Quake Engine Indicators

How quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

ELMterm, CornucopiaStreams, and the joy of clean automotive telemetry

Back in 2016 I fell deep into the rabbit hole of automotive diagnostics (long-time readers may remember OBD2 Expert). What started as “let me decode one CAN frame” quickly became a multi-year tour of every adapter I could get my hands on: ELM327 clones, genuine STN units, Bluetooth dongles, USB-seri…

OpenAI employees… are you okay?

You might have seen an article making the rounds this week, about a young man who ended his life after ChatGPT encouraged him to do so. The chat logs are really upsetting.

Someone two degrees removed from me took their life a few weeks ago. A close friend related the story to me, about how this person had approached their neighbor one evening to catch up, make small talk, and casually discussed their suicidal ideation at some length. At the end of the conversation, they asked to borrow a rope, and their neighbor agreed without giving the request any critical thought....

RetroPlayer – Bringing the Sound of My Youth to iOS

True readers of this column know how much I adore the C64 sound aesthetics — I’ve been going on about it in previous installments more than once. So here’s the next chapter of that story. Growing up in the 1980s, I spent countless hours in front of a Commodore 64, and later an Amiga, absolutely mes…

Еще один самодельный компьютер. Coolsystem — Часть 1

Сегодня мы будем делать еще один восьмибитный компьютер. Да, я еще не наигрался со всеми этими штуками.

Coolsystem - идея компьютера, сочетающего в себе идеи о защищенной среде выполнения (причем в очень-очень специфичном варианте) и способного запускать готовый софт для восьмибитных персоналок 80-х годов. Также он может использоваться для изучения основ схемотехники, своего рода учебный компьютер.

Ken Thompson tells a story

2024 interview, posted this October, quite a few interesting thoughts about Open Source in it:
https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=OmVHkL0IWk4

What's up with FUTO?

Some time ago, I noticed some new organization called FUTO popping up here and there. I’m always interested in seeing new organizations that fund open source popping up, and seeing as they claim several notable projects on their roster, I explored their website with interest and gratitude. I was first confused, and then annoyed by what I found. Confused, because their website is littered with bizzare manifestos,1 and ultimately annoyed because they were playing fast and loose with the term “open source”, using it to describe commercial source-available software.

FUTO eventually clarified their stance on “open source”, first through satire and...

Cloudflare bankrolls fascists

US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any respect for habeas corpus, exerting state pressure on the free press to censor speech critical of the current administration, and Trump is openly floating the idea of an unconstitutional third term.

Fascism is clearly on the rise, and they’re winning more and more power. None of this is far removed from us in the FOSS community – there are a number of fascists working in FOSS, same...

Atomic Distros

Hey, does anyone here have strong opinions or real experience with atomic distributions, like Fedora Silverblue? I am considering it for a professional laptop, where I want to avoid components breaking so the immutability and containerization is something that sounds good. And I have come to terms with GNOME, so that is not an issue for me at least. What I worry about is, e.g. with Fedora Silverblue, that my previous experience with regular Fedora always degraded after an upgrade or two, and I don't know if this is something that Silverblue can help me here.