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Catherine (Whitequark)’s recent observations on poorly-engineered firmware reminded me of a few mistakes I’ve seen in vendors’ CPUs; some unimportant and others surprisingly bad.

I often find that imposed limitations make it easier to create things: it’s easy to aim for perfection if you can expend as much effort as you like on something and thus end up with nothing that you’ll ever call good enough to share.

I’ve recently been asked to reduce the size of video files with some regularity, taking in a video file and generating something with reduced file size (“squishing” the video; hence “video squisher”).

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an excellent video game, which I’ve only recently (about three weeks ago, at the time of writing) played to a satisfactory conclusion; it took me around 90 hours of gameplay over nearly 150 real-time days to re…

On a long-lived Linux server I operate, it has periodically been desirable to move its root filesystem (containing core OS files and the like) to a new drive for various reasons.

Earlier this year, I had a desire to capture time-lapse video of some construction that would take an unknown amount of time and occurred mostly during short periods of activity separated by intervals of inactivity with varying time.

Users who are accustomed to writing TI-BASIC on computers in plain text like any other programming language are probably familiar with sometimes needing to explicitly mark where token boundaries occur.

I recently had a bit of a problem with the files that had ended up in Google Photos on my account: the Google Drive desktop synchronization app seemed to have noticed the many (reasonably-high-resolution) thumbnails that my local photo management applicat…

It is fairly well-known among techies that hard drives used in server-like workloads can suffer from poor configuration by default such that they frequently load and unload their heads, which can cause disks to fail much faster than they otherwise would.

I sometimes find myself wanting to cross-compile programs with CMake on a Linux machine such that I get a standalone .exe that can be given to mostly non-technical Windows users to run.

I’ve been doing some Django development lately, and was mystified why it seemed the debug toolbar on my local development instance wasn’t showing up, though it had been in the past.

Today I’m publishing tihle, a new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators (currently only the 83+, but maybe others later).

I updated fb-hitler a few years ago and never wrote about it; today I spent some time to describe the new version, which is implemented more robustly: now it’s a bootable image that runs in real mode, not a Linux application.

Sometimes I find it useful to be able to quickly save a page to the Wayback Machine, often to be able to provide a stable link to a page that I don’t control- for instance if I’m pointing somebody to a document that describes something they’re asking abou…

FPGAs are pretty cool pieces of hardware for tinkering with, and have become remarkably easy to approach as a hobbyist in recent years.

Previously as I was experimenting with logging the temperature using a Raspberry Pi (to monitor the temperatures experienced by fermenting cider), I noted that the Pi was something of a terrible hack, and it should be possible to do more efficiently with…

I had approximately the following exchange with a co-worker a few days ago: Them: “Hey, do you have a spare Raspberry Pi lying around?”

With the recent news that Crashplan were doing away with their “Home” offering, I had reason to reconsider my choice of online backup backup provider.

I’ve been enjoying The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild recently, and reflected some on what makes it interesting to me from a non-gameplay perspective.

At the most recent Rust Sydney meetup (yesterday, “celebrating” Rust’s second birthday) I gave a talk intended to provide an introduction to using LLVM to build compilers, using Rust as the implementing language.