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.

Rethinking systems for structuring and using time  Time is fundamental for human existence and experience. Societal frameworks for structuring and understanding time and temporal experience have, however, remained stagnant and are potentially no longer fit for their intended purpose or, more importantly, the purposes we might intend for them at present. Indeed, when considering the...

It's time for another entry in the Prior Art Department and today we'll consider a forgotten yet still extant sidebar of the early 1990s ...

With search getting worse by the day, maybe it's time we rebounded in the other direction. The long forgotten directory.

Neatnik Notes

Weeknotes 341 - New value mechanics for the agentic web What is the consequence of an agentic web for the mechanics of values? And a lot of other news after a week of announcements by Big AI Tech.

On the ground at the Microsoft Build conference with CTO Kevin Scott

We mostly don’t want to read the docs, but we do want to converse with them. When we build search interfaces for our docs, we have always tried to anticipate search intentions. People aren’t just l…

MCP's simplicity means that, like RSS autodiscovery and OpenSearch, it can catch on quickly and deliver powerful leverage for developers.

Google workers at Netscape Sacrifice Zone exposed to toxic levels of trichloroethylene. For at least two months, Google employees were exposed to excessive levels of a hazardous chemical after workers disabled a critical part of the ventilation system at the company's new satellite campus on a Superfund toxic waste site. [...] "We take several proactive measures to ensure the healthiest ...

Casey Newton writing for his Platformer newsletter: The AI Browser Wars Are About to Begin Here, I think we begin to understand the opportunity that companies see here — and why "web browser" probably isn't the best word for what they are building. Setting all the drama of the current browser

Artificial intelligence is already writing an obituary for the internet as we know it. So why is everyone building new web browsers?

Dive into the History of Java, from its inception by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems to its evolution as a pivotal programming language in technology.