real-time operating system

TRON was an ambitious project to say the least, and after a good start, it suddenly came to a screeching halt.

Dealing with AI coding and swinging from feeling on top of the world building things faster to crashing and feeling like everything is pointless

It's time to stop drawing user interfaces with punctuation characters. Native UI is a completely solved problem.

You’ve almost certainly encountered Conventional Commits before. It may have reared its ugly head in the changelog of an open source project you’ve used. It may have been the enforced commit format for an open source project you contributed to. A lot of people swear by it. I swear at it. Even though it is used by a large number of popular open source projects, Conventional Commits is an actively bad standard which encourages focus on the wrong things and fails to deliver on its promises.

When everyone is empowered with the same magic, is there any magic to be had? That’s one of the biggest wquestins you must ask yourself today – and it’s what I wrote into the Foreword of my latest book. Two weeks ago I retired a ten-year streak of Daily Inspiration posts. This week I want […]

“Data is the new oil.” It’s the metaphor that won’t die, though for the next little bit, I’ll do my part to advance its expiration date. Yesterday came news that Googl…

A quick note about future of computing and indieweb. It's about a 2 minute read.

The nation's second-largest library system just got a colossus of a book sorter, with conveyor belts and robot arms toiling away to bring you the item you want.

Some projects seem too good to be true until you dig into it and find the secret magic that makes it all work. Take Paper Tunes by [Makestreame], a project which purports to store a song on a singl…

A friend from my old hackerspace was in grad school for electrical engineering. He had a professor who would ask, when something went wrong with a student project, “Have you fully characterized the…

There are plenty of stories about inventors who see a problem and decide they can do better. But Van Phillips had a little more motivation than most. The problem was his own leg. In 1976, Phillips …

When we think about security threats, we generally imagine them coming from far away across the wider internet. But what if the connection between you and your ISP was the target? [Rithwik Jayasimh…

One of the great things of Linux as an ecosystem is that there is so much choice. Yet this is also its greatest weakness, as unlike on MacOS and Windows this means that simple questions often do no…

As far as desktop microcomputers for mere mortals went in the first half of the 1980s, there was a sharp distinction between home computers such as the many 8-bit machines we regularly see here, an…

However you make a digital computer, you need something to represent a binary digit. Usually this is some form of switch: a relay, a tube, or a transistor, although there have been other ways to re…

You’ve almost certainly heard of the Xerox Alto, the machine that pioneered the desktop-mouse-keyboard interface and inspired Steve Jobs to produce the Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers. It …

Arcade machines have a rich history, at times at the forefront of technology, and often the most bizarre machines. Machines that delivere...

There was a particular treat at the recent Electromagnetic Field event in the UK, as [Tim Hunkin] delivered a talk on the history of arcade machines. Given that he’s something of an engineeri…

[Mansour] presents an interesting idea in his essay A Common Thread — just as USB-C has become the “One Connector To Rule Them All” in the world of electronics, so too should his …

If you used a serious computer pre-IBM PC, there was a fair chance its operating system was CP/M. CP/M was a staple among 8080 and Z80 computers and while there were other versions, we’ll alw…

The last year or two has seen relatively affordable multi-material printers hit the market, and the question that [Tom Nardi] and I were kicking around when he was writing up the 2025 year-in-revie…

A talk from the recent Electromagnetic Field event in the UK caught our eye, in which [Amy Jeskins] looked at the overlooked engineering skill of pattern cutting. She takes us through the mechanics…

Back in the late 90s when absolutely everybody knew that Java was going to become the one programming language to rule them all, the Java Ring was handed out to folks at Java developer conferences …

In the old days, you either swore by BASIC or you swore at it — but just about everybody got their start on the educational language. Nowadays, the kids are learning Python, but there’s…

AI makes it cheap to build software for exactly one person's workflow. The idea is twenty years old, but suddenly feasible. And it breaks an assumption at the heart of open source collaboration.

A new job title for experts who ship systems by directing systems, agents, and outcomes