Robin Neufeld's projects and thoughts.
Canadian winters are dark, and my living space doesn’t get as much natural light as I’d like during the season. Working from home gets a bit depressing! I have a vague sense that things should be brighter. But how much brighter? The quantity in question is lux - the intensity of illumination on a surface. For seasonal depression, the “surface” you probably care most about is the back of your…
Mac OS X is only partially related to its predecessors - large parts of OS X were imported from Apple’s acquisition of NeXTSTEP , which had a different kernel and design from Mac OS 9. This is significant enough that applications made for one don’t run natively* in the other. Recently, I got a 2001 iMac which was dual booting OS 9 and OS X. There was a little problem - I didn’t know the admin…
In order to make puzdug-x86 , I had to learn a bit of bare metal x86 assembly. I learned something handy early on. Even though I was trying to make my program directly bootable, I could make some tiny tweaks to the code and build it as a DOS-compatible COM executable instead. This was convenient for my compile-run loop - instead of waiting a few seconds to reboot a VM and having it steal my mouse…
I was talking to my piano teacher about how I’m finding it hard to record a good take, and he gave me this interesting thought - why not record in MIDI? It’s such a compact file format that you could literally record every session you ever have on the keyboard. Then, if you ever happen to have a good practice session or improvise something nice, it’s already recorded. I think that’s a pretty…
I spent a bit of my time at the Recurse Center trying to restore one of the old computers in the collection: the Olivetti M24 . The first problem was figuring out how to connect it to a monitor - the port on the back was a 25-pin DSUB connector, which is not traditionally used for video. Supposedly the original release had a proprietary monochrome monitor, and later versions had a colour display.…
I’m currently attending the Recurse Center and I’ve been digging in to how bootloaders work on BIOS-based x86 systems. This is far outside my usual comfort zone of Python, data science and ML ops. It’s been very refreshing to explore this low-level topic! Bootloaders solve a chicken and egg problem: to start the operating system, you need to find its files, load them into memory and start…
Computers (famously) have files and folders. These files live on storage hardware, such as a solid state drive or USB drive. The drive has some capacity in bytes, and files have sizes that take up this capacity. If you run out of space on the drive, you delete some files you don’t need, and get those bytes back. Nice. From the drive’s perspective though, there are no files and folders; there’s…
Set is a card game for 1-8 (best with 3-4). Here are some things I like about it: it is conceptually very simple it is weirdly difficult it is played in real time, so it is always everyone’s turn it plays well online, e.g. via Set with Friends The rules of Set are simple, but hard to explain in words. In fact, most of the game is about one rule, which I’ll refer to as the rule . Set is about…
Inspired by Milan Cvitkovic’s article, Things You’re Allowed to Do . Going to the dentist can be uncomfortable. Some amount of this is unavoidable. Yet most dentists and staff care a lot about patient comfort. Tell them what you need, and you may very well get it! The hardest part is figuring out what’s on the menu. Below are some items that I’ve discovered. Caveats: available options may vary a…
Currently, I work from home most days. My living space isn’t very large so I do my work at the same space where I use my personal computer outside of work hours. Problem statement : I want to be able to easily switch over my monitor and peripherals between my work and home computers. Additionally, on days where I do go into the office, it would be nice to be able to pack up my work stuff quickly…