John Graham-Cumming's blog

The SidePulse Pro is a fun project that puts some LEDs in an "SD card format" to go into the side of a MacBook Pro.

Look I hate blog posts bitching about software but having tried to contact P&G to no avail here I am.

The October 1967 edition of Life Magazine covered the ongoing Vietnam War but also contained a long article helping readers understand how "man's most complex machine" (the computer) worked.

XKCD 3242 is titled "The aperiodic table" and looks like this: Which is cool, but it's not aperiodic like a Penrose tiling.

I've been working quite a bit with Claude Code and OpenCode on a project and really wanted a way to run both without having to constantly approve use of tools.

Back in 2012 I wrote a blog post titled just Programmer about both my job title and a company I'd just joined as a Programmer.

Because it isn't polarized, and that can lead to a situation where something is switched "off" but there's 230V of electricity still present.

So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's empty.

There's a quirk in the iPhone Camera app that can drive a security conscious iPhone owner crazy: if you touch your finger on the Camera app icon without actually opening the app, the camera starts operating.

KNX is a European standard used in home automation.

After an unfortunate incident involving my passport and some alcohol-based hand gel in my bag, I decided I needed some sort of waterproof passport protection.

A while back I attended a Cloudflare board meeting and carried my laptop in a brown paper bag from a grocery store.

I did have an X.com (username: 6a6763) account and I got bored of it so I deactivated it today.

I own two computers that I use regularly.

Close to three years ago I wrote about using Oddly Specific Objects' alternate "motherboard" to modify a classic Casio F-91W watch: Pimping my Casio with Oddly Specific Objects' alternate motherboard and firmware.

Early in the morning in a European city, I awoke and wondered for a moment where I was.

Somehow I forgot to blog my site: https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/.

One of my Minitels (the one that I modified a few years ago to run new firmware) started having power supply problems: the LED was on but nothing else was working.

I'm not much of a collector of things.

Portugal has an incredibly well executed and efficient system for collecting road tolls called Via Verde.

There isn't a lot to this story beyond the fact that in around 1990 I helped debug someone's Lotus 1-2-3 set up via fax.

Unless they are widely, widely known they make communication worse.

From time to time I do some project involving old hardware that requires connecting it to a modern computer.

I've written before about my 1976 KIM-1 and code I wrote for a similar one long ago.

Twenty years ago, on February 3, 2005, I released v1.0.0 of a project I called "GNU Make Standard Library" (GMSL).