Ayke van Laethem

How to install Syncthing on a Kobo e-reader

These are new earrings, very similar to my previous 36-LED earrings but with an extra button (to make it easier to cycle through many modes) and a microphone (for audio reactivity and programming custom patterns).

A variation on a traditional Dutch winter dish.

Extra hot chocolate, with the addition of pepper.

Bitbanging many LEDs from a microcontroller can be very fast, when using Binary Code Modulation and some assembly.

Charlieplexing is kinda difficult to wrap your head around initially, but once you understand it, it actually makes a lot of sense.

I've made new and improved RGB LED earrings, with double the LEDs compared to my previous LED earrings.

How to configure a Raspberry Pi to auto-play videos from a USB stick, without needing any input.

Tips and tricks on how to survive and even enjoy travelling when you're neurodivergent.

I've made RGB LED earrings, like these: You can find all the instructions on how to program it on the GitHub page.

Some thoughts on what would be nice to have in a silent lounge, especially at hacker events.

This post describes a fast algorithm for rendering polygons on slow hardware, and gives an intuitive explanation as to how it works.

I've updated play.tinygo.org to more accurately simulate hardware, and now also brought this feature to VS Code.

CGo is faster in TinyGo, here's how that works.

The int type is present in many programming languages, but their meaning varies.

The AVR architecture does not natively support arbitrary bit shifts.

An explanation of how garbage collectors work including some pseudocode how a real GC could be implemented.

How ESP32/ESP8266 support got added to TinyGo, how we got there, and the current status of support.

Quick note to get started with debugging AVR programs in a simulator

What RGB really means, what sRGB and gamma are and how to correctly blend colors.

How to configure DMA on the SAMD21, for example to use it with SPI.

The TinyGo playground simulates real hardware, including an e-paper display.

A high-level overview of LLVM IR, showing how two simple Go functions can be translated to IR.

TinyGo uses LLVM coroutines to implement goroutines.

How TinyGo implements Go interfaces in a radically different way, avoiding most memory allocations and reducing code size.

The defer keyword in Go does much more than you might think, leading to performance issues in some cases.

How to optimize code size for microcontrollers, including compiler options and lots of coding habits that produce smaller and often more efficient code.

Nordic BLE chips contain a proprietary SoftDevice implementing the BLE stack.

Using pvgrub2 on Debian is very easy, and there is a little bit of documentation on the 'net, but not enough to cover all needs.

While STARTTLS has traditionally been very sensitive to downgrade attacks, there are now two protocols to fix this: DANE and MTA-STS.

Explains how modern email authentication systems work together to protect the "from" header in email.

My experience with making a Python package and uploading it to PyPI.

A few tips on how to track how much you're addicted to your phone and how you can manage it.

As I gave up on Rust (for now), I tried setting up the Arduino environment to work with the "blue pill" board.

How to write a simple Rust program for the STM32 "blue pill" board that's sold on AliExpress and Ebay for about $2.

How to use memory checking tools inside an Android recovery to detect things like buffer overflows.

Use CCLoader to flash the official HM-10 firmware on a cheap Chinese JDY-08 device.

A look at the JDY-08, a cheap BLE module found on the online Chinese markets.

Concise version vectors is the algorithm behind DTSync.

A new bidirectional synchronization tool like Unison that can synchronize many distributed replicas

How to move an installed SD card from a Pi 1 to a Pi 3, or make it possible to use them both.

I have made a LED strip based on the ATtiny85 / Digispark.

How to install Debian on a Btrfs subvolume to easily make system snapshots.

How do you embed JSON in JavaScript?

Turn a plain HTTP web site served with nginx into one with HTTPS and SPDY support.

I have written a Go package for stateless authentication using HMAC.

I discovered that the CSS pseudo-classes :link and :visited are mutually exclusive.

I discovered a technique to prevent page jumping when navigating between short and long pages without showing the scroll bar all the time.