In the Blackberry-keyboard-based project lineage story last week, I covered how a series of open-source projects turned into Beepy, a cool Linux PDA with a lively community. To me, it’s yet a…

When home computers first appeared, disk drives were an expensive rarity. Consumers weren’t likely to be interested in punch cards or paper tape, but most people did have consumer-grade audio…

Jef Raskin instigated the Mac project in 1979. Twenty years later, he was dismayed with the state of personal computing. What would he think today?

Cheap Tickets, one of the first big digital travel companies, has a hell of a corporate history—one with nothing to do with the internet.

Asking for a cohort. How many different sellers, or one seller with different names, are (or is) pushing a coffee cup with the design above? But the problem is a U.S. one. Traffic to this blog jump…

After two decades, Apple has announced its final version of MacOS for Intel. Guess that means Hackintoshing is done, too.

Everyone these days wants to talk about Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) when it comes to nuclear power. The industry seems to have pinned its hopes for a ‘nuclear renaissance’ on the exci…

It’s easy to think of commercial products as black boxes, built with proprietary hardware that’s locked down from the factory. However, that’s not always the case. A great many co…

Simple, speedy, scalable, resilient: the fast, lightweight message broker you’re suddenly hearing a lot about has plenty of competition but stands out for its comprehensive approach to event-driven architecture

My current theory of agentic programming: people are amazing at adapting the tools they're given and totally underestimate the extent to which they do it, and the amount of skill we build doing that is an incidental consequence of how badly the tools are designed.

Tech giants come and go

Researchers at the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science introduce a novel approach to reducing electronic waste and advancing sustainable data processing: turning old smartphones into tiny ...

I discuss why Alexa missed the opportunity to take the lead and become the dominant player in the conversational AI market.

Step-by-Step Coding Implementation of Coppersmith and Grossman's 1975 paper

Let's Understand DNS For Real

Max Mitchell's personal portfolio website showcasing his photography, YouTube videos, coding projects, and work history.

How core principles of computer science unlock resilient, scalable systems.

(continuation of a previous post) If you ever have a hit on your hands, my advice is to take notes. Living in the whirlwind of blinding success is a little like experiencing your own wedding &#8211…

What could happen when you open-source a hardware project? No, seriously. I hold a fair few radical opinions – one is that projects should be open-source to the highest extent possible. I&#82…

The parts of the web/tech industry we lit on fire and probably aren't going to get back.

Recently [Florin] was in the market for a basic uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to provide some peace of mind for the smart home equipment he had stashed around. Unfortunately, the cheap Serioux…

Until the release of Windows 11, the upgrade proposition for Windows operating systems was rather straightforward: you considered whether the current version of Windows on your system still fulfill…

Today we heard from [Richard James Howe] about his new CPU. This new 16-bit CPU is implemented in VHDL for an FPGA. The really cool thing about this CPU is that it eschews the typical program count…

Main features: + Play audio CD using ATAPI + SPDIF + Nice but simple graphical user interface using a VFD (no OLEDs/LCDs, unless someone codes in the support for those) + CDDB and MusicBrainz connectivity for metadata + Last.FM scrobbling + Time-synced lyrics display ? Multi-disc changer drive support + Internet radio receiver in MP3 and AAC format with metadata + Bluetooth reception with metadata display + IR and physical button controls - OTA firmware updates with CI/CD Stretch goals: - Bluetooth audio transmission from CD - HTTP web interface OOS/Rev.2 ideation: - SPDIF coax I/O and TOSLINK I/O (it's already on the chip but not on the Rev.1 PCB!) - FM/AM radio - Higher speed IDE bus using SPI expanders instead of I2C - ... to allow reading MOD/XM/S3M/MP3/M4A files - ... and potentially stream raw data off the disc, eliminating the SPDIF Out requirement on the drive - ... potentially even allowing to use a SATA drive via an IDE-SATA converter

What do you get when you combine an ESP32, a 16-bit DAC, an antique VFD, and an IDE CD-ROM drive? Not much, unless you put in the work, which [Akasaka Ryuunosuke] did to create ESPer-CDP, a modern …

Today we’re going to make a little digression from things that we do to look at perhaps why we do the things that we do. This one is philosophical folks, so strap yourselves in. We’ve h…

In a marvelous college lecture in front of a class of engineering students, V. Hunter Adams professed his love for embedded engineering, but he might as well have been singing the songs of our peop…

Devadath PR's automatic homework machine was arguably more educational to build than the homework it wrote.