$ ls /etc/

Here’s where I put things I think are interesting or useful and don’t otherwise fit in a blog post. I’ve published this in an early state, I’ll add to it as I go.¹

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 Control²
• 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?

Parts

I’ve designed a lot of 3D printable (FDM) parts over the years. I’ll add them for download here.

Incoming articles

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.

• A custom Elgato Stream Deck library to map to scripts and actions
• Building a basic subwoofer to answer questions
• A 2-way speaker design with an organic shape
• Custom 2U Hifiberry DAC Rack for My Hifi
• Taking Control of My Data with ZFS, git, systemd and borg
• My NixOS home router
• Building a motorised drinks cabinet

Interesting 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.³

• 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

Interesting 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

Interesting 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

Interesting 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

Interesting websites

• Colour python package

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.