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axle OS

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Systems & Performance 2Security & Privacy 1Software Engineering 1Hardware & Electronics 1Games & Graphics 1

1

Exploiting the iPhone 4

Years ago, I was active in the iOS tweak development scene. I made many products and tools, distributed on Cydia, that modified iOS system behavior and added new functionality to SpringBoard. This was a really fun time, and gave me valuable early career exposure to reverse engineering closed-source binaries…

2

An IRC client in your motherboard

I made a graphical IRC client that runs in UEFI. It’s written in Rust and leverages the GUI toolkit and TrueType renderer that I wrote for axle’s userspace. I was able to develop it thanks to the vmnet network backend that I implemented for QEMU. You can connect to an IRC server, chat and read messages, all from the…

3

Writing a TrueType font renderer

Text is the medium of digital interaction, and text rendering has an outsized impact on the overall fit and finish of any system. It therefore pains me that axle has for years relied on a low-resolution 8x8 bitmap font. Let’s fix it! Take a look at the characters composing this sentence. Note the curves, the negative…

4

I wrote a GameBoy emulator for my hobby OS (2022)

The Nintendo GameBoy is an exceptionally well-documented system, perfect for anybody who’d like to take a crack at emulation. Publicly-maintained resources like the Pan Docs make it both approachable and convenient to get an overview of the GameBoy’s address space layout, to understand the mechanics of hardware…