Here’s a collection of some hardware acquisition hacks I’ve been using over the last few years. By no means are these original ideas–they’re quite well-known within their own niches. But all the same, they don’t seem to be very widespread among the other techie folks I talk to. The goal of these hacks is to construct a computing setup that is inexpensive , upgradable and…
Over on my YouTube channel , I make talking head videos, covering various computer science topics, mostly research papers. One of the most time-consuming yet mindnumbingly boring parts of that process is finding out all the dead air in the original video and editing it out. That’s got to be automatable, right? I’d been looking for a while but couldn’t find a good solution.…
Just thought I’d put this tip out in the Internet… So I recently got a Thinkpad Trackpoint II keyboard , which I like to use with my MacBook when docked to an external monitor. Yes, I realize that’s mixed up. But it happens to have a “PrtSc” key right on the space-bar row that is perfectly placed to be the “Cmd” key. Mac OS X, in its Keyboard Preferences,…
Unix has won in every conceivable way. And in true mythic style, it contains the seeds of its own eclipse. This is my subjective historical narrative of how that happened. I’m using the name “Unix” to include the entire family of operating systems descended from it, or that have been heavily influenced by it. That includes Linux, SunOS, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, and many, many…
How buffer overflow attacks work in C
Read a paper: Quicksort
Read a paper: The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a high-level language
Read a paper: Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system
Read a paper: Reflections on Trusting Trust
Read a paper: I/O is faster than the CPU
Read a paper: New Directions in Cryptography
Read a paper: A complexity measure (Cyclomatic complexity)
Read a paper: The case for the reduced instruction set computer
Read a paper: Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship
I’ve been putting up a video a week on my YouTube channel since about December 2018, and I suppose I should write out a clear manifesto for why I’m doing that and where I want to go with it. I started putting out videos for the same reason I have a blog: I want to share knowledge, and learn from the feedback. I have learned so much from stuff other people have published, and I want to…