Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,044 posts.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
First an apology. I started this project because during the first 9 months of the COVID-19 pandemic business was down to a fraction of what it was before then, and I had a lot of time on my hand. But that has changed now and there is a lot of work in my ‘day job’, so I don’t have a whole lot of time to work on the…
Intel released the 386 processor in 1985, the first 32-bit chip in the x86 line. This chip was packaged in a ceramic square with 132 gold-pl...
My current laptop is an aging X1 Carbon generation 7, purchased some time in mid 2019. A few months ago a few keys of the keyboard stopped working, specifically the 5, 6, - , = and Delete keys. Sometimes I can get it working again by mashing one of them for a while, but it's not consistent. Given my past experiences…
It began with a spark—a dormant passion reignited after many years away from motorcycling. Life had steered me in different directions, away from the saddle, but something deep inside pulled me back to the thrill and freedom that only riding offers. Returning to motorcycling after such an extended hiatus was daunting…
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
A regression in external display support on Apple Silicon M4/M5 generation chips prevents full HiDPI modes on 4K monitors, limiting users to either blurry non-HiDPI or reduced workspace HiDPI.
A couple of years ago, I was heavily involved in analysing and reporting on the massive VTech hack [https://www.troyhunt.com/when-children-are-breached-inside/], the one where millions of records were exposed including kids' names, genders, ages, photos and the relationship to parents' records which included their
If you’re new to the Arm ecosystem, consider this a quick primer on terms you likely have seen before but might have questions about.
Nope, I think this might be the best ultra-low power consumer digital watch ever produced!
You can’t have a 4-slot GPU. You just can’t. We have finally left sanity behind, with nvidia’s 4000 series cards yielding a “clown car” of absurd GPU designs, as GamersNexus put it. These cards are so huge they need “GPU Support Sticks”, which are an actual real thing now. The fact that we insist on relegating the GPU…
Programing in Clojure and ClojureScript
January 1, 2021 Update: My 1.34 Gbps benchmark was flawed. See this GitHub issue and this updated blog post to learn more: WiFi 6 is not faster than Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi. After buying three wireless cards, a new WiFi router, optimizing my process for cross-compiling the Linux kernel for the Raspberry Pi…
TL;DR: An undocumented API in Google home devices is easily exploitable. This command will reboot any on your local network: nmap –open -p 8008 192.168.1.0/24 | awk ‘/is up/ {print up};…
How I went from buying a €200 tracker to building a custom telescope mount with harmonic drives, ESP32, and way more engineering than necessary
For the holidays, I decapped a chip that plays three Christmas melodies. The UM66T melody chip from the 1980s was designed for application...
An accelerated FAST feature detector for the ESP32-S3 leveraging 128-bit SIMD instructions, achieving ~2x the performance of the reference implementation.
These days, I’m building a lot of hardware projects based on the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi mini computer. Especially with the Raspberry Pi Zero W (an even tinier version, with the W denoting the wifi-capable version), you can have one anywhere and can power it from any USB power source.
This is a reader question from “jlforrest” that seems worth answering in more detail than just a single sentence: I understand the need for a cache but I don’t understand why there are …
As harvest season begins here in the Midwest, I once again celebrate by grinding Nebraska gravel at the Gravel Worlds Long Voyage bike race. As in previous years ( 2021 ) ( 2022 ), I spent more time writing code for a marginally-useful project than I did training. But hey, I finished!
As we head into another gifting season and more and more connected devices make their way onto gift guides, I want to offer a cautionary note. The smart home is like a cat — mostly self-sufficient and nice to have, but also possessing a mind of its own that can lead to frustration and confusion […]
When viewing LCD monitors from an oblique angle, it is not uncommon to witness a dramatic color shift. Occasionally, this can appear as a total color inversion. This is primarily caused by a polarization asymmetry, where light rays passing through the pixel matrix at oblique angles are influenced by the relative…
I’ve had the Xteink X4 for a couple of months now, a £40 e-ink reader small enough to stick to the back of a phone. I’d seen a few posts about it (Khairul Se...
What do you do when you cannot copy text between computers due to lack of internet connectivity? I built a modem using the Web Audio API, allowing data transfer via audio.
A few years ago on a trip to Tokyo, we took a day to explore Akihabara. We found a shop that was selling retro gaming stuff and when I saw an old SNES controller for sale I had to buy it.
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
