I’ve been fascinated by high-volume, fault-tolerant data storage systems for a long time. I started my data storage setup in earnest with a 4-disk RAID 5 array on an ARC-1210 controller installed in my daily-driver Windows desktop. When that array inevitably filled up, I added another array on a second ARC-1210. That…
The machine is now capable of running un-attended for hours on end, which is a huge milestone. No more jamming or other nastiness that causes me to interrupt a run. Many little things contributed to this, I’ve looked at all the mechanics and figured out all the little things that went wrong one by one and have come up…
After several years with my Dell Latitude E6400 I was searching for a new, more powerful Linux machine for my coding and performance tweaking tasks. And although the Dell XPS line sounded interesti…
Some of you have asked about my exact Hackintosh spec, so here it is. I built my Hackintosh in March/April 2014, after finally deciding that the Mac Pro was too expensive and didn’t really fit my needs. The spec I was going to go for was an 8-core model, with 32 gigs of RAM, a 1 TB flash
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
Programing in Clojure and ClojureScript
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.
Jeff Atwood, perhaps the most widely read programming blogger, has a post that makes a case against using ECC memory . My read is that his major points are:
Want to read about the acceleration we are seeing in our society in the area of mobility? Read our new book ‘Forward’. Updated June 9, 2020. Today, Tesla Motors published their 2019 Imp…
A look at the impressive real-world power efficiency of Apple's newer MacBook Pro models and what it means for battery life.
Streaming a webcam to a deep learning model the hacker’s way
How I modified DOSBox and the original Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 from 1989 to run on my immersive multi-display flight simulator set up.
I've been restoring a Xerox Alto minicomputer from the 1970s and figured it would be interesting to see if it could mine bitcoins. I coded u...
A blog about Rust and embedded stuff
Introducing the Dice-O-Matic mark II, now generating the die rolls on GamesByEmail.com. It is a 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million rolls a day.
Alexei's pile o'stuff, featuring writing on software development, travel, photography, and more.
Last week I wrote a Mandelbrot set program for the Xerox Alto, which took an hour to generate the fractal. The point of this project was to...
TL;DR – be wary of buying a Lenovo laptop or any other laptop that uses a Synaptics touch pad until Synaptics ships a fixed driver. Their driver has a memory leak and they have a battery-life bug t…
Revisiting some opinions on how to pick a microcontroller - as a followup to SnapEDA's post on the Top 10 Microcontrollers on their site.
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The PocketBeagle is a tiny but powerful inexpensive key-fob-sized open source Linux computer. It has 44 digital I/O pins, 8 analog input...
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
In this Alto restoration episode, we repaired a second CRT display, exercising our TV repair skills and discovering a tiny mysterious lightb...
