$ ls /etc/

Here’s where I put things that don’t otherwise fit in a blog post as well as links to content I find interesting. It’s always changing and never complete.

See also, the meta page for more this website and how I build it.

Microblog

I used twitter for a while, automatically replicating my tweets on the main page. The tweets are archived here.

I no longer do this since twitter has paywalled their API.

Advice

Thoughts that stuck with me

Elon’s 5 steps to process improvement:

1. Make requirements less dumb: Question and verify requirements to ensure they are not error-prone and to remove unnecessary work.
2. Delete parts or processes: Remove unnecessary parts or process steps.
3. Simplify and optimize: Simplify or optimize the design and process.
4. Accelerate cycle time: Streamline the manufacturing process to speed up cycle time.
5. Automate: Automate the manufacturing process to ensure efficiency, reliability, and cost reduction.

Importantly automation is the last step, not the first. This is the opposite of what many people think!

If you have too many things to do, get something done

Networking is optimising for serendipity

If you can’t make a decision, either you don’t have enough information or it doesn’t matter. If you don’t have enough information, determine the requirements.

Communication tools

• SBAR – Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation. A structured way to SWAT Gantt

Ideation

1. Ignore existing constraints, start from the ideal and work backwards.

Blogs

• Bartosz Ciechanowski’s blog – Bartosz explains complicated systems and concepts such as GPS, colour spaces, cameras and lenses in the amazingly understandable way, complete with from-scratch WebGL (and other) interactive diagrams.
• The Asahi Linux blog – such a high concentration of extreme technical expertise, applied to something I thought impossible without manufacturer support.
• Phoronix – Michael Larabel covers Linux & Linux hardware extremely thoroughly and with great integrity
• Jeff Atwood’s blog – opinionated, often right! He’s the guy behind stack overflow and discourse, so there’s a lot to learn from him.¹
• Andrew Holme’s website – I used to work with Andrew. He’s made some impressive things in his spare time – like a GPS receiver from scratch!
• Chris Bishop’s blog – A friend with a some serious network skills and his own ASN
• Chips and cheese – Incredibly deep dives into hardware architectures
• Jeff Geerling’s blog – Lots of experimentation with Linux and strange things with server/hobby hardware
• Rodrigo Copetti’s blog – super interesting and astonishingly well communicated posts about game console architectures among other things
• Ken Shirriff’s blog – Deep dives into electronics and processor architectures. The charger tear-downs are particularly illuminating
• I Code 4 Coffee – Lots of hardware and game hacking
• Rob Hague’s blog – I work with Rob, always an interesting read. Especially if you like keyboards ;-)
• Ben Cartwright-Cox’s blog – All sorts of software hacking
• Phoboslab – Lots of video game and otherwise 3D pipeline hacking
• GMUNK – the insanely creative guy behind so many future user interfaces, cool looking adverts and the Windows 10 wallpaper
• Eddie Pace’s blog – I’ve had the pleasure of working with Eddie for several years. He’s a talented developer with some serious knowledge and skills in multiple, sometimes unrelated fields.
• aintnobodygottimeforthat – Frill has made various highly precise clocks and runs one of the UK’s top NTP servers

Books

Some books really stand out to me. I reckon I need to read some from https://blog.codinghorror.com/recommended-reading-for-developers/ so I can grow this list!

• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
• The Art of Intrusion by Kevin Mitnick
• The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick
• Ghost In The Wires by Kevin Mitnick
• Understanding Deep Learning by Simon J. D. Prince
• The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries
• The Art of Electronics – The book is a classic and still relevant

Videos

• Debunking the Digital Audio Myth: The Truth About the ‘Stair-Step’ Effect – Why anything more than 16-bit 44KHz audio is genuinely pointless
• Building EVEN SMALLER DOS gaming PC! – an entire DOS PC product from an industrial enclosure. Talk about full stack engineering!
• Broken Pen Conductor - What’s Going on Inside a TN-C-S Cable Joints – Behind the scenes of your UK power connection
• How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation – Andy Gavin talks about the surprising ingenuity behind the Crash Bandicoot series
• Learn to fly an FPV drone – Drone control for beginners, in the form of lessons on a playlist.
• FlowState: The FPV Drone Documentary - Why FPV? This is why.

Youtubers

• northwestrepair, dosdude1, Louis Rossmann² and MDrepairs – BGA rework, and a lot of consumer electronics hacking beyond the typical

Articles

• Keyboard latency – Dan Luu’s experiments with measuring keyboard latency and how it doesn’t align with marketing
• How GPS works – Bartosz Ciechanowski’s well explained article on GPS
• Sysadmin friendly high speed ethernet switching – running Debian on a Mellanox switch
• Everything I know about SSDs – All about SSDs + NAND flash
• I made a new backplane for my Terramaster F2-221 NAS – adding an extra SSD via a custom PCB
• Richard Clark $10,000 Amplifier Challenge – Modern amplifiers are almost always fine if they are appropriately powerful
• I Sold TinyPilot, My First Successful Business – Acquisition terms and process are usually quite opaque. It’s nice to see some transparency!
• Micro-mirrors – An super effective and interesting concept. A friend of mine runs one
• Ditherpunk – information about dithering. Dithering is interesting because it has applications in audio and video as well as images. It can be spatial as well as temporal.
• How to build an FPV drone – There’s a lot of standards and buzzwords to learn. This article covers it all in one place.
• How does deepseek work?
• The Promised LAN manifesto – Bring back the internet of the 2000s! Related: https://tpl.house/ and dn42

Learning

• Learn X in Y minutes – Great quick run-through for many languages
• Go by example – Straight to the point Go 101
• Kaggle.com Learn – ML/AI courses
• Colour spaces – A complete article about colour
• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? – Stephen Wolfram’s excellent explanation of how modern AI tools work
• OscarLiang.com – Super insightful and detailed blog around FPV drone racing
• The laws of UX – A website version of the book. Lots of good rules.
• Command Line Interface Guidelines – A good guide to making CLI tools without doing anything weird
• Common shader mistakes – I’m yet to enter the world of shaders but I still found this interesting!

Reference

• Open Infrastructure Map – Water, gas + electricity distribution. Interesting!
• Touch gesture reference – A good gesture cheat-sheet
• Better Internet Dashboard – a good survey of data services available in a given area
• Google SEO guide – straight from the horse’s mouth.
• Control guru: Practical Process Control – for implementing a PID controller
• Design for 3D printing – A great reference of tip and tricks when designing for manufacturing (DFM) with 3D printing

Typefaces

No affiliation, just typefaces I like.

• Pragmata Pro (Iosevka SS08 is a good free alternative)
• Fira Code – My current terminal font
• Berkeley Mono – Great for instrument panels!
• Raleway – A sans serif typeface with a clean, modern look. A little like Helvetica, but with a bit more character.
• Futura – A classic geometric sans serif typeface. Great for signage and headings.

Speaker designs

• jwsound.live – Open PA speaker designs, often multiple-entry horns
• Paul Carmody’s speaker designs – Open HiFi speaker designs. I made a modified version of the Speedster.
• Toid’s designs – HiFi and home theatre speaker designs

Hobbies

I met a person that deleted everything – all possessions and hobbies. He’s now rather productive after picking only a few hobbies and deliberately choosing not to make everything a project. I’ve deleted DJing and amateur radio…

Favorite films

I like 90’s/2000’s hacking/disaster films where technology is involved. Anything where sci-fi interfaces and sound design is involved.

• Hackers (1995) – the definition of 90s cyberpunk
• Swordfish (2001)
• The Core (2003) – ridiculous but fun
• TRON Legacy (2010) – mostly for the soundtrack and the visual design
• Interstellar (2014) – draining but great visuals and sound design
• Takedown (2003) – Loosely based on the capture of Kevin Mitnick
• Antitrust (2001)
• Enemy of the State (1998)
• Don’t look up (2021) – I know it has its issues but it’s spot on…

Things that have disappeared

• Low pressure sodium street lights
• CRT monitors and TVs
• Physical media (CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, game cartridges, floppy disks, etc)