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Catherine (Whitequark)’s recent observations on poorly -engineered firmware reminded me of a few mistakes I’ve seen in vendors’ CPUs; some unimportant and others surprisingly bad. Since I’ve never seen these widely discussed, here’s some discussion and links to supporting evidence to make them more widely known, since I think they’re interesting. Intel’s…
I often find that imposed limitations make it easier to create things: it’s easy to aim for perfection if you can expend as much effort as you like on something and thus end up with nothing that you’ll ever call good enough to share. Over on Cemetech in the final months of 2023, 1 we held a programming contest : write a screensaver, any kind of screensaver. I’m not often one to…
I’ve recently been asked to reduce the size of video files with some regularity, taking in a video file and generating something with reduced file size (“squishing” the video; hence “video squisher”). This is an easy task to accomplish with Handbrake , and since the transcodes I was asked to do were consistent in their needs, I was able to set up a preset in Handbrake…
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an excellent video game, which I’ve only recently (about three weeks ago, at the time of writing) played to a satisfactory conclusion; it took me around 90 hours of gameplay over nearly 150 real-time days to reach that point, representing a pretty significant amount of my free time. I previously wrote about what I liked about Breath of the Wild,…
On a long-lived Linux server I operate, it has periodically been desirable to move its root filesystem (containing core OS files and the like) to a new drive for various reasons. Over the years it’s migrated from a conveniently inexpensive mechanical hard drive to a series of increasingly capable and larger solid-state drives (SSDs), first connected over SATA and later in the form of M.2…
Earlier this year, I had a desire to capture time-lapse video of some construction that would take an unknown amount of time and occurred mostly during short periods of activity separated by intervals of inactivity with varying time. Because the overall recording time was unknown, this represented an interesting set of challenges that I wrote some software to address, using a Raspberry Pi and a…
Users who are accustomed to writing TI-BASIC on computers in plain text like any other programming language are probably familiar with sometimes needing to explicitly mark where token boundaries occur. I’ve been doing some thinking about this lately, and have arrived at a proposal for a way to improve the situation for some uses. TI-BASIC Background What enthusiasts often refer to as the…
I recently had a bit of a problem with the files that had ended up in Google Photos on my account: the Google Drive desktop synchronization app seemed to have noticed the many (reasonably-high-resolution) thumbnails that my local photo management application (Lightroom) creates, and had uploaded many near-duplicate images. It seems this wasn’t a problem with the old “ Backup and Sync…
It is fairly well-known among techies that hard drives used in server-like workloads can suffer from poor configuration by default such that they frequently load and unload their heads , which can cause disks to fail much faster than they otherwise would. While I have been aware of this in my home server as well, it is easy to forget to ensure that disks are not silently killing themselves by…
I sometimes find myself wanting to cross-compile programs with CMake on a Linux machine such that I get a standalone .exe that can be given to mostly non-technical Windows users to run. This isn’t hard, but finding the right options is a little bit of a challenge every time, so now I’m recording the procedure here; both as a reminder to myself, and to provide a quick recipe that future…
I’ve been doing some Django development lately, and was mystified why it seemed the debug toolbar on my local development instance wasn’t showing up, though it had been in the past. It turns out to have been a surprising interaction between browsers sometimes enforcing that resources be served with correct MIME types and the way Windows provides system-wide MIME type configuration…
Today I’m publishing tihle , a new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators (currently only the 83+, but maybe others later). There’s rather a lot to say about it, but here I will discuss the motivation for a new emulator and the state of the art followed by technical notes on the design and initial development process . Yes, it runs Phoenix! Read on for that discussion, or jump…
I updated fb-hitler a few years ago and never wrote about it; today I spent some time to describe the new version, which is implemented more robustly: now it’s a bootable image that runs in real mode, not a Linux application. QEMU looks like this when running the program. Read more on the project page or GitLab .
Sometimes I find it useful to be able to quickly save a page to the Wayback Machine , often to be able to provide a stable link to a page that I don’t control- for instance if I’m pointing somebody to a document that describes something they’re asking about, then it’s nice to ensure that there will still be an archived copy if the original goes away. While the landing page on web.archive.org has a…
FPGAs are pretty cool pieces of hardware for tinkering with, and have become remarkably easy to approach as a hobbyist in recent years. Boards like the TinyFPGA BX don’t require any special hardware to use and can provide a simple platform for modestly-scoped projects or just for learning. While historically the software tools for programming FPGAs are proprietary and provided by the…
Previously as I was experimenting with logging the temperature using a Raspberry Pi (to monitor the temperatures experienced by fermenting cider), I noted that the Pi was something of a terrible hack, and it should be possible to do more efficiently with some slightly less common hardware. I decided that improved version would be interesting to build for use at home, since it’s both kind of…
I had approximately the following exchange with a co-worker a few days ago: Them: “Hey, do you have a spare Raspberry Pi lying around?” Me: [thinks] “..yes, actually.” T: “Do you want to build a temperature logger with Prometheus and a DS18B20+? M: “Uh, okay?” It later turned out that that co-worker had been enlisted by yet another individual to provide a…
With the recent news that Crashplan were doing away with their “Home” offering , I had reason to reconsider my choice of online backup backup provider. Since I haven’t written anything here lately and the results of my exploration (plus description of everything else I do to ensure data longevity) might be of interest to others looking to set up backup systems for their own data,…
I’ve been enjoying The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild recently, and reflected some on what makes it interesting to me from a non-gameplay perspective. This document is a version of those musings organized for publication, though perhaps less well organized than my usual writings- I am by no means a skilled critic, but spending longer in composing this would likely just delay its…
At the most recent Rust Sydney meetup (yesterday, “celebrating” Rust’s second birthday ) I gave a talk intended to provide an introduction to using LLVM to build compilers, using Rust as the implementing language. The presentations were not recorded which might have been neat, but I’m publishing the slides and notes here for anybody who might find it interesting or useful.…