Michael "mickeyl" Lauer: SPM-ifying YapDatabase

Converting an existing Objective-C/Swift framework to Swift Package Manager I'm a big fan of the database library YapDatabase, which is a collection/key/value store for macOS, iOS, tvOS & watchOS. It comes with many high level features and is built atop sqlite. In the last 5 years, I have used this successfully for many of my projects. It is written in Objective-C and comes with a bunch of Swift files for more Swifty use. Since I recently announced to go all-in with Swift, I want to convert all my dependencies to the Swift Package Management system. I have never been a...

Update: new hacktober gear

Let me begin this month’s community update by teasing the November update, in which I’ll talk about the next generation of SoCs and our plans for the future. If you haven’t done so yet, then now is the right time to subscribe to our blog and follow the news on the PINE64 Telegram news channel.

Talpadk: An early unfair first comparison of the Radiona ULX3S and the Olimex iCE40HX8K-EVB

Why unfair?

Well when I obtained the iCE40HX8K-EVB it had already existed for quite some time the ULX3S I had just received the unit from the Crowd Supply campaign.
And Olimex therefore had lots of time to “perfect” the documentation Radiona on the other hand has not yet had the luxury of time yet.

Well I’m not really going to… The FPGA on the ULX3S is quite powerful and the board itself has more features as well, lets just call them different classes of products.

Well both FPGAs are supported by the open source command line friendly toolchains.
Xilinx years ago sort of cured...

Michael "mickeyl" Lauer: Programming Languages

While I never got much into natural languages (beyond my native tounge, a halfway solid english, and some bits and pieces of french), I have always been fascinated by (some) programming languages – I even wrote books about some of them. I (literally) grew up with BASIC and 6502/6510 ASSEMBLER – on the VC20 and the C64. Later on, learned to hate C and love 680x0 ASSEMBLER – on the AMIGA. During the 90s, I enjoyed PASCAL and MODULA II, and then found a preliminary home in Python. The 2000s were largely affected by C++ (which I always found much...

Free Stuff, January 2020–March 2020

January 2020

The Free Stuff recipient for January was Gabriel Sheeley, who runs an electrical engineering/embedded software meetup in Columbus, Ohio. They do do everything from soldering workshops, to tearing apart smart TVs, to automating chicken coops to keep out raccoons. Gabriel asked for a YARD Stick One to use in a talk about RF hacking, and now that the meetup is remote, the group will have to take turns with their new gadget.

We sent a HackRF One to the CU Boulder Sounding Rocket Lab Avionics Team for their ground station. They told us that they are “building an 18-foot-tall...

PSA: Vulnerability Disclosure 2020/09/17

PINE64 (both the business and the community around it) prides itself on transparency. Often, this transparency is used to give you a behind the scenes look into our operations. But today, we’re afraid we must be transparent about something else.

September Update: Let it sink in...

We have been fortunate to welcome many new members into our ranks over the past 30 days. This is in large part due to the continued interest in the Pinebook Pro and PineTab, which have just shipped, as well as the ongoing massive demand for the PinePhone.

Talpadk: How to prevent Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 from bsod when started on a virtual Windows PC using KVM

I assume you already have a working virtual machine that uses pci passthrough and that it works just fine with other games.

BUT very time you start up MS Flight Simulator 2020 Windows crashes with a blue screen of death.
It took me some time to figure out, so I’m writing this in the hope that it saves some other poor souls time.

The fix is quite simple you need to give the option “ignore_msrs=1” to the kvm kernel module.
Create the file “/etc/modprobe.d/kvm.conf“
Containing the line “options kvm ignore_msrs=1“
And reboot the host.

See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/QEMU#Certain_Windows_games/applications_crashing/causing_a_bluescreen for a slightly more in depth explanation of this.

Варианты использования конфигурации в ASP.NET Core

Для получения конфигурации приложения обычно используют метод доступа по ключевому слову (ключ-значение). Но это бывает не всегда удобно т.к. иногда требуется использовать готовые объекты в коде с уже установленными значениями, причем с возможностью обновления значений без перезагрузки приложения. В данном примере предлагается шаблон использования конфигурации в качестве промежуточного слоя для ASP.NET Core приложений.
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PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

I am thrilled to announce that the next Community Edition (CE) of the PinePhone will feature Manjaro. For those of you who do not know, Manjaro is an Arch-based Linux operating system designed with user-friendliness in mind.