PulkoMandy hacks and work and so on
Suite aux canicules de juin, juillet et bientôt août 2026, qui ne seront probablement pas les dernières, j'ai installé chez moi des ventilateurs de plafond. C'est une solution qui n'était pas très répandue en France jusqu'à présent, et pas dans les habitudes. C'est beaucoup plus fréquent dans d'autres pays: Inde, Indonésie, Chine ou Malaisie par exemple, mais aussi aux États-Unis et dans les…
This question seems to come every time I talk about one of my projects. Wether it's the Smalltalk interpreter for Amstrad CPC, the documentation of the V.Smile, or the building of a computer based on the Allwinner V3s with only 64MB of RAM. On their surface, these have no purpose. No one, probably not even myself, will use them. So, why don't I put my skills into something more useful? Well, this…
A long time ago, I bought a GP2x. I was in high school back then and had limited money. So I couldn't afford getting the cradle to go with it. In case you didn't know about it, the GP2x was a game console running Linux, and partially a follow-up to the earlier GP32 (the development team disagreed, and the console was released by a different company but by the same designer team, or something like…
This story starts a few month ago, when I found an amplifier and an FM receiver on the sidewalk while returning from work. At the time, I didn't really have any need for them, but I didn't want them to go to the trash and be crushed and burnt, so I brought them home, where they sat unused and untested. Now, I have moved to a new flat and I have a different setup, in particular my homeserver which…
I just moved to a new flat! I now have motorised shutters, which were equipped with wired controls (up and down switches mounted on the walls). So much more convenient than the previous flat with a manual crank to raise and lower them. I decided to set up a way to control them from a computer, so I could close them during the night and open them during the day (or the opposite in the summer).…
Stacks are everywhere In my daily life I do a lot of debugging, reverse engineering, and software development. For some of these tasks, understanding how computer works in unnecessary detail is, well, sometimes useful. In particular, stacks and stackframes are very central to how most modern computing works. And, annoyingly, the implementation is slightly different depending on CPU architecture,…
Recently a Chromebook landed on my bench. It came from the training center of a supermarket chain, which gives such machines to trainees as a support for coursework and communication, apparently (with everything stored on Google services). The device is locked by the training center and if you attempt to do a factory reset or enable developer mode, it won't work. It just shows a message asking to…
Hello There! You may have noticed some changes on this website recently. First of all, I joined a webring! With the web becoming full of LLM generated nonsense, I figured out it would be a good idea to start having links to other real websites. Fediring is a ring for people who post on the fediverse, so it covers a wide range of topics. Anyway, it means this website now has neighbors! So, go visit…
Hello, happy year 2025! Four years ago, I wrote an article starting with a note on how I had not made any progress on VTech hacking projects since 2017. So it seems it's about time for a new update. That old article has a few wrong things. First of all, the CQFD Scientus is not a z80 computer as I expected, instead it is a 68HC05. Which is a bit ridiculous given it has quite a lot of ROM and RAM,…
Most of this happened in march 2025, but I forgot to write an english blog post about it. I have previously written about Thomson EFCIS lineup of display controllers . During that research I had found about the EF9364 (aka SF.F 96364), designed by Jean Gastinel. I had found a patent, a datasheet, and mentions of it in Philippe Matherat's thesis as he based parts of his design for the EF9365 on it.…
That's it. I'm off Twitter now. I used it for 5 years. I now have archives of everything I posted there . Now you can find me on Mastodon instead. See you there!
Please do not mirror my whole website using wget mirroring mode, WebReaper, or other similar tools. It results in a lot of requests to my poor old server, too much memory and CPU use, and the server fan spins up and makes a lot of annoying noise. So I will ban your IP or IP range from accessing the website if you try this. If you want a full copy of some parts of the website, please contact me so…
This is the new server of the PulkoTeam! Enjoy your stay here. On this website you can find various stuff I work on, around the Haiku project, electronics, 8bit computers, and random things depending on the day mood.