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I over-engineered a Fast Fourier Transform for Arduino
PhD student in Photophysics
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LTO Tape data storage for Linux nerds
Tape storage is surprisingly not dead! If you are here then you may be considering using LTO tape as part of your backup or your long term archiving strategy. I’m here to mostly talk you out of it, or at best make sure that you are aware of what you are walking into.
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Patching an embedded synthesiser OS from 1996 with Ghidra
For reasons I won't get into, I've been working on a tricky reverse engineering puzzle recently: how to patch the operating system of a 26-year-old synthesizer. To be specific, the Kurzweil K2500, a...
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You can't buy a Raspberry Pi right now
...or at least, not without a lot of patience or a fat wallet. But why? And are there any signs Raspberry Pis will become available to the general public again soon? To be clear, I'm speaking of the mainstream SBC Raspberry Pis, like the Pi 4 model B, the Compute Module 4, the Pi Zero 2 W, and even in many cases the…
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RISC-V based single board computers are getting there
When putting the Raspberry Pi Zero vs a MangoPi MQ Pro, who wins? Can the RISC-V D1 chip hold its own?
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Clip control on the Apple GPU
After a year in development, the open source “Asahi” driver for the Apple GPU is running real games. There’s more to do, but Neverball is already playable (and a lot of fun!).
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My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman
A fun, small, affordable, and beautifully-crafted media player that’s easy to transfer files to, and sounds excellent.
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Pimping my Casio with Oddly Specific Objects' alternate motherboard and firmware
Some time ago I bought a replacement motherboard for my classic Casio F-91W from Crowd Supply. The project keeps the original Casio LCD but...
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M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2
It’s limited to 5 Gb/s, giving read rates of about 400 MB/s and writes at about 430 MB/s. Fine for Time Machine backups, but bad with NVMe drives.
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Oxide on My Wrist: Hubris on PineTime was the best worst idea
In my last Oxide-related post I got Oxide’s Propolis software running and said I might try and get their sled agent up and running next. Anyways that didn’t happen. Instead I ended up reading datasheets, writing rust codegen, spending 16 gigs of ram for an hour to build docs for a crate that’s just a glorified bundle…
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A home made PCB stepper motor
The first idea is interesting because it means cheap, precision-manufactured PCBs can be easily transformed into cheap, precise tiny motors.
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Running Stable Diffusion on Your GPU with Less Than 10Gb of VRAM
Constant Meiring - Technology Product Builder
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A secret Apple Silicon extension to accommodate an Intel 8080 artifact
Lately I’ve been spending time on Mastodon for … reasons. Here’s my link: https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot. In my recently active time on the platform, I have found quite a few excellent retrocomputing-related posts by creative members of the community. One such post, … Continue reading →
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No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices
Every few years, a dodgy stat does the rounds claiming you can save £££ if you switch off all your gadgets at the wall. The standby mode of your TV is bleeding you dry!!! Energy Saving Trust@EnergySvgTrustA quick way to #saveenergy at home is to turn off tablets, laptops and consoles as soon as you stop using them…
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Great AA Alkaline Battery Test (2016)
Regular readers would probably know that I have a love of batteries, and their associated test equipment. Maybe it was the fact that they were expensive, but pervasive, and my enjoyment as a child …
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Down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole
I’m writing this to share my experience adapting to weird keyboards and layouts.
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Life at 800 MHz
We’ve been using a Sony Vaio VGN-P588E for the past few months as our primary personal laptop. This thing’s great; it’s got a small but not uncomfortable keyboard. It’s got a trackpoint, which we absolutely need to keep our hands healthy. Crucially, it’s only 1.5 pounds. We’re disabled in a way that means we’ve got to…
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Why don't more people use throat mics?
Yes, *that* kind of microphone -- the kind that are most commonly known to be used by employees of the military industrial complex.
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mmWave radar, you won't see it coming
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Shimano Forces Hammerhead to Remove All Di2 Related Functionality From Karoo
Effective next Thursday,...
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Continuous glucose monitoring on the Apple Watch
Coding diabetic technology
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Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
I wasn't entirely satisfied with the aluminum cube , so after thinking about the design for a while, I decided to make another one out of stainless steel. Just for fun, I thought I would make all the pieces using only manual machines. How hard could it be?
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A Christmas tree bauble that plays Doom
Christmas is coming again, and generally that means christmas trees and everything in it: lights, streamers, and ofcourse baubles. The holiday is all very jolly and everything, so I decided it was lacking some doom... errm, I mean Doom. So I 3d-printed a small Christmas bauble modeled on an IBM PC, stuffed it with the…
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Repurposing an old Android phone as a web server
A programmer's blog with posts about Ruby, web development, algorithms and data structure.
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Apple’s Universal Control
Apple’s “Universal Control” is holy-shit good
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Why are McDonald’s Self Service Kiosks so hackable?
McDonalds in Australia do a decent cup of coffee. It’s not great but it’s consistently decent so I often start my day with a cup. Due to my travels around Australia in a decked out van I have seen how many McDonalds operate and just how many of