Recapping My 5 Year Old Studio Monitors

A few weeks ago, I started hearing a slight crackle at the loudest parts of whenever sound was playing through my PreSonus Eris E3.5 speakers. It was very faint, but quite annoying, especially when editing my YouTube videos.

For a few days I thought it could be a hearing problem (at this point in my life, every year brings a new health adventure...), but after testing my wired headphones and another small computer speaker on the same output, I determined the problem was, indeed, coming from the PreSonus speakers.

Challenger+ T3217 Packages 8-bit ATtiny3217 in a Compact, Battery-Ready Board

The Challenger+ T3217 is a compact development board based on Microchip’s ATtiny3217, combining the tinyAVR 1-series platform with a small, battery-ready form factor for low-power embedded applications. The board is based on the ATtiny3217, an 8-bit AVR microcontroller running at up to 20 MHz from its internal oscillator. It integrates 32 KB of Flash, 2 […]

Dabao Evaluation Board to Showcase Open-RTL Baochip-1x RISC-V MCU

Baochip has previewed the Baochip-1x, a mostly open RTL, RISC-V–based microcontroller fabricated on TSMC’s 22 nm process. Designed with openness and verifiability in mind, the MCU integrates a VexRiscv application core running at up to 350 MHz, alongside a quad-core I/O accelerator cluster clocked at 700 MHz. The Baochip-1x uses a VexRiscv RV32IMAC processor with […]

Glowing Polyhedrons

Building wireframe polyhedra made from LED filaments, using graph theory to devise geometry and driving strategies.

Read the article on my hugo blog

Notes on the Intel 8086 processor's arithmetic-logic unit

In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors, however, the 8086 is a 16-bit chip. Its arithmetic/logic unit (ALU) operates on 16-bit values, performing arithmetic operations such as addition and subtraction, as well as logic operations including bitwise AND, OR, and XOR. The 8086's ALU is a complicated part of the chip, performing 28 operations in total.1

In this post, I discuss the circuitry that controls the ALU, generating the appropriate control signals for a particular operation. The process is more complicated than you might expect. First, a machine code instruction results in the...

Стеклодувные горелки. От истоков к современности. Краткий экскурс

Несмотря на архаичность ручной формовки стекла, стеклодувное дело ещё отчасти живо и привлекает своих адептов, в том числе и как хобби, домашние любительские экзерсисы. Сегодня ремесло это довольно громоздкое и дорогостоящее, так, однако, было не всегда — взять хотя бы горелки — первое, о чём задумывается будущий стеклодув. Рассмотрим же, с помощью чего творили предки и как развивалось огневое оснащение стеклодувного дела со времён царя Гороха, до дней нынешних, взглянем заодно на интересные примеры и вообще, полюбуемся огнями. За мной, мои дорогие пироманы, за мной!

OpenTitan Introduces New Membership Tiers and Deliverables to Accelerate Deployment

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Выход в интернет с ПК на i486DX4 в 2026 году

Приветствую всех!

Думаю, всем нам известно: ещё каких-то лет десять назад "компьютером для интернета" назывался очень бюджетный офисный ПК, тогда как теперь потребление ресурсов возросло настолько, что порой современный веб - чуть ли единственное, с чем не справляется тот или иной девайс.

А как насчёт чего-то совсем старого? Можно ли выйти в сеть с компьютера тридцатилетней давности и остались ли ещё какие-то сайты, которые можно полноценно просматривать с такого ПК? Сейчас и узнаем...

Migrating 13,000 Comments from Drupal to Hugo

After 16 years on the LAMP stack, I finished migrating this website from Drupal to Hugo a few weeks ago.

What's old is new, as this blog was originally built with Thingamablog, a Java-based Static Site Generator (SSG) I ran on my Mac to generate HTML and FTP it up to my first webserver (over 20 years ago!).

The main reason I moved from an SSG to Drupal was to add comments. I wanted my blog to have the same level of interactivity I had pre-Thingamablog, when I was (briefly) on Xanga.com.

RISC-V EUR 1 retro computer soldering workshop at High School of Mathematics in Plovdiv

On Saturday, 17 January 2026, on the occasion of the 55th anniversary of the founding of the High School of Mathematics OMG “Akademik Kiril Popov,” a workshop was held for soldering the Plovdiv-developed Open Source Hardware retro microcomputer Olimex RVPC, featuring a 32-bit RISC-V processor, a PS/2 keyboard, and a VGA monitor. More than 50 […]