Posts on Made of...
A Cursed Bug
In my day job at Anthropic, we run relatively large distributed systems to train large language...
over a year ago
In my day job at Anthropic, we run relatively large distributed systems to train large language models. One of the joys of using a lot of computing resources, especially on somewhat niche software stacks, is that you spend a lot of time running into the long-tail of bugs which...
Willem's Blog
Optical vs chest strap heart rate monitors
Understanding the differences in common HR monitors used in wearables, smartwatches and fitness...
over a year ago
Understanding the differences in common HR monitors used in wearables, smartwatches and fitness trackers
somenice
CBC Spark with Nora Young
Really upset to recently learn that Spark with Nora Young has been cancelled by the CBC, ending in...
6 months ago
Really upset to recently learn that Spark with Nora Young has been cancelled by the CBC, ending in June 2024. (Announcement episode) One of the most intelligent, progressive technology-in-society news shows in Canada or anywhere for that matter. Perhaps that it’s medium is radio...
Willem's Blog
Fighting backscatter spam at server level
Deal with backscatter spam by implementing a stringent SMTP delivery policy at MTA level.
over a year ago
Deal with backscatter spam by implementing a stringent SMTP delivery policy at MTA level.
Applied Cartography
Notes on Zed, revisited
A little over six months ago, I wrote Notes on Zed. My conclusion at that time was that Zed made a...
2 months ago
A little over six months ago, I wrote Notes on Zed. My conclusion at that time was that Zed made a lot of great choices and felt really good to use, but lacked parity with VS Code's feature/ecosystem to its detriment.
Six months later, I spent a few days using it as my daily...
On Life and Lisp
Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1
For years, the M1 has only supported OpenGL 4.1. That changes today –
with our release of full...
10 months ago
For years, the M1 has only supported OpenGL 4.1. That changes today –
with our release of full OpenGL® 4.6 and OpenGL® ES 3.2! Install Fedora for the latest
M1/M2-series drivers.
Already installed? Just dnf –refresh
upgrade.
Unlike the vendor’s non-conformant 4.1 drivers, our...
Simply Explained
Retrospective: 4 years on YouTube
Every year I sit down and take a look at how my YouTube channel has been doing. I reflect, evaluate,...
over a year ago
Every year I sit down and take a look at how my YouTube channel has been doing. I reflect, evaluate, and set goals for the coming year. This year is no exception. January 13th, 2020, marks my fourth year on YouTube. Time to do a little retrospective.
computers are bad
2024-12-04 operators on the front
At the very core of telephone history, there is the telephone operator. For a
lot of people, the...
2 weeks ago
At the very core of telephone history, there is the telephone operator. For a
lot of people, the vague understanding that an operator used to be involved is
the main thing they know about historic telephony. Of course, telephone
historians, as a group, tend to be much more...
Willem's Blog
Tablet as main computer
I have been using a tablet as my main computer for quite some time now. In this blog post I share...
over a year ago
I have been using a tablet as my main computer for quite some time now. In this blog post I share you my experience on using Surface Pro and iPad Pro to get my work done.
Jonas Hietala
Vacation
Finally back from a 2 week vacation up at Övertorneå. It’s been pretty great to be taken care of and...
over a year ago
Finally back from a 2 week vacation up at Övertorneå. It’s been pretty great to be taken care of and not doing anything. Well, I did get my ass kicked in Terra Mystica and I played a bit of Minecraft, but still. We got some nice food and my in-laws and my parents were nice.
I’m...
computers are bad
2024-06-08 dmv.org
The majority of US states have something called a "Department of Motor
Vehicles," or DMV. Actually,...
6 months ago
The majority of US states have something called a "Department of Motor
Vehicles," or DMV. Actually, the universality of the term "DMV" seems to be
overstated. A more general term is "motor vehicle administrator," used for
example by the American Association of Motor Vehicle...
Home on Erik...
Approximate nearest news
As you may know, one of my (very geeky) interests is Approximate nearest neigbor methods, and I'm...
over a year ago
As you may know, one of my (very geeky) interests is Approximate nearest neigbor methods, and I'm the author of a Python package called Annoy.
I've also built a benchmark suite called ann-benchmarks to compare different packages.
Simply Explained
Tracking gas usage with ESPHome, Home Assistant, and TCRT5000
In 2019, I built an energy monitor to keep track of our electricity consumption. Then, in 2021, Home...
over a year ago
In 2019, I built an energy monitor to keep track of our electricity consumption. Then, in 2021, Home Assistant added an Energy Management feature that keeps track of electricity and gas usage. So naturally, I had to make my gas meter smart as well.
Applied Cartography
Notes from April
Welcome to spring, bona fide and humid. Lots of writing this month:
I wrote about spending the past...
7 months ago
Welcome to spring, bona fide and humid. Lots of writing this month:
I wrote about spending the past two years as an independent technologist.
On the media side of things: brief words on Murderville (meh), The Parallax View (incredible), This is Personal (meh), Cribsheet...
Home on Erik...
Presentation about Luigi
I like the editing!
over a year ago
Good Enough
TIL: Listen for JavaScript events only once!
A common thing I find myself doing in Javascript is adding some event driven behavior that I only...
a year ago
A common thing I find myself doing in Javascript is adding some event driven behavior that I only want to happen once. Let’s say I have a big button that starts the process of lowering a certain spy into a pool of certain doom — I don’t want a second button press to awkwardly...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Halo and more: exploring incremental verification and SNARKs without pairings
over a year ago
Home on Erik...
Mortality statistics and Sweden's "dry tinder" effect
We live in a year of about 350,000 amateur epidemiologists and I have no desire to join that “club”....
over a year ago
We live in a year of about 350,000 amateur epidemiologists and I have no desire to join that “club”. But I read something about COVID-19 deaths that I thought was interesting and wanted to see if I could replicated it through data.
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...
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...
Posts on Made of...
Record/Replay testing in Sorbet
In 2017 and 2018, I (along with Paul Tarjan and Dmitry Petrashko) was a founding member of the...
over a year ago
In 2017 and 2018, I (along with Paul Tarjan and Dmitry Petrashko) was a founding member of the Sorbet project at Stripe to build a gradual static typechecking system for Ruby, with the aim of enhancing productivity on Stripe’s millions of lines of Ruby, and eventually producing a...
Simply Explained
Preventing Cumulative Layout Shifts with lazy loaded images (Eleventy + markdown-it)
There's nothing more annoying than a website shifting down just as you're about to click on a button...
over a year ago
There's nothing more annoying than a website shifting down just as you're about to click on a button or link. This is called a layout shift, and Google has declared war on them. They've added layout shifts to the Core Web Vitals, and if your website has a lot of them, it will get...
Style over Substance
My Home Assistant setup (2023 edition)
For the past few years, I have been running Home Assistant to make my apartment a smart home. It’s...
a year ago
For the past few years, I have been running Home Assistant to make my apartment a smart home. It’s become such a hobby of mine that I’ve even started coding add-ons for it. While there are other popular automation platforms, Home Assistant’s versatility blows the rest out of the...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 4: The Verge
2 months ago
Electronics etc…
Hideo Okawara’s Mixed Signal Lecture Series
Introduction
Hideo Okawara’s Mixed Signal Lecture Series
Frequency/Phase Movement Analysis by...
11 months ago
Introduction
Hideo Okawara’s Mixed Signal Lecture Series
Frequency/Phase Movement Analysis by Orthogonal Demodulation
Misc
Introduction
While researching a DSP related topic, Google dug up an excellent article,
written by Hideo Okawara, that is just one part of a series of ~53. I...
Applied Cartography
Stripe Sessions 2024
Stripe held the keynote for Sessions, their annual WWDC/re:invent-esque conference, this morning. I...
8 months ago
Stripe held the keynote for Sessions, their annual WWDC/re:invent-esque conference, this morning. I wanted to jot down some thoughts while they’re still fresh. (I think the changelog is the best way to poke around both the changes I’m writing about and the ones that I...
Applied Cartography
Gosling’s Old Rum
Virginia has draconian liquor laws, which means I have to get interesting bottles shipped from...
10 months ago
Virginia has draconian liquor laws, which means I have to get interesting bottles shipped from [REDACTED], a site on which I am very prone to judging a book by its cover; every month I'll end up purchasing a bottle of something purely because it looks interesting and I can...
Arduino Blog
This small device enables users to feel braille through haptics
For the visually impaired community, most of their interactions on mobile phones are confined to...
7 months ago
For the visually impaired community, most of their interactions on mobile phones are confined to text-to-speech (TTS) interfaces that read portions of the screen aloud. Dynamic braille displays also exist as a tactile means of communication, but their prices can get close to...
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...
3 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...
Arduino Blog
Check out these Arduino-powered research projects from CHI 2024
Held in Hawaii this year, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) hosted its annual conference...
6 months ago
Held in Hawaii this year, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) hosted its annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) that focuses on the latest developments in human-computer interaction. Students from universities all across the world attended the...
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).
Jonas Hietala
How I did the layout for my self-published book
This is a rundown of how I typeset and laid out my self-published book for the web version, the EPUB...
10 months ago
This is a rundown of how I typeset and laid out my self-published book for the web version, the EPUB version, and the printed version.
I was planning to include many more details, but the project took a lot longer than planned so I’ve forgotten some things.
Web page
I started...
Jonas Hietala
Postmortem: A Geek Valentine
Ah man the mush in my brain is finally letting go and I’m starting to feel this tiny little...
over a year ago
Ah man the mush in my brain is finally letting go and I’m starting to feel this tiny little programming urge again… This time it’s not Haskell or a new experimental game that’s luring me on, no this time it’s me longing to create this fantastic awesome epic RTS game. Sadly it’s a...
Matt Mullenweg
Cloudflare Stories
There are two great Cloudflare-related stories published this weekend. The first is Steven Levy’s...
2 months ago
There are two great Cloudflare-related stories published this weekend. The first is Steven Levy’s incredible story about Tim Jenkin, who created a secure communication protocol for the African National Congress to overthrow the apartheid regime in South Africa. Cloudflare’s CTO,...
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...
Posts on Made of...
Navigating the Linux Kernel
In response to my query last time, ezyang asked for any tips or tricks I have for finding my way...
over a year ago
In response to my query last time, ezyang asked for any tips or tricks I have for finding my way around the Linux kernel. I’m not sure I have much in the way of systematic advice for tracking down the answers to questions about the Linux kernel, but thinking about what I do when...
Vitalik Buterin's...
From prediction markets to info finance
a month ago
Simply Explained
Why I don't take sponsorships
Last year I made that video in response to a sponsorship offer that I got from various VPN...
over a year ago
Last year I made that video in response to a sponsorship offer that I got from various VPN providers. They all told me the same thing: our service is the best way to protect your privacy, and we were hoping you could convey this message in one of your videos.So I decided to do...
Willem's Blog
Refining my tablet OS experience
Installing Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go 2 with LTE/4G to replace my iPad Pro as daily driver.
over a year ago
Installing Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go 2 with LTE/4G to replace my iPad Pro as daily driver.
Jonas Hietala
Long Term Goals
I have a lot of things I want to do. Right now I want to go to the kids training tomorrow and also...
over a year ago
I have a lot of things I want to do. Right now I want to go to the kids training tomorrow and also to our training time. I haven’t trained a lot lately so it feels good to do something again and training the kids is very rewarding. On Monday I have the next graph theory lecture...
Jonas Hietala
Microfeatures in my blog
xkcd: Nerd sniping
A while I ago I encountered a blog post called Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and...
5 months ago
xkcd: Nerd sniping
A while I ago I encountered a blog post called Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites, and together with the related Hacker News discussion I got nerd sniped.
(I spent more time than I care to admit implementing new and exciting microfeatures for...
Applied Cartography
Incumbency
Andrew Rea with an interesting and increasingly familiar take about how AI will disrupt...
5 months ago
Andrew Rea with an interesting and increasingly familiar take about how AI will disrupt software-focused private equity:
Distribution and brand moats can protect your legacy products for a while (esp in enterprise) but eventually you get lapped by competitors with better...
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!
Arduino Blog
Making fire detection more accurate with ML sensor fusion
The mere presence of a flame in a controlled environment, such as a candle, is perfectly acceptable,...
4 months ago
The mere presence of a flame in a controlled environment, such as a candle, is perfectly acceptable, but when tasked with determining if there is cause for alarm solely using vision data, embedded AI models can struggle with false positives. Solomon Githu’s project aims to lower...
Yazin Alirhayim
Braindump
Been having a hard time lately focusing.
It’s like whenever I start doing anything of any...
over a year ago
Been having a hard time lately focusing.
It’s like whenever I start doing anything of any significance I get derailed, and fall into this spiral of thought where I reconsider whether what I’m about to do matters, why it would, and whether I could be doing something else that...
Buck on Software
Category velocity
People make decisions, not businesses.
over a year ago
People make decisions, not businesses.
Vitalik Buterin's...
A Guide to 99% Fault Tolerant Consensus
over a year ago
Willem's Blog
Designing my own watch
Last month I received my custom made wristwatch from Switzerland, it is a minimalistic mechanical...
over a year ago
Last month I received my custom made wristwatch from Switzerland, it is a minimalistic mechanical annual calendar designed to be understated and true to the metal.
Abort Retry Fail
The History of the IBM 5100
IBM's First Personal Computer
a year ago
IBM's First Personal Computer
Arduino Blog
Vintage rotary phone becomes stylish kitchen timer
It seems like everything that happens in a kitchen requires exact timing. Whisk the batter for three...
6 months ago
It seems like everything that happens in a kitchen requires exact timing. Whisk the batter for three minutes, knead the dough for 15 minutes, bake for 30 minutes, and so on. A timer is a necessity for cooking and baking, but there is no reason you need to use your phone or a...
Arduino Blog
Why is STEAM education important for kids? 6 activity tips
School’s out for summer – at least for most of us. While the majority of children (and teachers!)...
5 months ago
School’s out for summer – at least for most of us. While the majority of children (and teachers!) will probably be breathing a huge sigh of relief, parents face a new challenge: how to keep kids engaged during the long break. Of course, downtime is important, but there are also...
computers are bad
2024-08-19 mining for meteors
Billboards
Route 66 is often viewed through the lens of its billboards. The Jack Rabbit
Trading...
4 months ago
Billboards
Route 66 is often viewed through the lens of its billboards. The Jack Rabbit
Trading Post, a small store a few miles out of Joseph City, would hardly be
remembered were it not for its billboards spanning four states. The tradition
of far-advance billboards is still...
Arduino Blog
Turn your old Android smartphone into an Arduino screen with the RemoteXY app
Each component you add to your Arduino project increases its complexity and the opportunity for...
5 days ago
Each component you add to your Arduino project increases its complexity and the opportunity for mistakes. But most projects require some “auxiliary” hardware — components that you use to interact with the Arduino or to help it do the job you’re asking of it. Buttons and displays...
Home on Erik...
Books I read in 2015
Early last year when I left Spotify I decided to do more reading. I was planning to read at least...
over a year ago
Early last year when I left Spotify I decided to do more reading. I was planning to read at least one book per week and in particular I wanted to brush up on management, economics, and technology.
Jonas Hietala
2016 Read Books
Yeah so I managed to not read a single fiction book this year. To compensate and make myself feel...
over a year ago
Yeah so I managed to not read a single fiction book this year. To compensate and make myself feel better I’ll add in some new mangas I’ve read, but I may may have missed some.
Fiction
Crickets
Non-Fiction
Getting to Yes
Relax into Stretch
Thinking, Fast and Slow
59 seconds
The...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Two thought experiments to evaluate automated stablecoins
over a year ago
lcamtuf’s thing
The serious science of trolling LLMs
The internet's oldest pastime finally has a purpose -- and it's more serious than AI companies would...
5 months ago
The internet's oldest pastime finally has a purpose -- and it's more serious than AI companies would like to admit.
computers are bad
2023-09-03 plastic money
You will sometimes hear someone say, in a loose conceptual sense, that credit
cards have money in...
a year ago
You will sometimes hear someone say, in a loose conceptual sense, that credit
cards have money in them. Of course we know that that isn't the case; our
modern plastic card payment network relies on online transactions where the
balance tracking and authorization decisions happen...
Matt Blewitt
Corporate Legibility for Software Engineers
Corporate legibility is the art of making tasks, and their outcomes, easier to understand for those...
over a year ago
Corporate legibility is the art of making tasks, and their outcomes, easier to understand for those not directly involved. I’ll help you understand why this is an important thing to be aware of and how to use it to help your career.
Willem's Blog
Around town in an electric car
For one week I drove the electric Smart EQ fortwo in and around town. I found out what it's like to...
over a year ago
For one week I drove the electric Smart EQ fortwo in and around town. I found out what it's like to drive electrically: fun!
Notes on software...
Tail call elimination
In this post we'll explore what tail calls are, why they are useful,
and how they can be eliminated...
over a year ago
In this post we'll explore what tail calls are, why they are useful,
and how they can be eliminated in an interpreter, a compiler targeting
C++, and a compiler targeting LLVM IR.
Tail calls
A tail call is a function call made at the end of a block that
returns the value of the...
On Life and Lisp
Software freedom isn't about licenses -- it's about power.
A restrictive end-user license agreement is one way a company can exert power over the user. When...
over a year ago
A restrictive end-user license agreement is one way a company can exert power over the user. When the free software movement was founded thirty years ago, these restrictive licenses were the primary user-hostile power dynamic, so permissive and copyleft licenses emerged as...
Louwrentius
'A Moment Of Silence: OpenSolaris Is Dead'
The last release of OpenSolaris dates back to July 2009. The next release was
scheduled for March...
over a year ago
The last release of OpenSolaris dates back to July 2009. The next release was
scheduled for March 2010, but Oracle did not release anything. It is dead
silent around OpenSolaris.
On 12 July 2010, the OpenSolaris Government Board sent out an ultimatum
to Oracle: "please...
Jonas Hietala
The current Cybershard layout
This is the keyboard layout I’m using for my custom keyboard that I generated, printed, and...
3 weeks ago
This is the keyboard layout I’m using for my custom keyboard that I generated, printed, and hand-wired.
It’s a minimalistic keyboard of 35 keys and features an integrated trackball on the right-hand side.
The keyboard layout started out as a direct copy of the T-34 keyboard...
Birchtree
I’m Knee-Deep in Turkey
Another week, another fantastically fun episode of Comfort Zone! This week Niléane talked about her...
2 weeks ago
Another week, another fantastically fun episode of Comfort Zone! This week Niléane talked about her new Flight Simulator obsession, we go on a tangent about PC gaming, Chris (who says he’s an iPad guy) brings another Mac to talk about, and I had the gang look
Old Vintage...
Niklaus Wirth dies
Reported yesterday. The first computer program I remember in school was Apple Presents Apple, which...
11 months ago
Reported yesterday. The first computer program I remember in school was Apple Presents Apple, which was written in UCSD Pascal; the first actual compiler I ever used was Turbo Pascal 5.5 (purloined from a campus NetWare server), and the first actual compiler I ever used on the...
Jonas Hietala
fish_update_completions in Slackware 14.1
I’ve been trying out fish shell lately. A cool feature with fish is that it can automatically...
over a year ago
I’ve been trying out fish shell lately. A cool feature with fish is that it can automatically generate completions by parsing the installed man pages by running fish_update_completions.
Unfortunately this is what I got:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File...
./techtipsy
The hidden media play/pause/stop keys on the Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga
ThinkPad keyboards were once well known for their great layouts, feel and
functionality. This...
7 months ago
ThinkPad keyboards were once well known for their great layouts, feel and
functionality. This included the media playback control keys.
On the ThinkPad T430, the new chiclet keyboard layout moved the media keys to
the function row. Still there, but less convenient to access.
The...
./techtipsy
Self-hosting Wikipedia using Kiwix
Do you have a need to host Wikipedia on your computer?
Or a StackExchange site, like Super...
over a year ago
Do you have a need to host Wikipedia on your computer?
Or a StackExchange site, like Super User?
It’s easier than you think!
Step 1: download stuff!
The Kiwix project provides ZIM files for many popular websites, including Wikipedia.
These files can be downloaded over at Kiwix...
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...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993,
a chip
to "separate the really power-hungry...
5 months ago
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993,
a chip
to "separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals."
The original Pentium was followed by the Pentium Pro, the Pentium II, and others, spawning a long-running brand of high-performance processors, Intel's...
Construction Physics
Will the China Cycle Come for Airbus and Boeing?
Noah Smith, author of the economics Substack Noahpinion, often refers to a common trajectory in...
2 months ago
Noah Smith, author of the economics Substack Noahpinion, often refers to a common trajectory in Chinese manufacturing as the “China Cycle”:
Notes on software...
Zig, Rust, and other languages
Having worked a bit in Zig, Rust, Go and now C, I think there are a
few common topics worth having a...
9 months ago
Having worked a bit in Zig, Rust, Go and now C, I think there are a
few common topics worth having a fresh conversation on: automatic
memory management, the standard library, and explicit allocation.
Zig is not a mature language. But it has made enough useful choices
for a number...
Willem's Blog
Google Analytics vs AWStats
Comparing Google Analytics with AWStats to find out where they differ and which is better.
over a year ago
Comparing Google Analytics with AWStats to find out where they differ and which is better.
Computer Ads from...
Plus Post: Rockwell AIM 65
The Company Rockwell International has been around for quite a while. Willard Rockwell started the...
7 months ago
The Company Rockwell International has been around for quite a while. Willard Rockwell started the company in 1919 to sell a newly designed truck axle bearing. Over the years, Rockwell acquired businesses in many different fields, including defense, industrial electronics,...
Louwrentius
Why I Do Use ZFS as a File System for My NAS
On February 2011, I posted an article about my motivations why I did not use ZFS as a file system...
over a year ago
On February 2011, I posted an article about my motivations why I did not use ZFS as a file system for my 18 TB NAS.
You have to understand that at the time, I believe the arguments in the article were relevant, but much has changed since then, and I do believe this article is...
Gwern.net Newsletter
May Gwern.net Newsletter
Link compilation newsletter with anime GAN updates, links on AI scaling, discussion of GPT-3, and 1...
over a year ago
Link compilation newsletter with anime GAN updates, links on AI scaling, discussion of GPT-3, and 1 book review.
Louwrentius
Improving iSCSI Native Multi Pathing Round Robin performance
10 Gb ethernet is still quite expensive. You not only need to buy appropriate NICS, but you must...
over a year ago
10 Gb ethernet is still quite expensive. You not only need to buy appropriate NICS, but you must also upgrade your network hardware as well. You may even need to replace existing fiber optic cabling if it's not rated for 10 Gbit.
So I decided to still just go for plain old 1...
Good Enough
Good Enough Marketing: The Preparation
We have a couple of exciting projects—Guestbook! Yay.Boo!—that we want to share with the world. But...
a year ago
We have a couple of exciting projects—Guestbook! Yay.Boo!—that we want to share with the world. But that’s a difficult task for us because, honestly, we’re terrible not good at self-promotion. We’d rather spend time making things than talking about the things we’ve made.
We’d...
Jonas Hietala
Minor site updates
As it happens I got a little tired of the syntax highlighter Pandoc uses so on a whim I started...
over a year ago
As it happens I got a little tired of the syntax highlighter Pandoc uses so on a whim I started looking at moving to Pygments as my highlighter. With some searching around I found a blog post about just that! That’s lucky because while I like Haskell, I’ve never really grocked it...
Notes on software...
Leaders, you need to share organization success stories more frequently
This post goes out to anyone who leads a team: managers, directors,
VPs, executives. You need to...
over a year ago
This post goes out to anyone who leads a team: managers, directors,
VPs, executives. You need to share organization success stories with
your organization on a regular and frequent basis. Talk about sales
wins, talk about new services released, talk about the positive impact
of a...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
over a year ago
Push to Prod
Making an AB Test Allocator 20x Faster Using Non-blocking IO
Many moons ago, I inherited a cross-company AB test and had to figure out how to allocate it...
a month ago
Many moons ago, I inherited a cross-company AB test and had to figure out how to allocate it effectively.
Jonas Hietala
The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros
Aaah feels good having a game ready after the last month’s failure! This time it’s a small...
over a year ago
Aaah feels good having a game ready after the last month’s failure! This time it’s a small shooter.
The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afro
Bullet masher - can you keep up with 100 enemies at the screen?
Instruction
W: up
Credits
Music: The Last Prophecy - Matthew Le Blanc...
Jonas Hietala
2021 in review
A new year is always a good time to review the past year. Funny how this is already the 12th year...
over a year ago
A new year is always a good time to review the past year. Funny how this is already the 12th year I’ve done this kind of quick review… Time sure flies.
2021 Non-Geek Achievements
Started strength training using a strength coach from Kabuki.
I got inspired by the book Peak that...
Yazin Alirhayim
The Meem app: it sucks
If you’re a “digital only” bank like Meem, the app your customers use is all they see: it’s like a...
over a year ago
If you’re a “digital only” bank like Meem, the app your customers use is all they see: it’s like a virtual 🏦 branch.
That’s fitting, because you know what my impression of meem is as a user? When I open up their app, it feels like walking into a crowded butcher shop, with...
Odds and Ends of...
Odds and Ends #42: An Elizabeth Line extension, some mad planning law nonsense, and the world's most...
Your regular round-up of interesting links
a month ago
Your regular round-up of interesting links
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...
Posts on Made of...
Transformers for software engineers
Ever since its introduction in the 2017 paper, Attention is All You Need, the Transformer model...
over a year ago
Ever since its introduction in the 2017 paper, Attention is All You Need, the Transformer model architecture has taken the deep-learning world by storm. Initially introduced for machine translation, it has become the tool of choice for a wide range of domains, including text,...
./techtipsy
ThinkPad as a server: the follow-up
It’s been a while since I last wrote about my ThinkPad T430 that was tasked with being a home...
a year ago
It’s been a while since I last wrote about my ThinkPad T430 that was tasked with being a home server.
After doing some experiments with my setup a couple of times, it is once again the main server for all my self-hosting
needs. However, this time I have made some...
computers are bad
2024-12-11 travelers information stations
Histories of radio broadcasting often make a particular focus on the most
powerful stations. For...
a week ago
Histories of radio broadcasting often make a particular focus on the most
powerful stations. For historic reasons, WBCT of Grand Rapids, Michigan
broadcasts FM at 320¸000 watts. Many AM stations are licensed to operate at
50,000 watts, but this modern license limit represented a...
Home on Erik...
We are still early with the cloud: why software development is overdue for a change
This is is in many respects a successor to a blog post I wrote last year about what I want from...
over a year ago
This is is in many respects a successor to a blog post I wrote last year about what I want from software infrastructure, but the ideas morphed in my head into something sort of wider.
Applied Cartography
Applied Cartography × Val Town
Had a blast live-coding some experimentations with Steve and Shovel yesterday using Val Town. (If...
a month ago
Had a blast live-coding some experimentations with Steve and Shovel yesterday using Val Town. (If you haven't used Val, well, watch the stream — think live, zero-deploy code snippets that can be arbitrarily extended and executed.)
Reflecting on the experience, the most exciting...
Simply Explained
Howto Virtualize Unraid on a Proxmox host
Here's how to run Unraid as a virtual machine under Proxmox. This is useful when you're already...
over a year ago
Here's how to run Unraid as a virtual machine under Proxmox. This is useful when you're already using Proxmox and if you want to use Unraid as a NAS.
Louwrentius
20 disk 18 TB RAID 6 storage based on Debian Linux
This system is no longer operational and has been decomissioned (2017)
This is my NAS storage server...
over a year ago
This system is no longer operational and has been decomissioned (2017)
This is my NAS storage server based on Debian Linux. It uses software RAID and 20 one
terrabyte hard drives. It provides a total usable storage capacity of 18 terrabytes in a single RAID 6 array.
One of the...
Jonas Hietala
Friend of the Tree
I just noticed I was recognized as a friend of the tree in a weekly meeting by the rust team. It...
over a year ago
I just noticed I was recognized as a friend of the tree in a weekly meeting by the rust team. It came during my documentation sprint during IDA Summer of Code and I discovered it now, only two and a half month later. Still a very pleasant surprise!
Notes on software...
Finishing up a FreeBSD experiment
I've been using FreeBSD as my daily driver at work since
December. I've successfully done my job and...
over a year ago
I've been using FreeBSD as my daily driver at work since
December. I've successfully done my job and I've learned a hell of a
lot forcing myself on CURRENT... But there's been a number of issues
with it that have made it difficult to keep using, so I replaced it
with Arch Linux...
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.
Louwrentius
How to run victron veconfigure on a mac
Introduction
Victron Multiplus-II inverter/charges are configured with the veconfigure1 tool....
9 months ago
Introduction
Victron Multiplus-II inverter/charges are configured with the veconfigure1 tool. Unforntunately this is a Windows-only tool, but there is still a way for Apple users to run this tool without any problems.
Tip: if you've never worked with the Terminal app on MacOS, it...
Neil Madden
Multiple input MACs
When working with Message Authentication Codes (MACs), you often need to authenticate not just a...
over a year ago
When working with Message Authentication Codes (MACs), you often need to authenticate not just a single string, but multiple fields of data. For example, when creating an authenticated encryption mode by composing a cipher and a MAC (like AES-CBC and HMAC), you need to ensure the...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Talking to memory: Inside the Intel 8088 processor's bus interface state machine
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor.
IBM's...
7 months ago
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor.
IBM's decision to use the 8088 processor in the IBM PC (1981) was a critical point in computer history,
leading to the success of the x86 architecture.
The designers of the IBM PC selected...
Willem's Blog
Flying in a C47-A (DC-3) classic plane
Flying in a C47-A Skytrain over The Netherlands is one magnificent birthday gift I received,...
over a year ago
Flying in a C47-A Skytrain over The Netherlands is one magnificent birthday gift I received, experiencing aviation history unlike anything else!
./techtipsy
My attempt at archiving nfscars.net
Background
My mother once had a laptop: the Compaq Armada 1592DT. It came with Windows ME which...
over a year ago
Background
My mother once had a laptop: the Compaq Armada 1592DT. It came with Windows ME which later got “upgraded” to Windows 98 SE
after I managed to completely screw up the OS, a whopping 96MB of RAM and a hard drive that probably wasn’t much larger
than 1-3GB. It wasn’t...
Willem's Blog
Business in a bag
After much testing I have selected a bag and set of cases to fit my entire business, wherever I go.
over a year ago
After much testing I have selected a bag and set of cases to fit my entire business, wherever I go.
Vitalik Buterin's...
A Philosophy of Blockchain Validation
over a year ago
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...
computers are bad
2024-01-31 multi-channel audio part 2
Last time, we left off at the fact that modern films are distributed with their
audio in multiple...
10 months ago
Last time, we left off at the fact that modern films are distributed with their
audio in multiple formats. Most of the time, there is a stereo version of the
audio, and a multi-channel version of the audio that is perhaps 5.1 or 7.1 and
compressed using one of several codecs that...
anderegg.ca
More details on Bluesky’s subscription plan
Update: I had missed this, but the Bluesky team had already announced a subscription model was on...
2 weeks ago
Update: I had missed this, but the Bluesky team had already announced a subscription model was on the way. I had written this article assuming that was the news. What is new is the work happening on their official apps, which contains details on features and potential pricing. An...
Arduino Blog
Transform trash into treasure with the DIY Bottle Plotter
Manufacturers put a lot of effort into their packaging (there is an entire engineering discipline...
3 months ago
Manufacturers put a lot of effort into their packaging (there is an entire engineering discipline just for that) and some of it can be quite beautiful. But it usually still ends up in the landfill or, at best, in a recycling center. However, if you’re the type of person who can...
Jonas Hietala
The Decline of FPS Games
I read an article about the decline of FPS games and it made me think a bit. When was the last time...
over a year ago
I read an article about the decline of FPS games and it made me think a bit. When was the last time I actually enjoyed an FPS game? I installed old Deus Ex a while ago but it’s what 12 years old? Team Fortress was okay, the one or two times I tried it, but I can’t say I truly...
Jonas Hietala
2012 Read Books
I read a post, sadly lost the link, where the author had recorded all books she had read during the...
over a year ago
I read a post, sadly lost the link, where the author had recorded all books she had read during the year and I thought it’d be pretty fun to do. So here goes, in a mostly ordered list.
The Art of Learning - Josh Waitzkin
Världens Whiskey
More of a reference book.
Linear Algebra...
Jonas Hietala
August theme: Bare Minimum
This time I’ll be following my inspiring site and declare Bare Minimum as the theme for my next...
over a year ago
This time I’ll be following my inspiring site and declare Bare Minimum as the theme for my next game. This could really be anything, from graphics to user interaction… But I’ve got an idea. It’ll be a real challange for me to make but hopefully I’ll have a game in a few weeks...
Vitalik Buterin's...
What do I think about biometric proof of personhood?
a year ago
Jonas Hietala
CS:GO AWP Nerf
When this man opens his mouth, truth comes out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsFnJYJ2buU
If I...
over a year ago
When this man opens his mouth, truth comes out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsFnJYJ2buU
If I ever make a game and I want someone to balance it and I had the money, I would hire Thorin.
computers are bad
2024-07-20 minuteman missile communications
A programming note: I am looking at making some changes to how I host things
like Computers Are Bad...
5 months ago
A programming note: I am looking at making some changes to how I host things
like Computers Are Bad and wikimap that are going to
involve a lot more recurring expense. For that and other reasons, I want to see
if y'all would be willing to throw some money my way. If everyone...
Vitalik Buterin's...
La Guía Incompleta de los Rollups
over a year ago
lcamtuf’s thing
The 8-bit (MCU) manifesto
Eight-bit microcontrollers aren't relics; they are a design philosophy. You might want to use them...
6 months ago
Eight-bit microcontrollers aren't relics; they are a design philosophy. You might want to use them more.
Push to Prod
Metrics Are The Map, Not The Territory
We can never obtain a complete and perfect understanding of what our systems are doing. All we have...
4 months ago
We can never obtain a complete and perfect understanding of what our systems are doing. All we have are incomplete signals to inform our theories.
Computer Ads from...
T/Maker: Tiny Software Company Takes on the Giants (Interview)
An interesting look at a company with less than 20 employees playing with the big boys
2 months ago
An interesting look at a company with less than 20 employees playing with the big boys
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...
computers are bad
2023-07-10 the tragedy of beatrice foods
Occasionally, research into the history of telephony takes you into some
strange places. There are...
a year ago
Occasionally, research into the history of telephony takes you into some
strange places. There are conspiracy theories, of course, and there are people
who insist on their version of events so incessantly that details of dates and
places can become heated arguments. There is also...
Jonas Hietala
Getting Comfortable
So I physically built the computer and now I’ve been using it a while, configuring stuff and getting...
over a year ago
So I physically built the computer and now I’ve been using it a while, configuring stuff and getting used to my new screens. I think they’re about three times wide as my old laptop and now I have this one huge vertical space which is absolutely wonderful for surfing forums and...
Christian Selig
Curing Mac mini M4 fomo with 3D printing
Spoiler: 3D printed! The colored ports really sell the effect
If you’re anything like me, you’ve...
a month ago
Spoiler: 3D printed! The colored ports really sell the effect
If you’re anything like me, you’ve found the new, tinier Mac mini to be absolutely adorable. But you might also be like me that you either already have an awesome M1 Mac mini that you have no real reason to replace,...
Notes on software...
Windows
It has been six years since I last used Windows for any remotely
serious software development. I've...
over a year ago
It has been six years since I last used Windows for any remotely
serious software development. I've used Ubuntu, Arch, or FreeBSD
since. But eventually I spent so much time working around common
workplace tasks that I decided to put Windows 10 Pro on my work
laptop.
Windows...
Home on Erik...
Fermat's principle
I was browsing around on the Internet and the physics geek in me started reading about Fermat's...
over a year ago
I was browsing around on the Internet and the physics geek in me started reading about Fermat's principle. And suddenly something came back to me that I've been trying to suppress for many years – how I never understood why there's anything fundamental about the principal of...
Willem's Blog
Riding with Omata One
If you're looking for an alternative for common cycling computers, the Omata One is something truely...
over a year ago
If you're looking for an alternative for common cycling computers, the Omata One is something truely special: it indicates your speed, distance, ascent and time ridden using mechanical hands!
Computer Ads from...
Plus Post: Quantum Software Systems Ltd's QNX
Operating Systems Come in Many Flavors But QNX Can Take the Heat
8 months ago
Operating Systems Come in Many Flavors But QNX Can Take the Heat
Arduino Blog
You can now work in collaboration in Arduino Cloud
In today’s busy world, getting students or engineers to work together is key to tackling complex IoT...
3 months ago
In today’s busy world, getting students or engineers to work together is key to tackling complex IoT projects. Traditional code sharing and editing methods, like using offline IDEs or swapping files manually, often slow down projects and lead to mistakes. This can be a hassle and...
Computer Ads from...
Comics from 1982/02 Creative Computing Mag
Time for some humor
6 months ago
Arduino Blog
Does your sample contain DNA or RNA? DIYNAFLUOR can tell you on a budget
Lab equipment is — traditionally at least — tremendously expensive. While there are understandable...
3 days ago
Lab equipment is — traditionally at least — tremendously expensive. While there are understandable reasons for those costs, they are prohibitive to anyone operating outside of a university or corporate lab. But as the “citizen science” movement has grown, we’ve seen more and more...
Christian Selig
Choosing a travel pack is hard
I love the “carry-on only” traveling style, it’s cheaper and you don’t have to worry about airlines...
7 months ago
I love the “carry-on only” traveling style, it’s cheaper and you don’t have to worry about airlines losing your stuff. Outside of requiring a bit more planning, what’s not to love?
Turns out this is a beloved product category with a passionate community behind it, and as a result...
Birchtree
My default apps of 2024
Last year I was the 27th of four hundred and freaking eight people to write about their default...
6 hours ago
Last year I was the 27th of four hundred and freaking eight people to write about their default apps, and I though it would be fun to turn this into a tradition and revisit the list to see if anything has changed since last year.
✨ next to each change
watchTowr Labs -...
“To live is to fight, to fight is to live! - IBM ODM Remote Code Execution
In previous blogs, we’ve discussed some of the big players in the enterprise software space, but...
10 months ago
In previous blogs, we’ve discussed some of the big players in the enterprise software space, but there is one that we have not mentioned before, that is - quite frankly - the heavy-weight champion of the world in terms of applications for large enterprises. With over a hundred
Matt Blewitt
Regular Restarts Are Good, Actually
Anecdotally, one of the more maligned features of the Heroku platform are the 24-hour limits on...
a month ago
Anecdotally, one of the more maligned features of the Heroku platform are the 24-hour limits on compute units, known as “dynos”. This is actually a good thing, but very misunderstood.
Willem's Blog
Snake '97 High Scores
Happily accepting the invitation to attend an exhibition of Snake 97 art works in Antwerp. This was...
over a year ago
Happily accepting the invitation to attend an exhibition of Snake 97 art works in Antwerp. This was totally WOW!
Arduino Blog
Two NEW Arduino Plug and Make Kit projects recreate iconic vintage games
The Plug and Make Kit is a toolbox you can use for infinite ideas. So what happens if you ask a mix...
3 months ago
The Plug and Make Kit is a toolbox you can use for infinite ideas. So what happens if you ask a mix of Arduino designers, engineers, and managers to sit down and brainstorm new ideas to have fun with it? Well, at least one of them is guaranteed to come up with an adorable,...
Jonas Hietala
Plans for Summer of Code
My first summer job is now over, and after a weekend of rest, it is now time to plan for my second...
over a year ago
My first summer job is now over, and after a weekend of rest, it is now time to plan for my second summer job: IDA Summer of Code.
I will work a month, or 4 weeks, with contributing to rust! The only issue is, I have no idea where to start. I didn’t have a strict plan or a vision...
Willem's Blog
Saving a MacBook Air with exploded battery
Saving a MacBook Air with a swollen battery pack.
over a year ago
Saving a MacBook Air with a swollen battery pack.
Vitalik Buterin's...
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge
2 months ago
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...
Posts on Made of...
Test suites as classifiers
Suppose we have some codebase we’re considering applying some patch to, and which has a robust and...
over a year ago
Suppose we have some codebase we’re considering applying some patch to, and which has a robust and maintained test suite.
Considering the patch, we may ask, is this patch acceptable to apply and deploy. By this we mean to ask if the patch breaks any important functionality,...
Notes on software...
Interpreting TypeScript
In addition to providing a static type system and compiler for a
superset of JavaScript, TypeScript...
over a year ago
In addition to providing a static type system and compiler for a
superset of JavaScript, TypeScript makes much of its functionality
available programmatically. In this post we'll use the TypeScript
compiler API to build an interpreter. We'll build off of a...
computers are bad
2024-08-31 ipmi
I am making steady progress towards moving the Computers Are Bad enterprise
cloud to its new home,...
3 months ago
I am making steady progress towards moving the Computers Are Bad enterprise
cloud to its new home, here in New Mexico. One of the steps in this process is,
of course, purchasing a new server... the current Big Iron is getting rather
old (probably about a decade!) and here in...
Abort Retry Fail
The History of Commodore, Part 3
Are you keeping up with the Commodore?
a year ago
Are you keeping up with the Commodore?
Lighthouse Blog
Updates December 15: Rebranding to Lighthouse and complete redesign
a year ago
Matt Mullenweg
UH Magazine, Revisiting My Alma Mater
My father attended University of Houston, and it’s where I went to college to study political...
a week ago
My father attended University of Houston, and it’s where I went to college to study political science, I started WordPress when there, and then dropped out after two years to move to San Franisco. It was fun seeing UH Magazine feature an article about my journey from a University...
Vitalik Buterin's...
On Medium-of-Exchange Token Valuations
over a year ago
Louwrentius
ZFS RAIDZ expansion is awesome but has a small caveat
Introduction
Update April 2023:
It has been fairly quiet since the announcement of this feature.
The...
over a year ago
Introduction
Update April 2023:
It has been fairly quiet since the announcement of this feature.
The Github PR about this feature is rather stale and people are wondering what the status is and what the plans are. Meanwhile, FreeBSD has announced In February 2023 that they...
./techtipsy
The IPv6 situation on Docker is good now!
Good news, everyone! Doing IPv6 networking stuff on Docker is actually good now!
I’ve recently...
2 days ago
Good news, everyone! Doing IPv6 networking stuff on Docker is actually good now!
I’ve recently started reworking my home server setup to be more IPv6 compatible, and as part of that I learned that
during
the summer of 2024 Docker shipped an update that eliminated a
lot of the...
Arduino Blog
Get notified of impending floods with this Arduino Nano 33 IoT-based display
As climate change continues to worsen, events such as heavy rains, hurricanes, and atmospheric...
2 months ago
As climate change continues to worsen, events such as heavy rains, hurricanes, and atmospheric rivers have only intensified, and with them, large amounts of flooding that pose serious risks to life and property. Jude Pullen and Pete Milne, therefore, have responded by creating a...
Vitalik Buterin's...
My 40-liter backpack travel guide
over a year ago
Louwrentius
'Linux: obtain motherboard model / type and vendor'
If you want to know what motherboard is installed in a system, use the tool
dmidecode:
dmidecode |...
over a year ago
If you want to know what motherboard is installed in a system, use the tool
dmidecode:
dmidecode | grep -e "Manufacturer|Product" | head -n 4 | tail -n 2
The result might be something like:
Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Product Name: P5Q-EM DO
Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Travel time ~= 750 * distance ^ 0.6
a year ago
Jonas Hietala
Giving the blog a facelift
When I rewrote the blog in Rust I tried not to touch any of the styling, but some things annoyed...
a year ago
When I rewrote the blog in Rust I tried not to touch any of the styling, but some things annoyed me:
It wasn’t pretty (even ugly in some parts).
No dark mode support.
Some elements were broken, for instance images or code blocks overlapping the header when it was floating to the...
Jonas Hietala
I Made It!
It’s been over a year, but I haven’t lost (most) my touch yet! For the second time I’ve completed a...
over a year ago
It’s been over a year, but I haven’t lost (most) my touch yet! For the second time I’ve completed a Ludum Dare! Not an easy feat and yet there are tons of games that look absolutely wonderful. I’m not there yet but now I have at least gotten back into game making again, long...
Home on Erik...
More Luigi alternatives
The workflow engine battle has intensified with some more interesting entries lately! Here are a...
over a year ago
The workflow engine battle has intensified with some more interesting entries lately! Here are a couple I encountered in the last few days. I love that at least two of them are direct references to Luigi!
Computer Ads from...
The Grand Stand
Joystick Stabilizer Support & Score Enhancer
a month ago
Joystick Stabilizer Support & Score Enhancer
Old Vintage...
The W65C265SXB gets a SXY case
Don't worry — my favourite single-board computer remains the 6502-based classic MOS/Commodore KIM-1,...
a year ago
Don't worry — my favourite single-board computer remains the 6502-based classic MOS/Commodore KIM-1, and I've got some future projects in the works. But these were recently on sale on Amazon and I couldn't resist getting a little sort-of RPi-sized SBC that runs the 16-bit 65816,...
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...
computers are bad
2024-01-16 the tacnet tracker
Previously on Deep Space Nine, I wrote that "the mid-2000s were an unsettled
time in mobile...
11 months ago
Previously on Deep Space Nine, I wrote that "the mid-2000s were an unsettled
time in mobile computing."
Today, I want to share a little example. Over the last few weeks, for various
personal reasons, I have been doing a lot of reading about embedded operating
systems and ISAs for...
Good Enough
Cool Songs Don’t Die
Earlier this week, I watched the pilot episode of Alias. Yes, that Alias – the one that began airing...
a year ago
Earlier this week, I watched the pilot episode of Alias. Yes, that Alias – the one that began airing 22 years ago and ran for 5 seasons and was a pretty big hit and launched the careers of two bonafide movie stars and featured a cast of very well known supporting actors. So yeah,...
Applied Cartography
Peak Newsletter
A handful of folks sent me this quip from Nate Silver a few days ago:
Slightly against interest to...
5 months ago
A handful of folks sent me this quip from Nate Silver a few days ago:
Slightly against interest to admit this (I don't want more competition lol) but I think we're still probably a year or two away from Peak Newsletter. It's just a really good distribution mechanism for certain...
Vitalik Buterin's...
Why sharding is great: demystifying the technical properties
over a year ago
Notes on software...
Studying foreign languages with inbox zero
The only time I've been able to seriously, rapidly improve my ability
to speak a foreign language...
over a year ago
The only time I've been able to seriously, rapidly improve my ability
to speak a foreign language was through intensive language courses in
college. I was forced to actively speak, read, and write Chinese for
6-8 hours a week (1-2 hours every day). Then study another 5-10 hours
a...
Birchtree
The future simply has more computers (members post)
Glasses and headsets and computers, oh my! Why the future continues to be all about adding computers...
5 days ago
Glasses and headsets and computers, oh my! Why the future continues to be all about adding computers to our lives, not replacing anything.
Posts on Made of...
Towards solving Ultimate Tic Tac Toe
Summary: Read about my efforts to solve the game of Ultimate Tic Tac Toe. It’s been a fun journey...
over a year ago
Summary: Read about my efforts to solve the game of Ultimate Tic Tac Toe. It’s been a fun journey into interesting algorithms and high-performance parallel programming in Rust.
Backstory Starting around the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown, I’ve gotten myself deeply nerdsniped...
Applied Cartography
VC does not guarantee PMF
Two companies that I started following (with no small amount of envy) back in 2021:
Hype (fka Pico)...
a month ago
Two companies that I started following (with no small amount of envy) back in 2021:
Hype (fka Pico) sold to an MMA-themed holdco earlier this year. Raised a $4.5m seed from Stripe and Bloomberg Beta and a $10m Series A; crossed the finish line at $200K ARR after eight years.
Stir...
watchTowr Labs -...
Palo Alto - Putting The Protecc In GlobalProtect (CVE-2024-3400)
Welcome to April 2024, again. We’re back, again.
Over the weekend, we were all greeted by...
8 months ago
Welcome to April 2024, again. We’re back, again.
Over the weekend, we were all greeted by now-familiar news—a nation-state was exploiting a “sophisticated” vulnerability for full compromise in yet another enterprise-grade SSLVPN device.
We’ve seen all the commentary around the...
Willem's Blog
And... there is light!
Discover how one cyclist's quest for the perfect lighting solution led to a custom installation of...
a year ago
Discover how one cyclist's quest for the perfect lighting solution led to a custom installation of dynamo powered lights, ensuring a bright and hassle-free ride on the darkest roads.
Jonas Hietala
The first (worst) post
Well, here it is: The opening post. What will come here? Here’s where I’ll outline what the blog...
over a year ago
Well, here it is: The opening post. What will come here? Here’s where I’ll outline what the blog will be about and maybe, if I’m dedicated, it won’t die before Christmas you think.
And sure, you’re right. I will run away to the corner in about two and a half months crying I never...
Vitalik Buterin's...
The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy
over a year ago
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...
Neil Madden
A controversial opinion about REST API design
I was just reading yet another article on REST API design guidelines. Some of it is good advice,...
a year ago
I was just reading yet another article on REST API design guidelines. Some of it is good advice, some of it I could quibble with. But several of the rules are about how to design the path hierarchy of your API: use plural nouns, don’t use nested sub-paths unnecessarily, etc. In...
Notes on software...
Static analysis with semgrep: practical examples using Docker
In this post we'll get a basic semgrep environment set up in Docker
running some custom rules...
over a year ago
In this post we'll get a basic semgrep environment set up in Docker
running some custom rules against our code.
Existing linters
Linters like pylint for Python or
eslint for JavaScript are great for general,
broad language standards. But what about common nits in code review
like...
Neil Madden
XSS doesn’t have to be game over
There’s a persistent belief among web security people that cross-site scripting (XSS) is a “game...
over a year ago
There’s a persistent belief among web security people that cross-site scripting (XSS) is a “game over” event for defence: there is no effective way to recover if an attacker can inject code into your site. Brian Campbell refers to this as “XSS Nihilism”, which is a great...
Computer Ads from...
E-Z Tax
The Tax Break You've Been Looking for !
8 months ago
The Tax Break You've Been Looking for !
Posts on Made of...
Security doesn't respect abstraction boundaries
The fundamental tool of any engineering discipline is the notion of abstraction. If we can build a...
over a year ago
The fundamental tool of any engineering discipline is the notion of abstraction. If we can build a set of useful, easily-described behaviors out of a complex system, we can build other systems on top of those pieces, without having to understand to worry about the full complexity...
Birchtree
Gemini 2.0: speed and deep research impress
From The Keyword Google blog: Introducing Gemini 2.0: Our New AI Model for the Agentic Era
Today...
a week ago
From The Keyword Google blog: Introducing Gemini 2.0: Our New AI Model for the Agentic Era
Today we’re excited to launch our next era of models built for this new agentic era: introducing Gemini 2.0, our most capable model yet. With new advances in multimodality —
Vitalik Buterin's...
A Note on Metcalfe's Law, Externalities and Ecosystem Splits
over a year ago
Vitalik Buterin's...
Analyzing Token Sale Models
over a year ago
Home on Erik...
NoDoc
We had an unconference at Spotify last Thursday and I added a semi-trolling semi-serious topic about...
over a year ago
We had an unconference at Spotify last Thursday and I added a semi-trolling semi-serious topic about abolishing documentation. Or NoDoc, as I'm going to call this movement. This was meant to be mostly a thought experiment, but I don't see it as complete madness.
Home on Erik...
Exploding offers are bullshit
I do a lot of recruiting and have given maybe 50 offers in my career. Although many companies do, I...
over a year ago
I do a lot of recruiting and have given maybe 50 offers in my career. Although many companies do, I never put a deadline on any of them. Unfortunately, I've often ended up competing with other companies who do, and I feel really bad that this usually tricks younger developers...
Posts on Made of...
BlackHat/DEFCON 2011 talk: Breaking out of KVM
I’ve posted the final slides from my talk this year at DEFCON and Black Hat, on breaking out of the...
over a year ago
I’ve posted the final slides from my talk this year at DEFCON and Black Hat, on breaking out of the KVM Kernel Virtual Machine on Linux.
Virtunoid: Breaking out of KVM from Nelson Elhage [Edited 2011-08-11] The code is now available. It should be fairly well-commented, and...
Old Vintage...
Refurb weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on...
6 months ago
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more in the near future. So we'll start with one that's widely considered to be a remarkable cul-de-sac in computing history: the Canon...
Nabeel S. Qureshi
How To Sell
Sales at a startup is counter-intuitive.
over a year ago
Sales at a startup is counter-intuitive.
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.
Willem's Blog
Developing a native iOS app
How hard can it be to build your own cycling and running workout tracker app using native code with...
7 months ago
How hard can it be to build your own cycling and running workout tracker app using native code with some help from AI? Read along to find out!
watchTowr Labs -...
Hop-Skip-FortiJump-FortiJump-Higher - Fortinet FortiManager CVE-2024-47575
It’s been a tricky time for Fortinet (and their customers) lately - arguably, even more so than...
a month ago
It’s been a tricky time for Fortinet (and their customers) lately - arguably, even more so than usual. Adding to the steady flow of vulnerabilities in appliances recently was a nasty CVSS 9.8 vulnerability in FortiManager, their tool for central management of FortiGate...
Louwrentius
'Tip of the day: Scrolling in GNU screen'
Just the answer:
By default, on Debian, the scroll back buffer is about 1K lines. This can...
over a year ago
Just the answer:
By default, on Debian, the scroll back buffer is about 1K lines. This can be
changed in the .screenrc file in your home directory. The following example
sets the scroll back buffer to 5K lines.
defscrollback 5000
Set the scroll back buffer on the fly with:
First...
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?
Jonas Hietala
My Minions
So I think I made it! It became a pretty different game from what I set out to create, but I’m glad...
over a year ago
So I think I made it! It became a pretty different game from what I set out to create, but I’m glad with how it turned out.
My Minions
Instructions
Build a pathway and then place objects or release minions on it, everything must be on a path. Place musical objects or make the...
Jonas Hietala
Building the GH60
I’ve finally completed my first custom made keyboard. I’m still missing stabilizers and some smaller...
over a year ago
I’ve finally completed my first custom made keyboard. I’m still missing stabilizers and some smaller screws to hold it all together but I’ve been using it the last days and I thought I’d share.
The hardware
Several years ago I joined the geekhack forum and I joined in a few group...
Applied Cartography
Linear
I invited nickd to join our Linear instance yesterday, which reminded me that I had a slew of notes...
5 days ago
I invited nickd to join our Linear instance yesterday, which reminded me that I had a slew of notes I wanted to publish on our own experience of migrating from GitHub Issues to Linear, and some reflections on it as a product now that we've been using it for a few months.
One...
./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
Willem's Blog
Making my own tablet OS
I wondered if I could escape Windows by installing Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go, read along to...
over a year ago
I wondered if I could escape Windows by installing Debian GNU/Linux on a Surface Go, read along to find out how to do this!
Bryan Braun - Blog
Links #11
Here are some more links to things that I keep thinking about. I shared a bit more detail on these...
2 weeks ago
Here are some more links to things that I keep thinking about. I shared a bit more detail on these ones than I usually do—there were so many good quotes to include. Enjoy!
Selfishness & Therapy Culture
Earlier this year, there was a post in the New York Times called “Sometimes,...
Willem's Blog
Wearing Grand Seiko
I am glad I took the opportunity to wear a Grand Seiko, learning first hand about its craftsmanship,...
over a year ago
I am glad I took the opportunity to wear a Grand Seiko, learning first hand about its craftsmanship, innovation and practicality.
Louwrentius
'lm-sensors: hardware monitoring with the w83627ehf module'
I have two systems that use the w83627ehf driver for hardware monitoring.
However, if this driver is...
over a year ago
I have two systems that use the w83627ehf driver for hardware monitoring.
However, if this driver is installed with a regular modprobe like:
modprobe w83627ehf
The result will be:
FATAL: Error inserting w83627ehf
(/lib/modules/2.6.28-1-amd64/kernel/drivers/hwmon/w83627ehf.ko):...
Odds and Ends of...
Here's how AI can REDUCE health misinformation
How the government can build a bullshit detector
2 months ago
How the government can build a bullshit detector
csvbase blog
My favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website
Simple data pipeline powertools: sqlite, pandas, gnuplot and friends
a year ago
Simple data pipeline powertools: sqlite, pandas, gnuplot and friends
Jonas Hietala
5 Years at Linköping's University
I recently finished my master’s degree (civilingenjör or civil engineering) at Linköping’s...
over a year ago
I recently finished my master’s degree (civilingenjör or civil engineering) at Linköping’s University. At first it felt like 5 years would be an eternity, but in hindsight it was over in a flash. my gut feeling is that I haven’t learnt or done anything of note, except you know...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Reverse engineering CMOS, illustrated with a vintage Soviet counter chip
I recently came across an interesting die photo of a Soviet1 chip, probably designed in the...
10 months ago
I recently came across an interesting die photo of a Soviet1 chip, probably designed in the 1970s.
This article provides an introductory guide to reverse-engineering CMOS circuits, using this chip as an
example.
Although the chip looks like a tangle of lines at first,
its large...
Louwrentius
How to determine which process causes IO ?
There is a nifty little program called 'iotop'. Iotop is part of Debian or
Ubuntu and can be...
over a year ago
There is a nifty little program called 'iotop'. Iotop is part of Debian or
Ubuntu and can be installed with a simple apt-get.
Once you have determined with 'top' that the system is waiting on IO-access,
It is nice to know
which process is responsibe for this IO. Therefore, you...
Posts on Made of...
Systems that defy detailed understanding
Last week, I wrote about the mindset that computer systems can be understood, and behaviors can be...
over a year ago
Last week, I wrote about the mindset that computer systems can be understood, and behaviors can be explained, if we’re willing to dig deep enough into the stack of abstractions our software is built atop. Some of the ensuing discussion on Twitter and elsewhere lead me to write...
Good Enough
Let's talk about conversations
If you subscribe to our newsletter — which you do, right? — then you'll know that recently we've...
9 months ago
If you subscribe to our newsletter — which you do, right? — then you'll know that recently we've been thinking about conversations.
We're a small group making fun software for people, and we like to have conversations with those people; the lovely folks who like our take on...
Louwrentius
Affordable server with server-grade hardware part II
If you want to build a home server, it may be advised to actually use server-grade components. I...
over a year ago
If you want to build a home server, it may be advised to actually use server-grade components. I documented the reasons for choosing server-grade hardware already in an earlier post on this topic.
It is recommended to read the old post first. In this new post, I only show new...
Gwern.net Newsletter
June gwern.net newsletter
June 2020 gwern.net newsletter with 3 new pages/essays, and links on CRISPR, population screening,...
over a year ago
June 2020 gwern.net newsletter with 3 new pages/essays, and links on CRISPR, population screening, AI scaling, politics, and technological unemployment.
lcamtuf’s thing
Dispatches from the farm upstate
Middle-aged computer expert opts to escape civilization, offers dubious life advice.
4 months ago
Middle-aged computer expert opts to escape civilization, offers dubious life advice.
computers are bad
2024-12-21 something over New Jersey
There were thousands of reports: strange aircraft, floating through the sky. A
retrospective sum of...
yesterday
There were thousands of reports: strange aircraft, floating through the sky. A
retrospective sum of press accounts finds that some 100,000 people were
reported to have witnessed aerial intruders. Despite the scant details
associated with most reports, an eager press repeated the...
Odds and Ends of...
Christmas Mailbag!
Is Elon Musk actually smart? Will HS2 ever be properly finished? Do I like Dominic Cummings? And...
3 days ago
Is Elon Musk actually smart? Will HS2 ever be properly finished? Do I like Dominic Cummings? And more!
Louwrentius
The iPad will be the death of Flash
So Apple finally released their tablet computer: the iPad. One of the most
debated drawbacks is that...
over a year ago
So Apple finally released their tablet computer: the iPad. One of the most
debated drawbacks is that it lacks support for Adobe Flash. The iPhone does
not support Flash either, and since the iPad is based on the iPhone OS, this
should not come as a surprise.
Now many people see...
Posts on Made of...
Using Haskell's 'newtype' in C
A common problem in software engineering is avoiding confusion and errors when dealing with multiple...
over a year ago
A common problem in software engineering is avoiding confusion and errors when dealing with multiple types of data that share the same representation. Classic examples include differentiating between measurements stored in different units, distinguishing between a string of HTML...
./techtipsy
So you want to migrate to Kubernetes: observations from a software developer
Kubernetes: everyone wants to do it, regardless of their scale and business objectives.1
Common...
2 months ago
Kubernetes: everyone wants to do it, regardless of their scale and business objectives.1
Common justifications include better scalability, cost savings, standardization and being super modern and stuff. It’s
the future!
In my personal experience, Kubernetes is far from the...
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,...
Vitalik Buterin's...
[Mirror] Zk-SNARKs: Under the Hood
over a year ago
Willem's Blog
Write your own words
Why not to use AI for writing - a blog post on the underestimated long term costs of AI tools for...
a month ago
Why not to use AI for writing - a blog post on the underestimated long term costs of AI tools for human creativity.
Good Enough
TIL: Rails has_one Nested Attributes Tweaking
In a project I'm working on right now I've been using a Rails nested form and a couple of things...
a year ago
In a project I'm working on right now I've been using a Rails nested form and a couple of things caught me off guard.
has_one Nested Form Sending id Attribute
In this case I have a nested form that is in a has_one relationship with the parent model.
I think this is a common thing...
computers are bad
2024-05-06 matrix
For those of you who are members of the Matrix project, I wanted to let you
know that I am running...
7 months ago
For those of you who are members of the Matrix project, I wanted to let you
know that I am running for the Governing Board, and a bit about why. For those
of you who are not, I hope you will forgive the intrusion. Maybe you'll find my
opinions on the topic interesting anyway.
I...
Vitalik Buterin's...
What in the Ethereum application ecosystem excites me
over a year ago
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.
Vitalik Buterin's...
Coordination, Good and Bad
over a year ago
Jonas Hietala
Trying and returning the Eight Sleep Pod 4
I recently bought the Eight Sleep Pod 4—a smart mattress cover that tracks your heart rate, HRV,...
2 months ago
I recently bought the Eight Sleep Pod 4—a smart mattress cover that tracks your heart rate, HRV, snoring, and cools or warms the mattress during the night.
There’s a lot to like about the mattress but in the end I opted to return it.
This post describes my experience with the Pod...
Arduino Blog
Self-leveling workbench can travel without trouble
An actually level workbench is critical for many different jobs, such as pouring resin or...
6 months ago
An actually level workbench is critical for many different jobs, such as pouring resin or calibrating sensors. But it is difficult enough to level a stationary workbench and that becomes a nightmare for a workbench that needs to roll around a shop on casters, as shop floors...
Willem's Blog
Back to the University
Join me on a special course exploring scientific programming, the perfect moment to learn Python...
a year ago
Join me on a special course exploring scientific programming, the perfect moment to learn Python with recent advancements in machine learning like ChatGPT!
Home on Erik...
Momentum strategies
Haven't posted anything in ages, so here's a quick hack I threw together in Python on a Sunday...
over a year ago
Haven't posted anything in ages, so here's a quick hack I threw together in Python on a Sunday night. Basically I wanted to know whether momentum strategies work well for international stock indexes. I spent a bit of time putting together a strategy that buys the stock index if...
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...
./techtipsy
Cool projects
This is an unsorted list of projects that really cool and neat.
Chromebook cluster
someone took...
a year ago
This is an unsorted list of projects that really cool and neat.
Chromebook cluster
someone took some old Chromebooks, stripped them down and built a cluster. I love this kind of jank!
Old Vintage...
An Apple district manager's Macintosh Portable in 1989-91 (featuring GEIS AppleLink and a look at...
a late prototype Macintosh Portable. But it turns out it's not merely notable for what it is than...
9 months ago
a late prototype Macintosh Portable. But it turns out it's not merely notable for what it is than what it has on it: a beta version of System 6.0.6 (the doomed release that Apple pulled due to bugs), Apple sales databases, two online services — the maligned Mac Prodigy client,...
Buck on Software
Model transitions: A framework for value creation
And a quick and dirty look at SPLK, NTNX, and GWRE
over a year ago
And a quick and dirty look at SPLK, NTNX, and GWRE
computers are bad
2023-05-07 electrical characteristics of telephone lines
Let's take a break from our boring topic of regional history to focus instead
on an even more boring...
a year ago
Let's take a break from our boring topic of regional history to focus instead
on an even more boring topic: implementation details of telephone lines.
The conventional "copper pair" analog telephone line is fading away. The FCC
has begun to authorize abandonment of copper outside...
Notes on software...
Languages you can run in the browser, part 1: Python, JavaScript, SQLite
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.
Odds and Ends of...
Odds and Ends #47: I think this YouTube video just changed my life
Plus vertical farming, the Russia/EU border, and more on why the Lobby is bad.
a week ago
Plus vertical farming, the Russia/EU border, and more on why the Lobby is bad.
Arduino Blog
How to use vintage LED bubble displays with your Arduino
If you want to add a display to your Arduino project, the easiest solution will likely be an LCD or...
a month ago
If you want to add a display to your Arduino project, the easiest solution will likely be an LCD or OLED screen. But though those are affordable and work really well, they may not provide the vibe you’re looking for. If you want a more vintage look, Vaclav Krejci has a great...
Applied Cartography
Notes on Zed
I was late to the VS Code zeitgeist, and as penitence I try to go out of my way to try new editors...
9 months ago
I was late to the VS Code zeitgeist, and as penitence I try to go out of my way to try new editors whenever I see them — which is why this morning I installed Zed, which makes its bones on performance (yay!) and teams functionality (irrelevant for my use cases, but seems...
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...
Louwrentius
Difference of behavior in SATA Solid State Drives
Introduction
Update: I've noticed some strange behavior of SSDs when benchmarking them with FIO....
over a year ago
Introduction
Update: I've noticed some strange behavior of SSDs when benchmarking them with FIO. After further investigation and additional testing, I've found the reason for the strange patterns in the graphs.
The 'strange' test results are due to the fact that they were...
Louwrentius
Building a RAID 6 array of mixed drives
To be honest, 4 TB of storage isn't really necessary for home usage.
However, I like to collect...
over a year ago
To be honest, 4 TB of storage isn't really necessary for home usage.
However, I like to collect movies in full DVD or HD quality and so I need some
storage.
I decided to build myself a NAS box based on Debian Etch. Samba is used to
allow clients to access the data. The machine...
Louwrentius
IKEA $50 VINDSTYRKA vs. $290 Dylos air quality monitor
This is a brief article in which I compare the IKEA VINDSTYRKA $50 air quality monitor (PM2.5) with...
a year ago
This is a brief article in which I compare the IKEA VINDSTYRKA $50 air quality monitor (PM2.5) with a $290 air quality monitor made by Dylos to see if it's any good.
Context
If you care about indoor air quality, you may already own a CO2 to determine if it's time to ventilate...
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...
Notes on software...
AOT-compilation of Javascript with V8
tldr; I'm working on a AOT-compiled Javascript implementation called
jsc.
Many dynamically typed...
over a year ago
tldr; I'm working on a AOT-compiled Javascript implementation called
jsc.
Many dynamically typed programming languages have implementations that
compile to native binaries:
Python: Cython
Common Lisp: SBCL
Scheme: Chicken Scheme
The benefits of compiling dynamically typed...
Posts on Made of...
Configuring dnsmasq with VMware Workstation
I love VMware workstation. I keep VMs around for basically every version of every major Linux...
over a year ago
I love VMware workstation. I keep VMs around for basically every version of every major Linux distribution, and use them heavily for all kinds of kernel testing and development.
This post is a quick writeup of my networking setup with VMware Workstation, using dnsmasq to assign...
Arduino Blog
This Arduino-controlled Spin Meister helps spin up the perfect pizza
Dedicated pizza ovens are all the rage right now, as they provide a better-distributed and higher...
6 months ago
Dedicated pizza ovens are all the rage right now, as they provide a better-distributed and higher heat that many find more preferable than a conventional kitchen oven. But even a nice gas-powered pizza oven like the Ooni Koda 12 will have some hot spots and cold spots. To get an...
Azad's Blog
RealityCapture to Gaussian Splatting using PostShot
TLDR: Tutorial on using RealityCapture to align an image dataset, export the alignment, and import...
5 months ago
TLDR: Tutorial on using RealityCapture to align an image dataset, export the alignment, and import it into PostShot to train Gaussian Splats without using COLMAP. Video tutorial RealityCapture Import your images and align them. If you ever need help with tricky dataset, refer to...
Home on Erik...
Luigi talk tomorrow
At NYC Data Science meetup! Unfortunately the space is full but the talk will be livestreamed –...
over a year ago
At NYC Data Science meetup! Unfortunately the space is full but the talk will be livestreamed – check out the meetup web page for a link tomorrow.
./techtipsy
ThinkPad as a server: third time's the charm
This is a follow-up to my two previous attempts on this topic:
Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable...
2 months ago
This is a follow-up to my two previous attempts on this topic:
Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
ThinkPad as a server: the follow-up
Since then, I’ve had quite a few changes to my home server setup:
I put my home server stuff on an IKEA pegboard
I tried the...
lcamtuf’s thing
The secret lives of snowblowers
Yes, they throw snow. But the mechanical design of residential snowblowers is more interesting than...
4 months ago
Yes, they throw snow. But the mechanical design of residential snowblowers is more interesting than it seems.
Posts on Made of...
Distributed cloud builds for everyone
CPU cycles are cheaper than they have ever been, and cloud computing has never been more ubiquitous....
over a year ago
CPU cycles are cheaper than they have ever been, and cloud computing has never been more ubiquitous. All the major cloud providers offer generous free tiers, and services like GitHub Actions offer free compute resources to open-source repositories. So why do so many developers...
Home on Erik...
Nearest neighbor methods and vector models – part 1
This is a blog post rewritten from a presentation at NYC Machine Learning last week. It covers a...
over a year ago
This is a blog post rewritten from a presentation at NYC Machine Learning last week. It covers a library called Annoy that I have built that helps you do (approximate) nearest neighbor queries in high dimensional spaces.
Home on Erik...
Momentum and mean reversion might just be volatility bias
The Economist just published an article called The best, the worst and the ugly. By looking at...
over a year ago
The Economist just published an article called The best, the worst and the ugly. By looking at historical performance for mutual funds, they find strong support for momentum and mean reversion. Picking the best or the worst fund over the previous five years gives great returns...
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...
seangoedecke.com RSS...
I don't know how to build software and you don't either
Are microservices better than monoliths? Should teams set their own technical direction, or is it...
a month ago
Are microservices better than monoliths? Should teams set their own technical direction, or is it better to have that dictated by some…
computers are bad
2023-09-10 the Essex GWEN site
Programming note: this post is in color. I will not debase myself to the
level of sending HTML...
a year ago
Programming note: this post is in color. I will not debase myself to the
level of sending HTML email, so if you receive Computers Are Bad by email
and want the benefit of the pictures, consider reading this online instead
(the link is at the top of the email).
In the aftermath of...
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...
Applied Cartography
Applied Cartography × Indie Rails
Chatted with Jess and Jeremy about a whole slew of things, from pricing strategy to terrifying and...
2 months ago
Chatted with Jess and Jeremy about a whole slew of things, from pricing strategy to terrifying and arcane differences between various Markdown parsers (including why I hate Slack.) They were particularly kind and gracious given that the amount of production-quality Rails I've...
Louwrentius
Linux: get a list of al disks and their size
To get a list of all disk drives of a Linux system, such as this:
Disk /dev/md0: 58.0 GB
Disk...
over a year ago
To get a list of all disk drives of a Linux system, such as this:
Disk /dev/md0: 58.0 GB
Disk /dev/md1: 2015 MB
Disk /dev/md5: 18002.2 GB
Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB
Disk /dev/sdb: 60.0 GB
Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.1 GB
Disk /dev/sdd: 1000.1 GB
Disk /dev/sde: 1000.1 GB
Disk /dev/sdf: 1000.1...
Home on Erik...
NYC Machine Learning meetup
From the NYC Machine Learning talk I had last week:
Haven't looked at it yet except briefly....
over a year ago
From the NYC Machine Learning talk I had last week:
Haven't looked at it yet except briefly. Unfortunately the quality isn't the best.
Notes on software...
Implementing zip archiving in Golang: unzipping
All code for this post is available on Github.
Let's take a look at how zip files work. Take a small...
over a year ago
All code for this post is available on Github.
Let's take a look at how zip files work. Take a small file for example:
$ cat hello.text
Hello!
Let's zip it up.
$ zip test.zip hello.text
adding: hello.text (stored 0%)
$ ls -lah test.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 phil phil 177 Nov 23 23:04...
Posts on Made of...
Regular Expression Search with Suffix Arrays
Back in January of 2012, Russ Cox posted an excellent blog post detailing how Google Code Search had...
over a year ago
Back in January of 2012, Russ Cox posted an excellent blog post detailing how Google Code Search had worked, using a trigram index.
By that point, I’d already implemented early versions of my own livegrep source-code search engine, using a different indexing approach that I...
Christian Selig
Announcing Apollo: a new Reddit app for iPhone
I’m really excited to unveil a project I’ve been working on for the last year or so. It’s called...
over a year ago
I’m really excited to unveil a project I’ve been working on for the last year or so. It’s called Apollo and it’s a new Reddit app for iPhone.
I’ve been a Reddit user for about four years now, and the site is a constant source of interesting discussion, hilarity and news for me...
Home on Erik...
Benchmarking nearest neighbor libraries in Python
Radim Rehurek has put together an excellent summary of approximate nearest neighbor libraries in...
over a year ago
Radim Rehurek has put together an excellent summary of approximate nearest neighbor libraries in Python. This is exciting, because one of the libraries he's covering, annoy, was built by me.
After introducing the problem, he goes through the list of contestants and sticks with...
Jonas Hietala
Minecraft Server Hosting
I play the phenomena that is Minecraft on and off. Sometimes the laid back building or the exploring...
over a year ago
I play the phenomena that is Minecraft on and off. Sometimes the laid back building or the exploring is just what I need. Sometimes I can challange myself to build cool complex stuff and I’m even an avid follower of Doc’M and Etho and the other mindcrackers over at the youtube....
Home on Erik...
Antipodes
I was playing around with D3 last night and built a silly visualization of antipodes and how our...
over a year ago
I was playing around with D3 last night and built a silly visualization of antipodes and how our intuitive understanding of the world sometimes doesn't make sense. Check out the visualization at bl.ocks.org!
Basically the idea is if you fly from Beijing to Buenos Aires then you...
Notes on software...
Implementing MVCC and major SQL transaction isolation levels
In this post we'll build a database in 400 lines of code with basic
support for five standard SQL...
7 months ago
In this post we'll build a database in 400 lines of code with basic
support for five standard SQL transaction levels: Read Uncommitted,
Read Committed, Repeatable Read, Snapshot Isolation and
Serializable. We'll use multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) and
optimistic...
./techtipsy
The optimization treadmill: why I keep changing my computing setup all the time
I have a bad habit of changing my computing setups all the time. I tend to see new gear, then I...
a year ago
I have a bad habit of changing my computing setups all the time. I tend to see new gear, then I get
some new ideas, and then I obsessively think about it for weeks and months until I just buy it.
And then the cycle repeats.
I’ve had time to think about why that keeps happening...
Willem's Blog
Is the Apple Watch the modern tool watch?
I tested the Apple Watch during my work in Frankfurt this week where I had to go inside an internet...
over a year ago
I tested the Apple Watch during my work in Frankfurt this week where I had to go inside an internet data centre.
computers are bad
2024-05-25 grc spinrite
I feel like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with suspect
hard drives. I mean,...
7 months ago
I feel like I used to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with suspect
hard drives. I mean, like, back in high school. These days I almost never do,
or on the occasion that I have storage trouble, it's a drive that has
completely stopped responding at all and there's...
Matt Blewitt
Unreasonably Effective Patterns
Much of my current job is maintaining and enhancing control planes for Heroku’s managed data...
over a year ago
Much of my current job is maintaining and enhancing control planes for Heroku’s managed data services. This post explores three patterns used to reduce operational burden and increase system safety and resiliency: state machines (and associated state-transition tables),...
Applied Cartography
Finding null JSON values in Postgres
Postgres' JSONB functionality is fast and useful but when I find myself dropping down from the...
7 months ago
Postgres' JSONB functionality is fast and useful but when I find myself dropping down from the Django ORM into
SQL to do weird things, the syntax strikes me as confusing and arcane. As such, when I need to do esoteric things it
takes me longer time than I'd like, and in hopes...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Inside an unusual 7400-series chip implemented with a gate array
When I look inside a chip from the popular 7400 series, I know what to expect: a fairly simple...
9 months ago
When I look inside a chip from the popular 7400 series, I know what to expect: a fairly simple die,
implemented in a straightforward, cost-effective way.
However, when I looked inside a military-grade chip built by Integrated Device Technology (IDT)4
I found a very unexpected...
Style over Substance
My grandfather’s Rolleiflex 2.8D twin-lens reflex (TLR) camera
One of the first vintage cameras I ever got was my dad’s old Polaroid SX-70. Like so many family...
over a year ago
One of the first vintage cameras I ever got was my dad’s old Polaroid SX-70. Like so many family cameras it had disappeared into a closet decades ago and was only found again recently. When he gave it to me, he told me there was another classic camera he wanted to give me – if...
Applied Cartography
You gotta be able to taste the kool-aid
Cognition, a six-month-old startup in the AI coding space just raised $175m at a $2b...
8 months ago
Cognition, a six-month-old startup in the AI coding space just raised $175m at a $2b valuation:
Despite the skepticism surrounding Devin’s launch, the AI coding assistant has shown promising results. According to the SWE-Bench benchmark, which evaluates AI models on software...
Posts on Made of...
Thoughts On Kubernetes
I spent a while the last week porting livegrep.com from running directly AWS to running on...
over a year ago
I spent a while the last week porting livegrep.com from running directly AWS to running on Kubernetes on Google’s Cloud Platform (specifically, the google container engine, which provisions and manages the cluster for me).
I left this experience profoundly enthusiastic about the...
Louwrentius
Don't use cloud services if you care about secrecy of your data
When you use cloud services, you are storing your data on other people's hard drives.
The moment you...
over a year ago
When you use cloud services, you are storing your data on other people's hard drives.
The moment you put your data within a cloud service, that data is no longer under your control. You don't know who will access that data. Secrecy is lost.
Instead of using services like Gmail...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Antenna diodes in the Pentium processor
I was studying the silicon die of the Pentium processor and noticed some puzzling structures...
4 weeks ago
I was studying the silicon die of the Pentium processor and noticed some puzzling structures where
signal lines were connected to the silicon substrate for no apparent reason.
Two examples are in the photo below, where the metal wiring (orange) connects to small square regions of...
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...
./techtipsy
What I've learned running Linux and Windows off of USB flash drives
I’ve recently made an effort to reduce the amount of tech stuff that I own. Lack of space, lack of...
2 weeks ago
I’ve recently made an effort to reduce the amount of tech stuff that I own. Lack of space, lack of time and the guilt
of storing perfectly functional hardware unused in a box were the main motivators.
This has resulted in experiments with my assortment of USB flash storage that...
Opsbros
Debug Header
After watching a livestream by UnexpectedMaker struggling to put probe pins on his Stepper Motor...
over a year ago
After watching a livestream by UnexpectedMaker struggling to put probe pins on his Stepper Motor driver connected to a Raspberry Pi, I thought a breakout header might help; so I whipped up this little board.
Good Enough
TIL: Rails Testing
I had to figure out how to run browser-based tests in Rails again. In part that meant working around...
a year ago
I had to figure out how to run browser-based tests in Rails again. In part that meant working around my lack of Chrome. Rails System Tests with Safari.
I also had some problems with Rails Turbo Drive taking over EVERYTHING, which required me to figure out how to deal with a Rails...
Willem's Blog
Hello, stranger
"Discover the transformative power of simple conversations in our tech-dominated world, as one...
a year ago
"Discover the transformative power of simple conversations in our tech-dominated world, as one individual delves into the lost art of talking to strangers and the profound connections it can forge."
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
Coconut Cauliflower Curry Mash
It’s time for lesson 3. I made the mistake of not planning for something to augment the mash with,...
over a year ago
It’s time for lesson 3. I made the mistake of not planning for something to augment the mash with, but a simple salad had to do:
It was okay. Girlfriend gave it 5/10 and I gave it a 6/10, a higher rating would be possible if there was something else to eat it with.
Notes on software...
One year as a solo dev building open-source data tools without funding
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
over a year ago
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
seangoedecke.com RSS...
Acing the coding challenge
How do you write a successful coding challenge? Unlike some nightmare whiteboard interview...
over a year ago
How do you write a successful coding challenge? Unlike some nightmare whiteboard interview scenarios, typically a coding challenge is not a…
./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...
Computer Ads from...
Apple IIe and IIc Design Manager Peter Quinn Interviewed by BYTE's Gregg Williams
A behind-the-scenes look at the development of the Apple IIe and IIc.
9 months ago
A behind-the-scenes look at the development of the Apple IIe and IIc.
./techtipsy
About the time I used Google Drive as a CMS for a web app
Near the beginning of my software development career, I worked on a pretty
standard web application....
over a year ago
Near the beginning of my software development career, I worked on a pretty
standard web application. The project was not a commercial success, but it did
give me a good technical foundation that turned out to be very useful for my
career so far.
For those interested, the tech...
Ken Shirriff's blog
Inside a vintage aerospace navigation computer of uncertain purpose
I recently obtained an aerospace computer from the early 1970s, apparently part of a navigation...
6 months ago
I recently obtained an aerospace computer from the early 1970s, apparently part of a navigation system.
Aerospace computers are an interesting but mostly neglected area of computer hardware, so I'm always delighted to
examine one up close.
In an era when most computers were large...
Posts on Made of...
Getting carried away with hack value
Recently, I’ve been working on some BarnOwl branches that move more of the core functionality of...
over a year ago
Recently, I’ve been working on some BarnOwl branches that move more of the core functionality of BarnOwl into perl code, instead of C (BarnOwl is written in an unholy mix of C and perl code that call each other back and forth obsessively).
Moving code into perl has many...
Home on Erik...
Machine, Platform, Crowd
I just bought Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future and discovered that it...
over a year ago
I just bought Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future and discovered that it mentions my blog – in particular the post When machine learning matters.
Ok, I lied a little bit. I didn't discover it serendipitously.
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
ThinkPad T40: it can still run modern Linux, for now
I recently busted out my old ThinkPad T40, the last of the OG IBM ThinkPads.
I picked it up some...
7 months ago
I recently busted out my old ThinkPad T40, the last of the OG IBM ThinkPads.
I picked it up some time around my university days because I liked collecting
ThinkPads at the time, and it was a nice complement to my existing ThinkPad T60
and T430.
The battery is dead, but everything...
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