4021
Elizabeth line testing ways of banishing its "ghosts in the walls"
The appearance of shadowy ghosts has plagued some of the Elizabeth line's central London stations, and now TfL is trying to banish them.
4022
EU NGI TALER will bring private and secure online payments to the Eurozone
Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Reserves
4023
4024
4025
Does Your Code Pass the Turkey Test? (2008)
Over the past 6 years or so, I’ve failed each item on “The Turkey Test.” It’s very simple: will your code work properly on a person’s machine in or around th...
4026
An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)
SBCL is a Common Lisp implementation, with a performant compiler and support for a wide range of platforms. It has excellent documentation , and even a guide to internals (... this is written towards people who already know a lot about how it works though). This paper about SBCL's fairly unique build process is also…
4027
Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults with Worse Mental Health (2023)
New global study from Sapien Labs finds consistent links, stronger for girls
4028
SQLite does not do checksums
SQLite does not do checksums by default. Disk corruptions go silently unnoticed.
4029
Dead Air on the Incident Call
Silence can mean different things to different people in different situations. In this post, I’ll present a few incident scenarios and explore the role of the incident commander in breaking (…
4030
18 Months with a Framework 13
I've been using a Framework 13 laptop as my main/only computer for a little over 18 months now.
4031
OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon
Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, and maybe a…
4032
4033
The memory remains: Permanent memory with systemd and a Rust allocator
A Rust object that survives program restart thanks to Rust allocators, systemd's file descriptor store, and syscall memfd_create.
4034
The browser's biggest TLS mistake
Much like a previous talk of mine at Chaos Computer Congress this blog post is a direct write-up of a talk, if you prefer to consume this kind of content in video form you can watch the video here:
4035
Benjamin Thorpe translated almost all Old English texts (2016)
Not much is known about Benjamin Thorpe (1782-1870), yet he was one of the first scholars to publish voluminous editions and translations of Old English texts. This blog provides an overview of Tho…
4036
Org Mode Syntax Cheat Sheet (2017)
I’m a keen user of Emacs and Org mode for a variety of tasks, including note taking, generating documents for exporting to LaTeX, Word, or html. creating blog posts (notably for this blog, us…
4037
When random numbers are too random: Low discrepancy sequences (2017)
Random numbers can be useful in graphics and game development, but they have a pesky and sometimes undesirable habit of clumping together. This is a problem in path tracing and monte carlo integrat…
4038
Using a LLM to compress text
Introduction Large language models are trained on huge datasets of text to learn the relationships and contexts of words within larger documents. These relationships are what allows the model to generate text. Recently I've read concerns about LLMs being trained on copyrighted text and reproducing it. This got me…
4039
Let's Embed a Go Program into the Linux Kernel (2023)
Today, we would like to present a lesser-known feature of the Linux kernel. Instead of launching a program from a file system, regardless of whether it's virtual or not, it is also possible to embed a user-space program directly into the kernel image itself and start it from there.
4040
A deep history of Halloween
Or, how far back can historical analysis take us?
4041
Choosing what to read
Like many people, I spend a lot of time reading. Since there is much more that I could read than there is time for, I have to make choices about what I should read. In this short post I’m going to outline what my reading choices have become and why. My aim isn’t to suggest that anyone else should make the same choices…
4042
Solar-powered desalination system requires no extra batteries
MIT engineers built a solar-powered desalination system that produces large quantities of clean water despite variations in sunlight throughout the day. Because it requires no extra batteries, it offers a much more affordable way to produce drinking water, compared to other solar-driven designs.
4043
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) Phishing
Providing security research and red team techniques
4044
Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more...
4045
Summing ASCII encoded integers on Haswell at almost the speed of memcpy
“Print the sum of 50 million ASCII-encoded integers uniformly sampled from [0, 2³¹−1], separated by a single new line and sent to standard input.”
4046
Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
(with thanks to René Zandbergen, Ray Clemens, Roger Easton, Claire Bowern, Bill Endres, and the curatorial and conservation staff at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) I have some exc…
4047
4048
A floppy disk MIDI boombox: The Yamaha MDP-10
Longtime readers of Nicole Express might know that I dabble in playing the organ. But sometimes I want to play with sounds that don’t have the organ’s defini...
4049
SceneScript, a novel approach for 3D scene reconstruction
Today, we’re introducing SceneScript, a novel method for reconstructing environments and representing the layout of physical spaces.
4050
NumPy-style broadcasting in Futhark
A high-performance and high-level purely functional data-parallel array programming language that can execute on the GPU and CPU.