Be Your Own Privacy-Respecting Google, Bing & Brave

Search engines have long been a hot topic of debate, particularly among the tinfoil-hat-wearing circles on the internet. After all, these platforms are in a unique position to collect vast amounts of user data and identify individuals with unsettling precision. However, with the shift from traditional web search, driven by search queries and result lists, to a LLM-powered question-and-answer flow across major platforms, concerns have grown and it’s no longer just about privacy:

Today, there’s increasing skepticism about the accuracy of the results. In fact, it’s not only harder to discover new information online, but verifying the accuracy of these AI-generated answers has become a growing challenge.

As with any...

Quake Engine Indicators

IoT in Python For Beginners: Making a Nixie Clock From Scratch

Let's Connect Some Vintage Tech to the Modern World

Continue reading on Level Up Coding »

JavaScript Input Buffering: a simple project to show delayed keyboard events

In this post I’ll show you a simple but powerful JavaScript experiment that visualizes keyboard input in real time and with a one-second delay. It’s a small project built with pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, designed to teach essential concepts like keydown/keyup listeners, precise input timing, and requestAnimationFrame loops; the same fundamentals used in games, replays, and input debugging tools.

How quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack

On Generative AI Imagery

With a growing readership on this very niche website of mine, the amount of reader feedback I receive, primarily via email, but also through the community channel, has noticeably increased. This is something that brings me joy, and I’m happy to respond to everyone who reaches out, whether that’s with replies to questions, help on specific topics, or just a simple “thank you” message.

However, for the past year, I’ve been receiving an increasing number of comments about my use of generative AI imagery in some of the posts on this website. While all the comments have been in good spirit, they share one thing in common: A dislike...

ELMterm, CornucopiaStreams, and the joy of clean automotive telemetry

Back in 2016 I fell deep into the rabbit hole of automotive diagnostics. 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‑serial cables, Wi‑Fi gateways, even a few early BLE UART experiments. Each promised to be the answer, yet every session ended with the same friction—flaky transports, unreadable hex dumps, and notebooks full of copy‑pasted traces. Eventually I built my own hardware so I could trust the bits on the wire, but I still lacked a terminal that...

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. The neighbor found them the next morning.

I...

Cameras, Cameras Everywhere!

We live in an age when a single walk down the street can put you inside at least a dozen different recording ecosystems at once: Fixed municipal CCTV, a bypassing police cruiser’s cameras or body-cam feeds, the license-plate cameras on light poles, the dash-, cabin-, and exterior cameras of nearby cloud-connected vehicles, Ring and Nest doorbells of residences that you might pass by, and the phones and wearables of other pedestrians passing you, that are quietly recording audio and/or video. Each of those systems was justified as a modest safety, convenience, or product feature, yet when stitched together they form a surveillance fabric that reaches far beyond its...

RetroPlayer – Bringing the Sound of My Youth to iOS

Some projects aren't just about building software—they're about preserving memories, honoring the past, and sharing what shaped you. RetroPlayer is one of those projects for me. Growing up in the 1980s, I spent countless hours in front of a Commodore 64, and later an Amiga, absolutely mesmerized by what these machines could do. The graphics were captivating, the games were endlessly replayable, but what truly captured my imagination was the sound. The SID chip in the C64—with its distinctive three voices—could produce music that seemed impossible for such simple hardware. Composers like Martin Galway, Rob Hubbard, and Ben Daglish weren't...