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CHOMPI portable sampler is now open-source
CHOMPI Sampler Reference Hub Open Source Intro to CHOMPI Open Source This is a discontinuation open-source release: a permanent source for the files and documentation related to CHOMPI. To customize it, clone the repo into your own GitHub. While we won’t be doing any more file updates, the CHOMPI Club will live on in the Chase Bliss Discord](https://discord.gg/q3KcumMcBB). Check out the CHOMPI Open Source channel to discuss the project, share what you make, and see what others have made on their
4 min · 876 words
How little does an AI agent need, and how cheap can it get?
Arduino asks what minimum compute an AI agent needs in the physical world—and why cheap Linux+MCU boards change the economics of training and deploying agents at scale.
3 min · 709 words
A Brief History of the Bloomberg Terminal
Allison Marsh traces how Michael Bloomberg's Market Master grew from a monochrome Merrill Lynch terminal into the Bloomberg Terminal—keyboards, hot keys, private networks, and museum artifacts of financial computing.
7 min · 1,562 words
Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
Marcin Wichary photographs modular industrial control dashboards in German and Polish museums—air traffic, subway, railway, and power-plant panels as physical design systems that software later replaced.
1 min · 320 words
Floppy Emu Hardware Failure Analysis Results
Steve digs through years of Floppy Emu QA failures and returns: clock crystals dominate the failure table, with CPLDs, programming misses, and soldering filling out a detailed hardware autopsy.
5 min · 1,165 words
Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2026
Backblaze’s Q2 2026 Drive Stats: 354,415 drives at 1.73% quarterly AFR, lifetime AFR 1.41%, plus a clear CMR vs SMR primer as 20TB+ drives become a larger share of the fleet.
11 min · 2,548 words
macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
SquareOrbits argues Apple's macOS Golden Gate release echoes Snow Leopard's stability pitch but ships with serious bugs—including a Colours eyedropper hang that force-restarts the system—and catalogs the breakage from a working-Mac perspective.
4 min · 914 words
Phyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display
A build write-up of an audio-reactive LED sculpture that maps Fibonacci phyllotaxis onto a physical light array—math, fabrication, and real-time reactive firmware.
7 min · 1,644 words
Rickrolling with a Pharmacy cross
A playful hardware write-up: turning a pharmacy LED cross into a scrolling Rickroll display, with wiring notes and the software path.
5 min · 1,072 words
AMD to Acquire World Labs to Advance the Future of AI Compute
AMD announces a definitive agreement to acquire Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, bringing spatial AI researchers and models in-house to shape future AI hardware, software, and systems.
4 min · 1,011 words
World Labs announces a definitive agreement to join AMD, arguing that scale, reach, and closer hardware partnership are needed to accelerate spatial and physical AI research.
1 min · 218 words
KiCad Version 10.0.7 Release Candidate 1 Available
KiCad announces the first release candidate for 10.0.7, with testing builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux ahead of the stable point release.
1 min · 199 words
Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights
Julia Evans walks through repairing decade-old rechargeable bike lights by replacing the battery at a makerspace—opening the case, identifying the cell, soldering a replacement, and what she learned as a non-electronics expert.
4 min · 1,011 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
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