DIY
From the post-war era of fixable radios and televisions to today's sealed smartphones and disposable appliances, the culture of repairing your own devices has undergone a dramatic transformation. This article traces the social, economic, and technological forces that created DIY repair culture — and then largely destroyed it.
AI
A profile of Bulgarian developer Georgi Gerganov, whose open-source llama.cpp library powers most local LLM inference but remains overshadowed by wrappers like Ollama. The article explores his 30+ projects spanning AI inference, acoustic keylogging, sound-based data transmission, and more.
Essays
A DIY electronics project building a hand dynamometer from a Nokia display, ATmega328P, and a 200kg load cell — only to discover the author's grip maxes out at a humbling 49 kilograms.
Hardware
A comprehensive guide to VHS-Decode, an open-source tool that achieves professional-quality VHS digitization at a fraction of the cost by capturing raw RF signals from the tape head preamplifier instead of the traditional composite video output.
Essays
A comprehensive beginner's guide to computer networking that explains fundamental concepts like IP addressing, subnet masks, MAC addresses, routing, TCP/UDP protocols, NAT, and IPv6 using accessible postal service analogies.
Programming
Revisiting Peter Naur's 1985 paper 'Programming as Theory Building' in the age of AI-generated code, this article argues that the real product of programming is not code but the mental model behind it, making experienced developers indispensable.
History
An exploration of the earliest programmer jokes on Anekdot.ru, Russia's first major joke website, tracing how IT humor evolved from rare curiosities in 1996 to massively popular cultural artifacts by 1998.
Essays
A senior PHP developer shares eight practical strategies that helped him overcome a productivity crisis after six months of remote work, from phone management and website blockers to sleep schedules and social connection.
Programming
A comprehensive guide to storing monetary values in databases and APIs, covering ISO 4217, the pitfalls of floating-point types, and comparing integer minor units, decimal base units, and string representations as used by Stripe, PayPal, Visa, and others.
Smart Home
A practical account of building and iterating on a DIY smart home system five times over, discovering what automations actually matter and throwing out half the unnecessary ones.
AI
Despite adding 'reasoning' capabilities, the latest AI models hallucinate significantly more than their predecessors. OpenAI's own data shows o3 and o4-mini error rates of 33-48%, up from 16% in o1.
Essays
Some malware detects virtual machines by checking for hardware components like cooling fans via WMI. This article shows how to inject custom SMBIOS data into Xen and QEMU/KVM to make a VM appear to have a real CPU fan.