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 […]

By now, I imagine everyone with the slightest inkling of an interest in electronics has seen this scandalous tidbit: To anyone who has received this generous gift from his Government, I offer: 4 Bitcoin for either of the above, in working condition. 1 Bitcoin for a dead or untestable unit. Serious inquiries only! Please attach […]

Not long ago, I happened to come across a very cheap and heavily used CO2 Laser Cutting Machine, made by Full Spectrum Inc. About 1K USD, including curbside delivery from across the continent.  I also bought the traditional water chiller, air compressor, exhaust manifolds, etc: The junk seller promised an intact tube, and indeed there […]

The following is a conversation I recently had with an alert and inquisitive reader. It has been redacted for brevity; handles/names/irrelevant things have been removed. Some text has been turned into links to relevant material. Anyone still reading this page for reasons related to its original purpose is encouraged to read this; it may help […]

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. […]

Boston Lisp Meeting; June 28, 2012. Update: Here’s a mirror of the film. The Google copy appears to have been censored.

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 […]

Loper’s I2C controller is working.  The SPD ROM on the DDR2 RAM stick attached to the Xilinx ML-501 board is read correctly.  The video controller is working (though not feature-complete.)  The DDR2 SDRAM controller is still under testing, as is the cache SRAM controller.  The gigabit Ethernet controller is not yet complete. I should probably […]