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DIY Amps: A Roadmap for Beginners (2017)
So you have decided to take the DIY dive and start building your own headphone amplifiers! If you stick with it, you are going to learn a lot about audio and electronics theory and develop several …
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Tokyo mechanical keyboard meetup photos
Last sunny Saturday, there was the biggest keyboard mee…
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Running an eInk Display with Elixir, Scenic and Nerves
So I've been curious about what kinds of displays you can connect to the Pi-series single board computers for a while. I happened to accidentally order a few. Among others an eInk display. I ordered the PaPiRus ePaper. It ended up being dead on arrival and then out of stock so I received an Inky to replace it. Fair…
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Bitcoin mining on an Apollo Guidance Computer
We've been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 . Now that we have the world's only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it. Try...
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Apple’s $9 engineering marvel no one wants (2017)
It’s the Lightning to 3.5 mm headphone jack adapter. I figured Apple got rid of the headphone jack and came up with this simple adapter to send analog audio signals from the phone to a 3.5 mm jack. Simple, right?
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Why Does My Remote Control Need to Know My Location?
Here's an interesting user-hostile pattern which could easily be avoided if programmers and business-people thought like regular humans. I have a Pioneer / Onkyo sound system. It's pretty nice and comes with a (not too crappy) Android app to let me remote control it. One day, the app updated itself. The changelog was…
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Buying an IBM Mainframe
I bought an IBM mainframe for personal use. I am doing this for learning and figuring out how it works. If you are curious about what goes i...
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All Magic Leap Patents Have Been Assigned to J.P. Chase Morgan as Collateral
Just A Quick Note Today on Magic Leap 2+ Month Old News Things have been very quiet lately with respect to Magic Leap. So quiet, that apparently the assignment of all of Magic Leap patents over 2 m…
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Need a USB Cable? Build One
Personal homepage of Josef Adamcik
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Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old today
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. Designing the System/360 was an extremely...
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How does the Hololens 2 matter?
So that happened, the Hololens 2 has been released. A few people have asked me what I think, so it’s about time I got my thoughts down on paper the interwebs. I’ve had a day or 2 to mull over it ...
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Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
What’s the oldest laptop you could reasonably do your job with? 3 years old? 5 years? 10? And if asked the same question 10 years ago, would your number be higher or lower? Thanks to a failing batte…
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Hacking Water
From water insecurity to offgrid, solar pumped, gravity flow 1000 gallons of running water.
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The 16-Inch MacBook Pro
After my first day with the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, I’m very optimistic about it.
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Hacking the Casio F-91W to Handle 1000 Psi
The Casio F-91W is one of the most iconic watches of the past few decades. It’s notoriously cheap, reliable, and retro; in fact, it’s probably the only watch that was worn by both Obama and Osama . At just under $10, it’s the perfect daily beater watch. And in the age where you need to charge your Apple Watch every…
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Where do interrupts happen?
Trying to determine exactly where asynchronous interrupts are delivered on Intel CPUs.
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A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi
Update: See follow-up post about A1 vs A2 performance, Raspberry Pi microSD follow-up, SD Association fools me twice?. After I published my 2019 Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison, I received a lot of feedback about newer 'A2' Application Performance class microSD cards, and how they could produce even…
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This TRS-80
A first-hand story about the TRS-80 Model 100 and journalism
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TROS: IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers
I recently came across a Transformer Read-Only Storage (TROS) module that stored microcode in an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. This unu...
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Home 3D metal printing: first results
A couple of weeks ago I learnt about an interesting 3d metal printing process , from a company selling it for $100k USD, and speculated that it might be DIY-able for much less. Well I now have some promising first results.
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How to Track Your Kids (and Other People's Kids) with the TicTocTrack Watch
Do you ever hear those stories from your parents along the lines of "when I was young..." and then there's a tale of how risky life was back then compared to today. You know, stuff like having to walk themselves to school without adult supervision, crazy stuff like that
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CPU Introspection: Intel Load Port Snooping
I blog about random things security, everything is broken, nothing scales, shared memory models are flawed.