It so happens that AMD resisted the informal NSA ban on the manufacture of LinuxBIOS-capable x86 CPUs slightly longer than Intel did. Or perhaps they were simply slower to succumb to Microsoft’s Fritz chip decree. Whichever may be the case, vintage (pre-2011, with some caveats, inquire within) AMD Opteron motherboards are a precious and increasingly […]

Note: Please read the FAQ!!! The Sage SmartProbe was a very spiffy “Hard ICE” debugger, one of the few ever manufactured for use with modern (2010s) AMD x86-64 processors, and – as far as I’m aware – the only one ever sold on the mass market, rather than as part of “favourite son” deals (as, […]

I had the honour of being invited to Trilema 2014 in Timișoara – where I exhibited a few completed gadgets. More pictures at Mr. P’s site.

The public discovery of FLUXBABBITT, a modestly-clever American spy gadget – that may or may not have been “fired in anger” yet – has provoked the usual flood of media garbage (“JTAG is a Chinese back door! Threat or menace?”) What follows is some basic investigation regarding the plausible workings of this device, based only […]

Cardano is a joint project of yours truly and Mircea Popescu. The objective: an inexpensive, user-auditable gadget which attempts to deal with the problem discussed in “Don’t Blame the Mice.” Refer to Mr. Popescu’s page for more details. The device consists of a mainboard (not yet complete) to which two TRNG modules, containing two equivalent analog […]

I have decided to publish some of my “archaeological” work from last year on Cy Endfield’s MicroWriter.  The original objective was to produce a cycle-accurate emulator.  I do not currently have the free time to complete this project, so I will post my results here for anyone who might care to pick up the torch. […]

Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is “an instrument whose music is ideas.” This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown.  To continue with this analogy, let’s imagine that you were a child who […]

Edit: The moral of the story, for those who didn’t get it, is that a serious programming environment ought to be an intimately-personalized affair, like eyeglasses or a hearing aid.  And that existing solutions fall laughably short of this goal.  Emacs, the supposed counter-example, is conceptually heavy and unbearably complex for everyday “civilian” use – […]