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GPT-6 Astra Helped Me Jailbreak My Kindle
Niraj Rajgor describes using coding agents to jailbreak his own 10th-gen Kindle over Wi-Fi and build KindleCTL, a photo-slideshow app: which models failed or were blocked, how GPT-6 Astra got it working, and why closing the feedback loop on the real e-ink display mattered more than passing tests.
5 min · 1,157 words
Digital Audio on the ZX Spectrum's 1-Bit Beeper
Michael Martin wraps a ZX Spectrum series with a practical write-up on coaxing high-quality digital audio from the machine's 1-bit beeper—covering techniques, trade-offs, and surprisingly good results on every Spectrum model.
21 min · 4,768 words
Clone It, Build It, Run ItAkida execution in heterogeneous environments with IBM Spectrum Symphony
BrainChip describes the open-source Symphony Community Akida Bundle for running AI inference across a fleet of Akida neuromorphic chips managed by IBM Spectrum Symphony.
5 min · 1,131 words
Reverse-engineering the vintage Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers the Intel 8087's tangent microcode and shows why the chip's approach goes beyond classic CORDIC—covering range reduction, the argument reduction trick, and what the die reveals about 1980s floating-point design.
32 min · 7,343 words
Infecting the Steam Link with NixOS
While rummaging through my closet the other day I discovered a [Steam Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Link Hardware_device) I had bought on flash sale way back in 2018 still dutifully humming away all these years later. It occured to me that having an always on low power Arm device with Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and several USB ports would be handy, so thus began my journey to get NixOS running on the Steam Link.
13 min · 2,996 words
Un-hanging the HP Envy 17-DA0013dx for OpenBSD
Ian Darwin describes getting OpenBSD running on an HP Envy 17 laptop whose boot hung during device probing: verbose autoconf output via ddb, a panic that pointed to buggy ACPI, the BIOS update that fixed it, swapping NVMe drives and opening the case, notes on the hardware, remaining minor issues, and lessons learned.
8 min · 1,804 words
Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
In 2011, Apple released the Cards app. The app — which required iOS 5 — let you design custom letterpress cards, with your messages and photos printed upon them — which Apple would ship to your recipient on your behalf. I recently learned the origin story of Cards, and that it was specifically a Steve Jobs product. It also wasn’t smooth sailing. But first, some backstory, and inserting myself into the narrative, because it’s my site and I can do what I want here.
6 min · 1,445 words
Getting out of the way: my robotics crash course
Software engineer Rob Bercik documents a crash course with a desktop robot arm: why LLM-era builders should get out of the way, what broke first, and what physical loops taught him.
8 min · 1,842 words
Local AI on a 12 GB GPU: what survived testing, and how to set it up
Hands-on notes testing local AI models on a 12 GB RTX 3060: which stacks fit in VRAM, how context length decides spills to CPU, and a practical setup that survived the author’s trials.
14 min · 3,307 words
C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
Gustavo Pezzi defends C’s platform-sized integers: how 12–60-bit machines shaped int, why minimum ranges beat fixed widths, and what Lua’s portable C still teaches.
2 min · 486 words
Arm & SoftBank: Part 1 — Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
Today, something a little different: a joint post in the form of a conversation between Jon Metzler and Babbage.
11 min · 2,555 words
Friday Facts #447 - Factorio that you can touch
Factorio’s Friday Facts #447 covers a physical Factorio experience: how a playtesting event snowballed into a touchable factory build players can visit, with design notes from the Wube team.
10 min · 2,235 words
John D. Cook explains dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbits: why satellites there stay in perpetual sunlight, and what that means for powering orbital compute servers.
1 min · 257 words
When to choose x86-64 vs aarch64
Not all cloud vCPUs are created equal. When you create a PlanetScale Postgres or Neki database, you have to choose between `aarch64` (ARM) and `x86-64`. Two clusters on different architectures can have the same vCPU count and RAM, yet perform very differently. It's worth understanding the implications, since you can't easily switch the CPU architecture on your cluster later. x86 grew up on the desktop, prioritizing backward compatibility and performance. It began at Intel in 1978 and IBM’s…
6 min · 1,326 words
Mac Mini M6: Retro PC Emulation with 86Box (600MHz PII?!)
Benchmarking cycle-accurate 86Box on an M6 Mac Mini: why one core matters for retro PC emulation, a stable 600MHz Pentium II clock, and how timing accuracy compares to original hardware.
7 min · 1,678 words
Lab on a Contact Lens Can Measure Stress Through Serotonin
IEEE Spectrum covers a smart contact lens that aims to measure serotonin as a stress biomarker, part of a broader push toward continuous body-chemistry sensing.
4 min · 960 words
mitxela builds a FLIP fluid simulation on salvaged Hanover flipdot panels for EMF2026—drive electronics, power, eight-panel install, and the pun that started it.
2 min · 377 words
One CPU Atomic Instruction, One Packaging Infinite Loop: The Story of the Lost Update on LA664
Jie Ge documents a Loongson LA664 erratum where an atomic instruction can lose updates, how it surfaced as an infinite packaging loop, the root cause analysis, and what it means for correctness on that CPU.
14 min · 3,163 words
Building a 64-Bit OS — Chapter 3: Interrupt Descriptor Tables (The magic behind a working keyboard)
Building a 64-Bit OS — Chapter 3: Interrupt Descriptor Tables (The magic behind a working keyboard) Interrupts Interrupts are easily one of my favorite topics.
11 min · 2,612 words
Notes on loading oliveoil22's Casio CZ-101 patch banks into the browser-based CZP-1 synthesizer, with downloadable JSON bank data and step-by-step library import instructions.
2 min · 363 words