Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
You're Leaving Compute on the Table
Nishant Joshi tallies roughly 15 TFLOPS of idle GPU and neural compute sitting on his desk across a MacBook, Mac mini, iPhone, and AirPods, and argues product teams should push more work onto users' own devices while keeping identity, billing, and source of truth on the server.
5 min · 1,094 words
Reviving Valve's 15-year-old e-book
A technical write-up on resurrecting Valve’s The Final Hours of Portal 2 interactive e-book: reverse-engineering the aging app, restoring assets and playback, and publishing a Steam guide so others can read it again.
12 min · 2,690 words
The making of a very fast SPI flasher
localcc builds an Xbox 360 dual-NAND modchip and pushes an RP2040-based SPI flasher as fast as possible, replacing the SPI peripheral with PIO programs written in Rust, profiling with Tracy, and optimizing the USB path to approach the ~29 second theoretical read limit through the SMC.
12 min · 2,770 words
Reverse Engineering the iPod Classic's Undocumented Mikey Chip
My iPod Classic (7th gen) runs Rockbox, and I love almost everything about that arrangement. But the inline remote on Apple’s wired earbuds (the center play/pause button and the volume clicker) did nothing. Never has, for anyone running Rockbox on this family of iPods. ``` /* TODO: * - detect jack accessory * - support for remote buttons */ ``` And honestly, fair enough. Rockbox on this iPod exists because volunteers reverse engineered Apple hardware with zero documentation, for free, since January 2011. Music, clickwheel, recording, all of it figured out the hard way.…
12 min · 2,803 words
Simulating Airband AM Radios Warning: Contains many annoying sounds. In a slight departure from my usual code monkey content, let’s talk about airplanes! And radios!
15 min · 3,432 words
Magic Switch: Share a Magic Keyboard & Trackpad Between Two Macs (Free)
Joshua Rogers explains how he built Magic Switch, a free open-source macOS app that shares Apple Magic Keyboard, Trackpad, and Mouse between Macs without Apple ID or USB re-pairing.
11 min · 2,633 words
Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
A hands-on story of climbing into Portobello’s old police-station clock tower to diagnose a stopped nineteenth-century clock—dust, gears, and the small engineering of making time move again.
6 min · 1,406 words
Semantics for 2D Rasterization
Kulkarni, Whiting, and Panchekha introduce μSkia—a Lean-mechanized formal semantics for Skia 2D graphics—and an optimizer that speeds rasterization ~18.7% on Chrome-derived Skia programs while proving replacements correct.
4 min · 1,009 words
Stars in the sky: The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites
A deep history of the classified URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH ocean-surveillance satellites—from 1970s origins through later generations—and what open sources reveal about them.
28 min · 6,327 words
How Your Code Runs: The Journey of a Program Through the CPU
A clear walkthrough of CPU architecture—control unit, ALU, registers, and memory—and how a simple program is compiled, loaded, and executed instruction by instruction.
3 min · 730 words
lcamtuf argues that electronically controlled working memory—not Babbage—was the real bottleneck unlocked on the path to modern computers, tracing early registers, delay lines, and RAM.
8 min · 1,775 words
One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan myself included must show up and try to explain the concept of screens. Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we'll tell you, and one can drag them, we'll say, and other Amiga users rally in agreement, while non-Amiga users probably still don't get what's so great about screens. Until now, when this text has been written, in the hope of converting unsuspecting normies into full-blown Amiga screen lovers.
10 min · 2,400 words
Bartosz Ciechanowski’s interactive explainer of what sound is, how it is created and propagated, with playable demos of waveforms, frequency, and hearing.
34 min · 7,924 words
Urbex: Woking Electrical Control Room
Photo essay on the unused 1936 Southern Railway electrical control room in Woking, Surrey—its Art Deco board, wartime role, and abandonment after later consolidations.
3 min · 773 words
Gallery of Processor Cache Effects
Igor Ostrovsky's classic 2010 post uses short C# code samples to illustrate how processor caches shape real program performance: memory access patterns, cache lines, L1 and L2 sizes, instruction-level parallelism, cache associativity, false sharing of cache lines, and hardware quirks that are hard to explain.
12 min · 2,685 words