Personal data and self hosting
Details of how I how self host services to maintain a degree of digital privacy and freedom.
James W. Hanlon
Latest posts
Discrete-event simulation
How to build a simple discrete-event simulation with an example in Rust
Review of heat pump use and performance
A review of one year s worth of data from my home heat pump.
Silicon infrastructure
Thoughts on the requirements of software infrastructure to support chip design.
Building a Python processor
A rationale and strawman for a processor to accelerate dynamic-language workloads.
Cornish Unit House retrofit insulation
Retrofitting insulation in a timber-framed top floor.
From logic gates to a programming language using the Hex architecture
A hardware implementation of a Hex processor with some basic tooling, including a complete compiler for a simple programming language.
Seeding parallel xoroshiro128+ generators
Choosing seeds for parallel xoroshiro128+ generators using fixed offsets produces correlated outputs.
The hardware pseudorandom number generator of the Graphcore IPU
A short summary of an investigation into the statisitical quality and implementation cost in hardware of the xoroshiro128aox PRNG .
Garden workshop
Design and construction of a office and workshop.
Home thermal-imaging survey
Investigation of thermal faults using a thermal-imaging camera.
Reflections on the state of nature
A review of human impacts on nature as a way to reflect and navigate environmental bad news.
Error-correcting codes
Using Hamming Codes for single error correction and double error detection.
Recycled allotment shed
Low-cost construction of a shed out of reclaimed materials.
New chips for machine intelligence
Details of new chips that have been built recently to accelerate machine intelligence workloads.
Testing silicon logic with scan structures
A description of how digital circuits are modified to allow scan testing to be performed.
RGB lightbox stacks
Experimental lighting using high-power LEDs in generous volumes and behind translucent acrylic plastic to create big blocks of colour.
Three-channel high-power LED driver
An LED driver module controlled by a PIC12F1572 and with CAT4101 drivers, deployable in an array via a RS485 interface.
Querying logical paths in a Verilog design
A description of a command-line tool I created for tracing timing paths from a flattened netlist back through the RTL .
Retrofit shed insulation
Retrofitting an existing shed/workshop with insulation to improve its energy efficiency and make it a usable space throughout the year.
Vim command composition
The rules for composing Vim s motions and operators.
Writing synthesizable Verilog
Coding style for RTL design using Verilog / SystemVerilog. Updated 2024.
Notes on testing random number generators
Using empirical statistical tests to determine the quality of PRNGs.
A convolutional neural network from scratch
A C++ implementation of a convoluational neural network building on the explanation in Michael Nielsen s book Neural Networks and Deep Learning .
Reducing memory use in deep neural networks
A review of state-of-the-art techniques used.
Machine learning challenges for computer architecture
Neural networks have become a hot topic in computing and their development is progressing rapidly. They have a long history with some of the first …
The XC Programming Language
An overview of the key features of the language, many of which derive from occam.
The XMOS XMP-64
The XMP -64 is an experimental single-board distributed-memory parallel computer with 512 hardware threads and is programmable with a C-like language. It was developed by …
Scalable abstractions for general-purpose parallel computation
An overview of my PhD thesis.