Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
purplesyringa investigates vfmaddrnd231pd, an FMA instruction with per-instruction rounding control documented in Intel's 2024 Software Development Manual that the GNU assembler doesn't recognize, whose documented intrinsics are missing from Clang and ICC, and that has vanished from the 2026 SDM.
2 min · 415 words
Classic 1990's PC Shooter Quake Runs on Pimoroni Explorer
Pimoroni's Les Pounder covers Zenodante's RP2350 Quake, a port of Quake's single-player campaign that runs on the £33.90 Pimoroni Explorer microcontroller board, a game that once needed a £1,000 1990s PC.
2 min · 434 words
Deep dive into Azure Maia 300 architecture
Microsoft details the architecture of Maia 300, the third generation of its Azure Maia AI accelerator, built as a co-designed system of silicon, software, racks, networking and datacenters optimized for cloud-scale agentic LLM inference.
8 min · 1,750 words
The Lightbulb Computer: Reimagining Spatial & Ambient Computing with Projectors
Former Apple prototyper Guillaume Ardaud presents the Lightbulb Computer, a speculative device that pairs modern projectors with computer vision to put ambient, spatial information onto everyday surfaces, as an alternative to smart glasses and headsets, with prototype demos and a companion video.
7 min · 1,643 words
Use the Tello's GameSir T1d controller as a Linux gamepad
A guide to making the BLE-only GameSir T1d controller sold with the Ryze/DJI Tello drone work as a regular Linux gamepad by speaking its proprietary GATT protocol and exposing it as a virtual input device, with every button verified.
7 min · 1,703 words
Inside a 1980s filter chip that uses switched capacitors
Ken Shirriff decaps a mysterious 1985 Harris chip, identifies it as a version of the MF10 switched-capacitor filter, and explains under the microscope how rapidly switched capacitors act as resistors, how the state-variable filter and op-amps are built, and how the die's layout maps to the circuit.
20 min · 4,576 words
We gave init() developers an ESP32-S3 computer as a conference badge. They put DOOM on it.
WorkOS shipped ESP32-S3 computers as init() 2026 conference badges; attendees put DOOM, Tamagotchi, voice assistants, and flight trackers on them. A recap of the badge hardware and what ~500 people built.
5 min · 1,195 words
HIP and ROCm as first-class citizens
Ludovic Courtès reports that Guix developers migrated the whole AMD HIP/ROCm stack from the Guix-HPC channels into Guix proper starting with 7.1.1: more than 40 packages covering the toolchain, linear algebra libraries, rocHPL, a ROCm Open MPI and profiling tools, plus HIP variants of scientific software.
6 min · 1,485 words
Oxide Computer Company announces a $445M Series D, opening with the milestone that ordinary operations made it pay income tax this spring, and explains why a profitable hardware company still raises: to keep accepting new demand, expand manufacturing capacity and build an enduring company.
3 min · 694 words
The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen
Brian Potter traces plasma displays from the University of Illinois PLATO terminals of the 1960s through their run as the premier flat-panel TV technology to their displacement by LCDs, and what the story says about how technologies win and lose.
8 min · 1,823 words
It took me nine years to hack my Xbox 360
Kennedn recounts buying a Matrix CoolRunner glitcher in 2017 and finally RGH-modding an Xbox 360 in 2026 with a Raspberry Pi Pico. The essay explains Xbox 360 boot security, reset-glitch fault injection, and how cheap microcontrollers made DIY glitching far easier than a decade ago.
5 min · 1,163 words
"Robot" Is A Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not A Robot
A roboticist and former industrial safety standards committee member rebuts the claim that a dishwasher is a robot, arguing that beyond the technical definition the word, born in Capek's 1920 play, is a social construct applied to automated machines that make us uneasy about what it means to be human.
4 min · 988 words
Deeper dive: Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs
Marcin Wichary compiles the gotchas between Mac and Windows keyboard handling — key names, modifiers, shortcuts, legends and behaviours — as a reference for web-app builders who serve both platforms from one codebase.
10 min · 2,348 words
The OLED Burn-In Test: 30-Month Update
We've spent the last two and a half years burning in our 4K QD-OLED monitor, and it's time to take another look at how it's holding up. It's been six months since the last update, and in that time we've continued to burn in our MSI MPG 321URX monitor on purpose by using it exclusively for productivity work.
12 min · 2,823 words
Making a flexible “neon” t-shirt with LED filaments
Earlier this year I had the perfect excuse to experiment with some flexible LED filaments that had been sitting in my “interesting parts” bin for years -- the company I work for was putting on a neon-themed event, so obviously I had to custom-build some LED neon attire! The only problem was this was announced less than a week in advance.... This is how I designed and assembled a wearable neon shirt in just a few days.
3 min · 741 words
Daniel Mangum digs into the Nordic nRF54LM20 access port and what you can learn when a peripheral writes memory while the CPU is halted.
9 min · 1,960 words
Inside TT-Wormhole: full Architecture
A friendly tour of Tenstorrent Wormhole n150 architecture: the die, network-on-chip, Tensix tiles, memory and compute hierarchy, with diagrams and measured card numbers for the n150d and n150s variants.
10 min · 2,251 words
A Practical Guide to “Plug&Pwn” for Pentesters and Defenders
SCRT's Clément Labro gives practical guidance on the Plug&Pwn research from DEF CON 34, showing how emulated USB devices and Windows Plug and Play driver installation can yield SYSTEM code execution on a locked machine or privilege escalation over RDP, and how configuration hardening can block it.
20 min · 4,624 words
Raspberry Pi Desktop now available for PC and Mac
Simon Long announces an updated Debian Trixie with Raspberry Pi Desktop image for PCs and Macs, including a Raspberry Pi Connect client, and recounts how the x86 version began as a 2016 side project after Eben Upton asked whether the desktop could run on his Mac.
4 min · 1,020 words
tapo speaks TPAP: Third-Party Compatibility can stay off
Mihai Dinculescu explains how v0.11.1 of tapo, his unofficial Rust and Python client for TP-Link Tapo devices, now logs in over TP-Link's TPAP protocol so users no longer need the Third-Party Compatibility switch, and covers new H200/H500 camera hub recording downloads plus plug schedules and timers.
10 min · 2,290 words