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...

JavaScript + CSS 3D Wheel of Fortune

Build a fully 3D Wheel of Fortune using nothing but HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with pure geometry and a few clever transforms. Watch it spin in real 3D and see how a handful of divs can create a smooth, random wheel animation.

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.

Zeit v1

Zeit began nearly five years ago as a pet project. I needed a lightweight, user-friendly tool to track time, with the added capability to export data for integration with other, mostly home-brewed software used for accounting and invoicing. At the time, I had only a basic set of features in mind and no clear long-term plan for the tool. Little did I know that I seemingly wasn’t alone in my need for a time tracker that stays out of the way and doesn’t come with an attached (paid) cloud service.

Whenever users requested new features or options, I either implemented them myself or accepted...

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

IoT in Python For Beginners: Addressable LEDs

Turn Your Raspberry Pi Into a Rainbow

Continue reading on Python in Plain English »

A Word on Omarchy

Pro tip: If you’ve arrived here via a link aggregator, feel free to skip ahead to the Summary for a conveniently digestible tl;dr that spares you all the tedious details, yet still provides enough ammunition to trash-talk this post in the comments of whatever platform you stumbled upon it.

In the recent months, there has been a noticeable shift away from the Windows desktop, as well as from macOS, to Linux, driven by various frustrations, such as the Windows 11 Recall feature. While there have historically been more than enough Linux distributions to choose from, for each skill level and amount of desired pain, a recent Arch-based configuration...