M5Stack Cardputer Audio Coding: Visualizer, Playback, and SD Recorder

A friendly guide to writing code for the ESP32-S3

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The state of things in 2026

True readers of this column may remember the previous installment — all 66 words of it, written in February 2020, a few weeks before the world went sideways. The one before that, 2019, at least had proper paragraphs. Six and a half years is the longest gap between two of these I’ve ever had, and of …

llama.cpp with SYCL (oneAPI) for Intel Panther Lake on Gentoo

Alright, so if you’ve read the title and thought you were having a stroke, you might not be the target audience for this post. If, however, you thought “more tokens/s?”, you should keep on reading.

If you remember my review of the new Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 14 Aura with Intel Panther Lake Core Ultra X7 368H vPro from a while ago, you might recall that I had tested its local “AI” performance using Ollama, via Vulkan, which obviously didn’t perform particularly well across various models. The proper way to run local LLMs is to use Intel’s official oneAPI framework and compile llama.cpp with SYCL enabled, which will...

Understanding raycasting in 2D games, and using it with a free commented open source JavaScript library

Raycasting is one of those things that keeps coming back in game development: vision cones, fog of war, bullets, and even moving a character against walls. I wrote a small open source JavaScript library that answers the one question behind all of it, what does a ray hit, and I explain why knowing only about axis aligned boxes is enough for most 2D games. Ten interactive examples included.

This Math Problem Is 3,000 Years Old — Magic Squares

Can My PC Solve It with C++, OpenMP, and CUDA?

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Build a game like mobile smash hit Meowdoku in vanilla JavaScript in just a few lines of code

Meowdoku is a hit cat puzzle: one cat per row, column and colour region, and no two may touch, not even diagonally. I rebuilt it from scratch in vanilla JavaScript, and here is how.

s/Neovim/Helix/g

A while ago I decided that I’d like to challenge my muscle memory (and by that my brain) a little by pushing it out of its comfort zone. Last time I did that was back in 2024 with the switch from my endgame M60 to the Corne v3 and ultimately to the Kunai, which required me to re-learn to type, in a way. I remember how dreadfully inconvenient the experience had been in the first days/weeks, but over two years down the line I’m glad I made the move, and I feel like it has definitely improved my typing and my abilities, let alone my wrist posture.

This...

Jetzt auch noch Belletristik?

A note for my international readers: this post is in german, because the book is — eight short stories of the fantastic, out now as paperback and ebook (amazon.de, but the ebook travels). A translation is not planned for the time being; the state of things post has a summary in english. Ich habe fr…

Your First App for the M5Stack Cardputer

A friendly guide to writing code for the ESP32-S3

Continue reading on Level Up Coding »

Hyperuplink: Discuss like it's 1998

Between the screeching handshake of a 2400-baud modem, the steady hum of a computer in Turbo mode, and the pale flicker of a CRT glowing at three in the morning, the internet seemed to have had something that, over the past two decades or so, it has completely lost: A soul. Communities made up of actual humans gathered around bulletin boards that loaded in a single request, where regular hardware could bring an entire world to your screen without borrowing half your CPU just to show you a list of topics. If you happened to have lived through that brief and peculiar moment in history, you probably...