell (i.e. backgrounding and foreground jobs) and the very closely related...
Jonas Hietala
Computer upgrade
After 5 years or so I’ve made a large upgrade to my desktop, and this post contains details and some...
a year ago
After 5 years or so I’ve made a large upgrade to my desktop, and this post contains details and some pictures about the process.
It was time
I didn’t really want to do an upgrade right now, but I felt I had to do it.
Sometimes the lag had gotten very noticeable, for example when...
./techtipsy
How to start your self-hosting adventure: a high-level overview
Reddit is a great starting point for getting new ideas for your homelab: racks full of machines
in...
over a year ago
Reddit is a great starting point for getting new ideas for your homelab: racks full of machines
in /r/homelab, storage measured in terabytes (or even petabytes) over
at /r/datahoarder, all the different services that people host over at
/r/selfhosted. This can be a bit...
OH8HUB’s Substack
Spring ham radio activation of Korkattivuori (Mt. Korkatti)
Korkattivuori (“Mount Korkatti”, 186m above sea level) is a small hill and Natura 2000 nature...
a year ago
Korkattivuori (“Mount Korkatti”, 186m above sea level) is a small hill and Natura 2000 nature reserve area near town Haapavesi (pop. 6588) in Finland. The nature reserve area consist of short family friendly hiking path of approximately 1.5km. One end of the path has parking...
Posts on Made of...
Some thoughts on Quora
With the announcement this week that Quora had taken $11 million in VC at an $86 million valuation,...
over a year ago
With the announcement this week that Quora had taken $11 million in VC at an $86 million valuation, there’s been an awful lot of attention on Quora. I’ve had an account there and wanted to write up some of my initial thoughts.
If you haven’t heard about Quora, it’s yet another...
Arduino Blog
This fake CRT TV works using lasers and UV magic
Until the 21st century, cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs were pretty much the only option. As such, media...
a month ago
Until the 21st century, cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs were pretty much the only option. As such, media was made to suit them. Retro video game consoles in particular look best on CRT TVs. But those old TVs are getting hard to find and desirable models are now quite expensive. So,...
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...
Louwrentius
How to setup a local or private Ubuntu Mirror
Preface
In this article I provide instructions on how to setup a local Ubuntu mirror using...
a year ago
Preface
In this article I provide instructions on how to setup a local Ubuntu mirror using debmirror. To set expectations: the mirror will work as intended and distribute packages and updates, but a do-release upgrade from one major version of Ubuntu to the next won't...
Posts on Made of...
Advent of Code in C++ Template Metaprogramming
This December, the imp of the perverse struck me, and I decided to see how many days of Advent of...
a year ago
This December, the imp of the perverse struck me, and I decided to see how many days of Advent of Code I could do purely in compile-time C++ metaprogramming.
As of this writing, I’ve done two days, and I’m not sure I’ll make it any further. However, that’s one more day than I...
Notes on software...
A minimal distributed key-value database with Hashicorp's Raft library
When I wrote the "build a distributed PostgreSQL proof of
concept" post I first had to figure...
over a year ago
When I wrote the "build a distributed PostgreSQL proof of
concept" post I first had to figure out
how to use Hashicorp's Raft
implementation.
There weren't any examples I could find in the Hashicorp repo
itself. And the only example I could find was Philip O'Toole's
hraftd. It's...
Ian's Blog
All About Apache Cassandra: Snapshots
The concept of a "Snapshot"
In computing, a snapshot is a point-in-time copy of data or state of a...
over a year ago
The concept of a "Snapshot"
In computing, a snapshot is a point-in-time copy of data or state of a machine.
You ever end up doing something like this?
Each one of these files is a snapshot, as it's a copy of your essay at the point-in-time when you saved it.
Snapshots provide us...
Ian's Blog
What the heck is OCSP?
The online certificate status protocol, or OCSP for short, is a way for TLS clients (like your web...
over a year ago
The online certificate status protocol, or OCSP for short, is a way for TLS clients (like your web browser) to check if a certificate has been revoked or not.
Certificate Revocation?
With asymmetrical encryption, your encryption is only as good as long as your private key remains...
Willem's Blog
Clouds below my floor
Building a little datacenter in my basement utilising a very fast internet connection.
over a year ago
Building a little datacenter in my basement utilising a very fast internet connection.
./techtipsy
Cool links
This is an unsorted list of links that I find to be cool.
slow roads
sit back, relax and let the AI...
a year ago
This is an unsorted list of links that I find to be cool.
slow roads
sit back, relax and let the AI do all the driving
or don’t, I’m not your dad
Simply Explained
My Sixth Year as YouTube Creator (statistics + retrospective)
Every new year I reflect on the previous year and set new goals. Last year has been my most...
over a year ago
Every new year I reflect on the previous year and set new goals. Last year has been my most successful year on YouTube so far, and I'd like to share some statistics and thoughts. I will also go over how my email newsletter is doing and where I'm headed. And finally, I'll set...
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...
./techtipsy
Oops, I published my drafts!
Those of you who follow my blog using the RSS feed might have seen that new, incomplete posts popped...
10 months ago
Those of you who follow my blog using the RSS feed might have seen that new, incomplete posts popped up around the time
I published my FOSDEM 2024 post.
Oops.
I recently tried looking for an alternative to writing blog posts in IntelliJ and out of all the options I stuck...
Notes on software...
Notes from Neal Gabler's Walt Disney
Disney was a celebrity by his mid-30s, Disney the company was famous
by 1930s.
Even though...
a year ago
Disney was a celebrity by his mid-30s, Disney the company was famous
by 1930s.
Even though politically the 1930s was considered the decade of
Roosevelt (elected President in 1933), culturally the 1930s was
considered the decade of Mickey Mouse.
Almost every new...
./techtipsy
How to take down production with a single Helm command
You’re Cletus Kubernetus: a software developer, and a proud Fedora Linux
user.1
You know Kubernetes,...
9 months ago
You’re Cletus Kubernetus: a software developer, and a proud Fedora Linux
user.1
You know Kubernetes, especially after the time you migrated some services to it.
Everything is calm.
Your pods are running. Your service is up. Business as usual.
You release some minor changes to...
Louwrentius
Blu Ray is dead
HD-DVD may be dead, but Blu Ray is just as dead. The whole concept of optical
media is dead....
over a year ago
HD-DVD may be dead, but Blu Ray is just as dead. The whole concept of optical
media is dead. Honestly, who is still burning CD's or DVD's nowadays? (If you
are, why for Christ sake? I can't think of a single good reason) And at 10
euros ($100) for a single Blu Ray disk, you must...
axio.ms
Classical virtualisation rules applied to RISC-style atomics
In 1974, Gerald Popek and Robert Goldberg published a paper, “Formal Requirements for Virtualizable...
over a year ago
In 1974, Gerald Popek and Robert Goldberg published a paper, “Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures”, giving a set of characteristics for correct full-machine virtualisation.
Today, these characteristics remain very useful. Computer architects will...
./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...
Louwrentius
Switching away from Debian to Ubuntu LTS
Over the last couple of years, Debian Linux has released new stable versions about every two years....
over a year ago
Over the last couple of years, Debian Linux has released new stable versions about every two years. This pace is great for progress, but there is a serious problem. This problem is related to their support for older Debian stable versions.
If you read the quote below from the...
./techtipsy
How to mess up a simple ThinkPad X230 BIOS flash and how to recover from it
Background
I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X230. It’s a small and good laptop that I’ve used as my main...
over a year ago
Background
I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X230. It’s a small and good laptop that I’ve used as my main laptop and a server as well.
A couple of years ago I messed around with flashing alternative BIOS implementations on the X230, such
as the skulls project, which made installing...
Computer Ads from...
Plus Post: Lobo MAX-80
The Computer Tandy Should Have Built (at least according to the ad).
9 months ago
The Computer Tandy Should Have Built (at least according to the ad).
./techtipsy
So you want to migrate to Kubernetes: observations from a software developer
Kubernetes: everyone wants to do it, regardless of their scale and business objectives.1
Common...
3 months ago
Kubernetes: everyone wants to do it, regardless of their scale and business objectives.1
Common justifications include better scalability, cost savings, standardization and being super modern and stuff. It’s
the future!
In my personal experience, Kubernetes is far from the...
anderegg.ca
The trouble with openness
Back in the early 2000s, there was this nebulous idea called the semantic web. It never really went...
a month ago
Back in the early 2000s, there was this nebulous idea called the semantic web. It never really went anywhere, but I found it exciting at the time.
One piece that particularly spoke to me was the notion of including data in websites so that web scrapers could easily get at it....
Louwrentius
ZFS: resilver performance of various RAID schemas
When building your own DIY home NAS, it is important that you simulate and test drive failures...
over a year ago
When building your own DIY home NAS, it is important that you simulate and test drive failures before you put your important data on it. It makes sense to know what to do in case a drive needs to be replaced. I also recommend putting a substantial amount of data on your NAS and...
Louwrentius
Is there an easy and secure way to transfer files?
Many organisations just assume that the local physical network is trusted. That their network...
over a year ago
Many organisations just assume that the local physical network is trusted. That their network equipment is physically secure and that it is impossible for an attacker to get on the wire and start eavesdropping on network traffic.
Many organisations do not seem too concerned about...
Home on Erik...
ML+Hadoop at NYC Predictive Analytics
I was just at the NYC Predictive Analytics meetup talking about how we build machine learning...
over a year ago
I was just at the NYC Predictive Analytics meetup talking about how we build machine learning algorithms using Hadoop to power music recommendations.
Great meetup, where we had two speakers, me and Blake Shaw from Foursquare.
Jonas Hietala
A type checking error in Elixir 1.18
Although I’m a big Elixir fan, the lack of static typing has always been my biggest annoyance (and...
4 days ago
Although I’m a big Elixir fan, the lack of static typing has always been my biggest annoyance (and why I think Gleam is so cool).
I think static typing helps catch bugs earlier and in an automated way, leading to less buggy software and saves time in the long run.
To my great joy...
Neil Madden
Why the OAuth mTLS spec is more interesting than you might think
I was catching up on the always excellent Security. Cryptography. Whatever. podcast, and enjoyed the...
over a year ago
I was catching up on the always excellent Security. Cryptography. Whatever. podcast, and enjoyed the episode with Colm MacCárthaigh about a bunch of topics around TLS. It’s a great episode that touches a lot of subjects I’m interested in, so go ahead and listen to it if you...
Louwrentius
An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
Introduction
Back in 2004, I visited a now bankrupt Dutch computer store called MyCom1, located at...
over a year ago
Introduction
Back in 2004, I visited a now bankrupt Dutch computer store called MyCom1, located at the Kinkerstraat in Amsterdam. I was there to buy a Western Digital Raptor model WD740, with 74 GB of capacity, running at 10,000 RPM.
When I bought this drive, we were still in...
Good Enough
TIL: Deploying a Sinatra app to Render.com
This morning I wanted to deploy a simple Sinatra app to Render.com.
It wasn’t super obvious to me,...
a year ago
This morning I wanted to deploy a simple Sinatra app to Render.com.
It wasn’t super obvious to me, so I figured I’d write down what worked in the end.
First, a Gemfile:
# Gemfile
source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'sinatra'
gem 'sinatra-contrib'
gem 'puma'
* I’m pretty sure...
Engineers Need Art
VPX Scripting - Part 5 (DOF)
Some light Visual Pinball debugging and the world of DOF. New to DOF? Read on.
8 months ago
Some light Visual Pinball debugging and the world of DOF. New to DOF? Read on.
Avestura's Blog
Understanding zero-knowledge proofs
What are zero-knowledge proofs, really?
over a year ago
What are zero-knowledge proofs, really?
Avestura's Blog
How optimistic or pessimistic are the Kurzgesagt videos?
A sentiment analysis on the last 20 videos of Kurzgesagt.
a year ago
A sentiment analysis on the last 20 videos of Kurzgesagt.
Louwrentius
'Tip of the day for every Linux or Unix user: brace expantion'
Searching the web I discovered some really nice feature of the unix shell,
which I didn't know...
over a year ago
Searching the web I discovered some really nice feature of the unix shell,
which I didn't know about.
Try this:
touch foobar.conf
Now try this:
cp foobar.conf{,.bak}
It is equivalent to:
cp foobar.conf foobar.conf.bak
This is also the easiest way to create sequences. Do not use...
Birchtree
Starship is a late contender for favorite new things in 2024
I don't have a huge love for Star Fox 64. I mean I played it with friends and I still have the...
a week ago
I don't have a huge love for Star Fox 64. I mean I played it with friends and I still have the cartridge all these years later, but it's not as big a part of my childhood as Ocarina of Time was. That said, the Ocarina
./techtipsy
The Fedora Linux starter pack: everything you need for a smooth experience
I like Fedora Linux.
It’s the Linux distro that stopped my habit of distro-hopping. Big
deal? Ooh,...
2 months ago
I like Fedora Linux.
It’s the Linux distro that stopped my habit of distro-hopping. Big
deal? Ooh, big deal!
It’s stable in day-to-day use, ships with up-to-date software, and the software selection is adequate out of the box.
It also ships with a fresh Linux kernel version1,...
Jonas Hietala
2022 in review
A bit late, but it’s time for my yearly review. It’s something I like doing for myself and it’s nice...
a year ago
A bit late, but it’s time for my yearly review. It’s something I like doing for myself and it’s nice to see that despite a tough year I’ve done some good things.
2022 Non-Geek Achievements
We got our third child!
This time we got a girl to complement our two boys, and I love them...
Matt Mullenweg
Disrupt Interview
On Wednesday I had a great chat with Connie Loizos, the editor in chief of TechCrunch, you can view...
2 months ago
On Wednesday I had a great chat with Connie Loizos, the editor in chief of TechCrunch, you can view the video here: Then yesterday Automattic filed its legal responses to the spurious lawfare from WP Engine, Silver Lake, and Quinn Emanuel. It’s a bit long, but if you have time...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Engineering Security Through Coordination Problems
over a year ago
Avestura's Blog
An opinion on what's a good general-purpose programming language
What features should a programming language have to be ideal, in my opinion?
over a year ago
What features should a programming language have to be ideal, in my opinion?
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...
Notes on software...
Running SQL Server in a container on Github Actions
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Ken Shirriff's blog
Wealth distribution in the United States
Forbes recently published the Forbes 400 List for 2024, listing the
400 richest people in the United...
2 months ago
Forbes recently published the Forbes 400 List for 2024, listing the
400 richest people in the United States.
This inspired me to
make a histogram to show the distribution of wealth in the United States.
It turns out that if you put Elon Musk on the graph,
almost the entire US...
Notes on software...
Exploring PL/pgSQL: Strings, arrays, recursion, and parsing JSON
Next in exploring PL/pgSQL:
Implementing a Forth-like interpreter
PostgreSQL comes with a...
over a year ago
Next in exploring PL/pgSQL:
Implementing a Forth-like interpreter
PostgreSQL comes with a builtin imperative programming language called
PL/pgSQL. I used to think this language was scary because it has a bit
more adornment than your usual language does. But looking deeper,...
./techtipsy
How to fix ZFS pool not importing at boot
Issue description
You are running a Linux-based machine with an install of ZFS on Linux. Everything...
over a year ago
Issue description
You are running a Linux-based machine with an install of ZFS on Linux. Everything seems to work correctly, but
after restarting your machine, the ZFS pool is not visible. You can still import your pool manually using
zpool import poolname or zpool import -a.
In...
Posts on Made of...
Dear Twitter: Stop screwing over your developers.
I really like Twitter. I think it’s a great, fun, service, that helps enable interesting online...
over a year ago
I really like Twitter. I think it’s a great, fun, service, that helps enable interesting online communities, and is a surprisingly effective way to spread news and information to lots of people online. One of the things that I’ve loved about Twitter is their API, and how open and...
Arduino Blog
Kickstart your tech journey, with the new Arduino Plug and Make Kit!
Hey, creating an IoT device shouldn’t be rocket science. We believe technology is for everyone....
5 months ago
Hey, creating an IoT device shouldn’t be rocket science. We believe technology is for everyone. That’s why we’ve developed the whole new, beginner-friendly Plug and Make Kit – the easiest way to get started with Arduino! Inside the box, you’ll find everything you need to create...
Notes on software...
Writing to be read
There is a common struggle in the writing and maintenance of
documentation, checklists, emails,...
over a year ago
There is a common struggle in the writing and maintenance of
documentation, checklists, emails, guides, etc. Each provides immense
value; a document may be the key to an important process. The goal is
to remove barriers -- to encourage understanding and correct
application of...
Arduino Blog
Bringing Quake to Arduino: a game-changing project by Nicola Wrachien
Following up on his successful Doom port last year, engineer Nicola Wrachien – who works at Silicon...
3 months ago
Following up on his successful Doom port last year, engineer Nicola Wrachien – who works at Silicon Labs, a leader in secure, intelligent wireless technology for a more connected world and long-time Arduino partner – has now tackled an even bigger challenge: porting Quake, the...
Computer Ads from...
OS-9 Bonus Content
A detailed look at OS-9 for Tandy Color Computers
4 months ago
A detailed look at OS-9 for Tandy Color Computers
anderegg.ca
Halls of Torment: a thematically questionable downtime game
Merry Christmas and happy holidays! I hope everyone out there has a joyful and relaxing day, however...
a week ago
Merry Christmas and happy holidays! I hope everyone out there has a joyful and relaxing day, however you celebrate. During the downtime I got to play a game I’d been wanting to try for a while.
Last summer on The Besties podcast, Russ Frushtick mentioned that he was enjoying...
Willem's Blog
Designing an interface for a food ordering page
Designing a food ordering page is surprisingly challenging because of the many variables that need...
over a year ago
Designing a food ordering page is surprisingly challenging because of the many variables that need to be accommodated on a very small screen.
./techtipsy
Whacky setups: seedbox on a wall
The Orange Pi Zero is one hell of an SBC. It has served as
a Wi-Fi access point for months without...
over a year ago
The Orange Pi Zero is one hell of an SBC. It has served as
a Wi-Fi access point for months without issues
and as a testbed for playing around with MySQL.
I wanted it to be a useful device again, but had trouble finding an use case for it due to its hardware limitations.
After...
latest projects -...
Robot Slide Whistle Orchestrion
[Hardware] Army of Robot Slide Whistles
9 months ago
[Hardware] Army of Robot Slide Whistles
Jonas Hietala
Blogging in Djot instead of Markdown
What if we weren’t chained to the past? What if we tried to create a light markup syntax that keeps...
11 months ago
What if we weren’t chained to the past? What if we tried to create a light markup syntax that keeps what is good about Markdown, while revising some of the features that have led to bloat and complexity in the CommonMark spec?
John Macfarlane, Beyond Markdown
I recently...
Notes on software...
A database without dynamic memory allocation
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
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...
Willem's Blog
Servicing a robot vacuum cleaner
This week it was time for some maintenance on my iRobot Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. Read along to...
over a year ago
This week it was time for some maintenance on my iRobot Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. Read along to learn how I did it.
Notes on software...
Container scheduling strategies for integration testing 14 different databases in Github Actions
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Home on Erik...
Deep learning for… chess (addendum)
My previous blog post about deep learning for chess blew up and made it to Hacker News and a couple...
over a year ago
My previous blog post about deep learning for chess blew up and made it to Hacker News and a couple of other places. One pretty amazing thing was that the Github repo got 150 stars overnight.
Home on Erik...
Model benchmarks
A lot of people have asked me what models we use for recommendations at Spotify so I wanted to share...
over a year ago
A lot of people have asked me what models we use for recommendations at Spotify so I wanted to share some insights. Here's benchmarks for some models. Note that we don't use all of them in production.
Posts on Made of...
A Brief Introduction to termios: termios(3) and stty
(This is part two of a multi-part introduction to termios and terminal emulation on UNIX. Read part...
over a year ago
(This is part two of a multi-part introduction to termios and terminal emulation on UNIX. Read part 1 if you’re new here)
In this entry, we’ll look at the interfaces that are used to control the behavior of the “termios” box sitting between the master and slave pty. The behaviors...
Construction Physics
Energy Cheat Sheet
Building an intuition about energy
2 weeks ago
Building an intuition about energy
Home on Erik...
Interview with a Data Scientist: Erik Bernhardsson
I was featured in Peadar Coyle's interview series interviewing various “data scientists” – which is...
over a year ago
I was featured in Peadar Coyle's interview series interviewing various “data scientists” – which is kind of arguable since (a) all the other ppl in that series are much cooler than me (b) I'm not really a data scientist.
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...
Jordan’s Substack
On Building Git for Lawyers
Over this past weekend, Twitter discovered the problem that I have dedicated the past four years of...
a month ago
Over this past weekend, Twitter discovered the problem that I have dedicated the past four years of my life to solving. Why don't lawyers and other non-coders use git?
Applied Cartography
PSA: mess around with Kolo
I had bookmarked Kolo many months ago to try out and finally got a chance to integrate it with...
10 months ago
I had bookmarked Kolo many months ago to try out and finally got a chance to integrate it with Buttondown — a process that I expected to take a couple hours on a lazy Sunday and in fact took ten minutes and three lines of code.
If you have a Django app, I think you should drop...
Willem's Blog
iPad Pro as primary computer
Is the time right to use an iPad as primary development platform to get some real work done?
over a year ago
Is the time right to use an iPad as primary development platform to get some real work done?
Home on Erik...
The number of letters in the word for each number
Just for fun, I generated these graphs of the number of letters in the word for each number. I...
over a year ago
Just for fun, I generated these graphs of the number of letters in the word for each number. I really spent about 10 minutes on this (ok…possibly also another 40 minutes tweaking the plots):
More languages!
Bryan Braun - Blog
Capability makes your life simpler
If you can tolerate discomfort, then you can camp much lighter. Camping lighter means you spend less...
5 months ago
If you can tolerate discomfort, then you can camp much lighter. Camping lighter means you spend less time and energy packing, setting-up, tearing down, and unpacking. The same goes for travel. Fewer clothes and shoes means less luggage to carry, manage, and lose. You can board...
Arduino Blog
Explore e-paper technology with Nano Matter and the new EPDK-Matter from Pervasive Displays
We’re excited to share that Pervasive Displays has just launched the E-Paper Development Kit for...
3 weeks ago
We’re excited to share that Pervasive Displays has just launched the E-Paper Development Kit for Matter! This groundbreaking, self-contained kit is designed to revolutionize how smart home devices use e-paper displays, enhancing user experience while driving down energy...
Matt Blewitt
Everything I Know About Operations, I Learned From NHS 111
Ever heard someone say “It’s only software/money/<trivial thing>, not life or death”, in the context...
over a year ago
Ever heard someone say “It’s only software/money/<trivial thing>, not life or death”, in the context of incidents at your company? Although mostly true, I want to talk about a time in my career when sometimes, just sometimes, it was the latter, and how it shaped my approach to...
Willem's Blog
Beast of the Green Hell
Blog post about an amazing AMG Circuit day at the race track of Zolder, Belgium.
over a year ago
Blog post about an amazing AMG Circuit day at the race track of Zolder, Belgium.
Home on Erik...
Blogroll
Remember when everyone had a really ugly blog with a blogroll? Anyway, just think the word is...
over a year ago
Remember when everyone had a really ugly blog with a blogroll? Anyway, just think the word is funny.
I follow a few hundred blogs using Feedly and Reeder and have been reading a few hundred thousand blog posts over the last 10 years.
Christian Selig
Beware UserDefaults: a tale of hard to find bugs, and lost data
Excuse the alarmist title, but I think it’s justified, as it’s an issue that’s caused me a ton of...
2 months ago
Excuse the alarmist title, but I think it’s justified, as it’s an issue that’s caused me a ton of pain in both support emails and actually tracking it down, so I want to make others aware of it so they don’t similarly burned.
Brief intro
For the uninitiated, UserDefaults (née...
Simply Explained
Serverless Anagram Solver with Cloudflare R2 and Pages
Six years ago, I reworked my anagram solver so it would run on top of AWS Lambda and DynamoDB....
over a year ago
Six years ago, I reworked my anagram solver so it would run on top of AWS Lambda and DynamoDB. However, this year I realized I didn't need server-side code or a database at all. I could make it completely static by pre-computing anagram solutions.
Computer Ads from...
MicroTimes Interviews the Head Honchos of Silicon Graphics (1989)
Ed McCracken and Jim Clark talk about their hardware and the future of 3D
7 months ago
Ed McCracken and Jim Clark talk about their hardware and the future of 3D
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...
Jonas Hietala
Life and Shields
Time is running out! At least the more technical parts are mostly done. The ships have an acceptable...
over a year ago
Time is running out! At least the more technical parts are mostly done. The ships have an acceptable AI, they have rechargeable shields and they can now even be killed. Currently the game is far too easy, but it’s starting to look a little cooler at least.
Jonas Hietala
2015 Read Books
I didn’t read a lot of books in 2015, but the books I did read were pretty damn good.
Fiction
A Song...
over a year ago
I didn’t read a lot of books in 2015, but the books I did read were pretty damn good.
Fiction
A Song of Ice and Fire: A Dance with Dragons - George R.R. Martin
Reread.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms - Gearge R.R. Martin
The Skin Collector - Jeffery Deaver
Best Served Cold - Joe...
Arduino Blog
“Catch me if you can!” — How Alvik learns to dodge trouble with AI, featuring Roni Bandini
Have you ever discovered a cool piece of tech buried in your drawer and thought, “This could make...
3 months ago
Have you ever discovered a cool piece of tech buried in your drawer and thought, “This could make for an awesome project”? That’s exactly what happened to Roni Bandini, maker, writer, electronics artist – and Arduino Alvik Star! Bandini began coding at 10 years old, and has...
Home on Erik...
Conversion rates – you are (most likely) computing them wrong
How hard can it be to compute conversion rate? Take the total number of users that converted and...
over a year ago
How hard can it be to compute conversion rate? Take the total number of users that converted and divide them with the total number of users. Done. Except… it's a lot more complicated when you have any sort of significant time lag.
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...
Willem's Blog
Designing and implementing a (micro) payment system
Designing and implementing a micro payment system with an emphasis on simplicity. Read about how I...
over a year ago
Designing and implementing a micro payment system with an emphasis on simplicity. Read about how I did it in this post.
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...
Odds and Ends of...
Odds and Ends #45: Deliverism, blasphemy and selfies from space
Plus the best Minecraft-themed political deepfake you'll see today
a month ago
Plus the best Minecraft-themed political deepfake you'll see today
Posts on Made of...
Conkeror
I’ve recently switched to Conkeror as my primary browser. It started life as a Firefox extension,...
over a year ago
I’ve recently switched to Conkeror as my primary browser. It started life as a Firefox extension, but nowadays it’s a standalone app built on top of Mozilla’s xulrunner, so it uses the Gecko rendering engine.
What it is, is an emacs implemented in Javascript, for the web. This...
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...
Jonas Hietala
How I wrote a book using Pollen
I wrote an online book using Pollen, a static site generator in Racket. An earlier post contains my...
over a year ago
I wrote an online book using Pollen, a static site generator in Racket. An earlier post contains my first impressions of it, but as the book is now completed I think I can summarize some implementation details in more detail with this post.
I really like the markup language and...
Home on Erik...
The software engineering rule of 3
Here's a dumb extremely accurate rule I'm postulating* for software engineering projects: *you need...
over a year ago
Here's a dumb extremely accurate rule I'm postulating* for software engineering projects: *you need at least 3 examples before you solve the right problem*.
This is what I've noticed:
Don't factor out shared code between two classes.
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:
Willem's Blog
Measuring cholesterol levels in blood
This week I had my blood examined to measure my cholesterol levels, taking a lipid profile. Know...
over a year ago
This week I had my blood examined to measure my cholesterol levels, taking a lipid profile. Know your LDL, HDL and Triglycerides numbers with a simple test.
Louwrentius
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,...
Notes on software...
Benchmarking esbuild, swc, tsc, and babel for React/JSX projects
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
Willem's Blog
Tudor Black Bay 36 long-term review
For the past six months I have been wearing the same watch, every day and night. Read along to learn...
over a year ago
For the past six months I have been wearing the same watch, every day and night. Read along to learn what makes the Tudor Black Bay 36 the perfect every day watch.
latest projects -...
Hand-cranked Flux Capacitor
[Concept] Control the flow of time
a year ago
[Concept] Control the flow of time
Computer Ads from...
Maxell's MF 2-DD Floppies
The Gold Standard
a month ago
Nabeel S. Qureshi
Reflections on Palantir
A retrospective of an eight-year stint.
2 months ago
A retrospective of an eight-year stint.
Posts on Made of...
Why scons is cool
I’ve recently started playing with scons a little for some small personal projects. It’s not...
over a year ago
I’ve recently started playing with scons a little for some small personal projects. It’s not perfect, but I’ve rapidly come to the conclusion that it’s a probably far better choice than make in many cases. The main exceptions would be cases where you need to integrate into legacy...
Home on Erik...
What is the right level of specialization? For data teams and anyone else.
This isn't as much of a blog post as an elaboration of a tweet I posted the other day:
I think this...
over a year ago
This isn't as much of a blog post as an elaboration of a tweet I posted the other day:
I think this specialization of data teams into 99 different roles (data scientist, data engineer, analytics engineer, ML engineer etc) is generally a bad thing driven by the fact that tools are...
lcamtuf’s thing
Random objects: Guycot & Jarre
Early repeating handguns, or another unnecessary excursion into the bowels of history.
6 months ago
Early repeating handguns, or another unnecessary excursion into the bowels of history.
Computer Ads from...
Comics from 1982/02 Creative Computing Mag
Time for some humor
7 months ago
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...
latest projects -...
Analemmagraph
[Concept] Video of a day, one year in every frame
a year ago
[Concept] Video of a day, one year in every frame
Ian's Blog
Securing Your GitHub Account
Let's talk about some of the simple & practical steps you can take to improve your GitHub account...
over a year ago
Let's talk about some of the simple & practical steps you can take to improve your GitHub account security.
There's plenty of good reasons why you should try to keep any online account safe, but I feel that GitHub deserves special attention among developers. With automation...
Old Vintage...
xa (xa65) 2.4.0 - finally
xa (xa65) 2.4.0 is the newest release of André Fachat's fast and portable two-pass 6502/65816...
a year ago
xa (xa65) 2.4.0 is the newest release of André Fachat's fast and portable two-pass 6502/65816 crossassembler; yours truly is the current maintainer and I just punched "live" on it tonight. It runs on Un*xy things and Windows (with Cygwin or msys2 or similar), and probably other...
Bryan Braun - Blog
One Million Checkboxes and the fear of viral success
When Nolen Royalty’s One Million Checkboxes site went viral, several people sent me links to it.
If...
4 months ago
When Nolen Royalty’s One Million Checkboxes site went viral, several people sent me links to it.
If you haven't heard of One Million Checkboxes, see the Wikipedia article for more details.
I loved everything about One Million Checkboxes. It was simple but strangely compelling....
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...
Jonas Hietala
Why make games
Why did I start making games? Because I like to play them of course. Think of all the fantastic...
over a year ago
Why did I start making games? Because I like to play them of course. Think of all the fantastic games; Super Mario, Lemmings, Tetris, GTA, The Sims, Counterstrike, Theme Hospital, SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon… Damn - when you count them like this you’ll see how many great...
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Blockchain for beginners
Introduction This is a guide for developers who kinda sorta know what blockchains are for (making...
over a year ago
Introduction This is a guide for developers who kinda sorta know what blockchains are for (making distributed crypto-currencies like Bitcoin…
Home on Erik...
Looking for smart people
I haven't mentioned what I'm currently up to. Earlier this year I left Spotify to join a small...
over a year ago
I haven't mentioned what I'm currently up to. Earlier this year I left Spotify to join a small startup called Better. We're going after one of the biggest industries in the world that also turns out to be completely broken.
Old Vintage...
When the Power Macintosh ran NetWare (featuring Wormhole and Cyberpunk)
This entry and the software we'll demonstrate is in large part thanks to an anonymous Apple...
a year ago
This entry and the software we'll demonstrate is in large part thanks to an anonymous Apple developer who was part of the NetWare team. Thank you!
the network operating system of the 1990s. Nothing was quite like it. Until Windows NT muscled in on its action near the end of the...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Degen communism: the only correct political ideology
9 months ago
computers are bad
2024-06-02 consumer electronics control
In a previous episode, I discussed audio
transports
and mention that they have become a much less...
7 months ago
In a previous episode, I discussed audio
transports
and mention that they have become a much less important part of the modern home
theater landscape. One reason is the broad decline of the component system:
most consumers aren't buying a television, home theater receiver,...
Willem's Blog
Search like a pro: Google search operators
Read along for a comprehensive list of advanced Google search operators that allow you to filter...
over a year ago
Read along for a comprehensive list of advanced Google search operators that allow you to filter your search results.
Push to Prod
How We Built a Self-Healing System to Survive a Terrifying Concurrency Bug At Netflix
Our CPUs were dying, the bug was temporarily un-fixable, and we had no viable path forward. Here's...
4 months ago
Our CPUs were dying, the bug was temporarily un-fixable, and we had no viable path forward. Here's how we managed to survive.
Neil Madden
Hybrid encryption and the KEM/DEM paradigm
If you know a bit about public key cryptography, you probably know that you don’t directly encrypt a...
over a year ago
If you know a bit about public key cryptography, you probably know that you don’t directly encrypt a message with a public key encryption algorithm like RSA. This is for many reasons, one of which being that it is incredibly slow. Instead you do what’s called hybrid encryption:...
Willem's Blog
Fixed Gear Gran Fondo
Taking a fixed gear road bike for a gran fondo! Let some of my fun be of inspiration to you!
over a year ago
Taking a fixed gear road bike for a gran fondo! Let some of my fun be of inspiration to you!
Home on Erik...
A neat little trick with time decay
Something that pops up pretty frequently is to implement time decay, especially where you have...
over a year ago
Something that pops up pretty frequently is to implement time decay, especially where you have recursive chains of jobs. For instance, say you want to keep track of a popularity score. You calculate today's output by reading yesterday's output, discounting it by $$ exp(-lambda...
computers are bad
2023-10-03 overheard overhead
Let's talk about overhead paging. The concept goes by various names: paging,
public address, even...
a year ago
Let's talk about overhead paging. The concept goes by various names: paging,
public address, even intercom, although the accuracy of the latter term can be
questionable. It's probably one of the aspects of business telephone systems
that gets the most public attention, on account...
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...
Louwrentius
Determining smartphone market share using wireless sniffing
I started a project to see if I could track smartphone users by sniffing for
wifi-clients. Most...
over a year ago
I started a project to see if I could track smartphone users by sniffing for
wifi-clients. Most smartphones support wifi and most people don't bother disabling
wifi when they go outdoors1. If wifi is left on, it is possible to detect these
smartphones and track their movement. To...
Willem's Blog
Repairing a Giro AEON bicycle helmet
Try fixing your Giro bicycle helmet? I went through some trouble to do it! Read along to find out...
over a year ago
Try fixing your Giro bicycle helmet? I went through some trouble to do it! Read along to find out how.
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...
Notes on software...
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 3. indexes
Previously in database basics:
1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
2. binary expressions...
over a year ago
Previously in database basics:
1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
2. binary expressions and WHERE filters
4. a database/sql driver
In this post, we extend gosql
to support indexes. We focus on the addition of PRIMARY
KEY constraints on table creation and some easy...
Notes on software...
An effective product manager
There are three specific activities I have loved in some product
managers I've worked with (and...
a year ago
There are three specific activities I have loved in some product
managers I've worked with (and missed in others).
tldr;
Talk with customers and prospects
Develop and share a vision
Evangelize
Talk with customers and prospects
As a product manager, your superpower over...
latest projects -...
3D Model Viewer Improvements
[Software] Unlocking the embedded gimbals
a year ago
[Software] Unlocking the embedded gimbals
Arduino Blog
DIY submersible pump controller helps retrieve well water
It might surprise our urban-dwelling readers, but wells are still very common in rural areas where...
7 months ago
It might surprise our urban-dwelling readers, but wells are still very common in rural areas where it is difficult or prohibitively expensive to run utilities. The CDC reports that more than 15 million households rely on groundwater and wells — and that’s just in the United...
Arduino Blog
Save 20% on Arduino Cloud Maker Plan this May!
Enhance your IoT projects with our special offer! Get 20% off a yearly subscription to the Arduino...
7 months ago
Enhance your IoT projects with our special offer! Get 20% off a yearly subscription to the Arduino Cloud Maker Plan using code CLOUD20MAY. Valid until the end of May, this deal saves you $14.38, reducing the price from $71.88 to $57.50. Benefits of the Maker Plan: What is Arduino...
Jonas Hietala
Why Cryptocurrencies? is now available in print
Today is a big milestone for me, as this marks a big milestone in the biggest personal project I’ve...
over a year ago
Today is a big milestone for me, as this marks a big milestone in the biggest personal project I’ve undertaken.
My book ‘Why Cryptocurrencies?’ is released in print today! It’s my attempt to explain what cryptocurrencies are and what problems they solve, in a simple and...
detreville
This is "detreville"
It's my name, and the name of my Substack too. That's one less thing for everyone to remember.
a year ago
It's my name, and the name of my Substack too. That's one less thing for everyone to remember.
Birchtree
Apple’s 2024 report card: the Mac 💻
This is the third in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2024 across their major product lines. I...
6 days ago
This is the third in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2024 across their major product lines. I did this last year and you can read last year’s Mac report card here.
MacBook Pro
The MacBook Pro continues to get a relentless stream of updates, as
Louwrentius
Fio-plot: creating nice charts from FIO storage benchmark data
New release of fio-plot
I've rewritten fio-plot, a tool that turns FIO benchmark data into nice...
over a year ago
New release of fio-plot
I've rewritten fio-plot, a tool that turns FIO benchmark data into nice charts. It allows you to create four types of graphs which will be discussed below.
The github project page explains how to run this tool.
Fio-plot also includes a benchmark script...
Vitalik Buterin's...
The bulldozer vs vetocracy political axis
over a year ago
Old Vintage...
Refurb weekend: Data General/One (and the worst LCD in the world)
I mentioned earlier that while I prefer specializing in non-x86 laptops, that doesn't mean I don't...
9 months ago
I mentioned earlier that while I prefer specializing in non-x86 laptops, that doesn't mean I don't collect interesting or unusual x86 laptops, like the Brother GeoBook NB-60 (I finally tracked down a mostly working NB-80C, the top of the line model, which will be the subject of a...
Louwrentius
The 'hidden' cost of using ZFS for your home NAS
Introduction
Update December 2023:
In June, it was announced that iXsystems would sponsor...
over a year ago
Introduction
Update December 2023:
In June, it was announced that iXsystems would sponsor implementing the VDEV expansion feature. A new pr has been created for this effort. The feature was merged into the code base, but may not be available to the general public before the end...
./techtipsy
techtipsy, now hosted on k-space!
This site is now hosted on infrastructure provided by k-space, a friendly hackerspace in Tallinn,...
a year ago
This site is now hosted on infrastructure provided by k-space, a friendly hackerspace in Tallinn, Estonia.
If you’ve been reading any of my previous posts, you might be wondering why I made that move, especially since I was
quite proud of hosting my website over a residential...
Birchtree
Apple’s 2024 report card: iPhone 📱
This is the first in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2024 across their major product lines. I...
a week ago
This is the first in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2024 across their major product lines. I did this last year and you can read last year’s iPhone report card here.
iPhone 16 Pro
I really, really liked the 15 Pro lineup, and I would
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...
Property-Based Testing Is Fuzzing
“Property-based testing” refers to the idea of writing statements that should be true of your code...
over a year ago
“Property-based testing” refers to the idea of writing statements that should be true of your code (“properties”), and then using automated tooling to generate test inputs (typically, randomly-generated inputs of an appropriate type), and observe whether the properties hold for...
Engineers Need Art
Move Fast and Abandon Things
For every shareware game I released in the 1990's, another four were partially written but put aside...
3 months ago
For every shareware game I released in the 1990's, another four were partially written but put aside and abandoned.
Good Enough
Beware of Free Software
Beware of free pizza
If I want a slice of pizza, I don't expect it to be free. In fact, if you try...
a year ago
Beware of free pizza
If I want a slice of pizza, I don't expect it to be free. In fact, if you try to offer me a slice of free pizza, I'd suspect there's something wrong with it.
And ever since my kids can understand me, I've taught them to be careful of free stuff. Nothing is...
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.
Nabeel S. Qureshi
Notes on Karl Popper
A woven web of guesses
over a year ago
Simply Explained
ESP32: Keep WiFi connection alive with a FreeRTOS task
I have a few ESP32's running in my house. A few of them are running 24/7 and require an always-on...
over a year ago
I have a few ESP32's running in my house. A few of them are running 24/7 and require an always-on WiFi connection. That's been quite tricky to implement. I used to include various checks throughout my code, but that's not scalable.What I need is something running in the...
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