`$ ls /etc/`

Here’s where I put things I think are interesting or useful and don’t otherwise fit in a blog post.

Featured work

Here’s a list of things I’ve made that have been featured somewhere significant:

Hackaday, 2024 – Upgrading PC Cooling With Software
Tom’s hardware, 2024 – Annoyed by bursty fans and bloated apps, engineer writes software in Python to better control his NZXT Kraken AIO
Guru3d, 2024 – Disgruntled User creates Python Cooling App for NZXT Kraken AIO: His Solution to Fan and Pump Control¹
Hackaday, 2023 – CNC Feeds And Speeds, Explained As A First-Timer
Hackaday, 2023 – Before You Sudo Rm -rf /, Take Some Precautions
Hackaday, 2023 – Getting The Most From Fading ThinkPads
Linux Magazine, 2021 – Best Laid Plans
Linux User, 2021 – Dstask verwaltet anstehende Aufgaben auf der Kommandozeile
Hackaday, 2017 – Awesome Prank Or Circuit-Breaker Tester?

I make many more things than I can motivate myself to blog about. Here’s a list of things I’ve finished, but want to blog about.

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.²

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 ;-)
Sam Frances’s blog – Sam is a brilliant engineer on my team
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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

Elon’s 5 steps to process improvement:

Make requirements less dumb: Question and verify requirements to ensure they are not error-prone and to remove unnecessary work.
Delete parts or processes: Remove unnecessary parts or process steps.
Simplify and optimize: Simplify or optimize the design and process.
Accelerate cycle time: Streamline the manufacturing process to speed up cycle time.
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!

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.