Simsalabim — giving the iOS Simulator hardware powers

The iOS Simulator is a wonderfully fast place to build an app — right up to the moment the app needs something that belongs to the physical world. Bluetooth discovery returns nothing, there’s no camera, Core NFC is unavailable, and a freshly created simulator has no contacts, appointments, remi…

The Cables that Connect the World

At the northeastern edge of La Línea de la Concepción, on a scrubby Mediterranean beach called El Burgo–Torrenueva, there is an old battlement-tower, La Torre Nueva, and not much else. It was part of the system of coastal watchtowers during the 16th century that would defend the area against the incursion of the Barbary corsairs. The coordinates are 36°12′36″N, 5°19′27″W. Walk the tideline and you would never know that buried two meters beneath the sand, a fiber-optic cable comes out of the sea here and turns into the internet. It’s the start of a line that runs across the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, on the African coast,...

Two questions macOS should answer — lsaudio and lsusd

Some tools begin with a roadmap. Others — like these two — begin with a question you ask yourself often enough that irritation wins. At my desk, two questions kept coming back: What is making that sound? What exactly is connected over USB? macOS knows both answers. CoreAudio knows every process th…

My agent.md to improve LLM-assisted code quality

Flipper BUSY Bar

Yes, it is in fact real, I’m holding it in my hands, and after what feels like years of Flipper teasing everyone with this ominous device in various online posts, I can finally confirm that it is real.

The BUSY Bar is a 250 gram desk device by Flipper Devices, the company behind the Flipper Zero and the still very much in-development Flipper One. It’s basically a little display that shows various things on a 72x16 RGB LED matrix, and as of writing this its main selling point is that it can run a Pomodoro-style focus timer, and that it has a full-blown HTTP API that’s available over...

Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

Recovering BIOS Firmware on the Star Labs StarBook

As I described in my latest quarterly update, a perfectly routine firmware update managed to turn my Star Labs StarBook Mk VI (AMD) into an expensive paperweight. I had simply copy-pasted the curl ... | bash one-liner from Star Labs' official documentation, the script did its thing for about half a minute, shut the device down, and from that point on the StarBook refused to boot. Black screen, keyboard backlight on, the power LED lit, and the speakers occasionally producing a clacking sound. Sadly no amount of the usual turn-it-off-and-on-again rituals or battery disconnects brought it back.

The only way out of this situation is to re-flash the BIOS...

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Forgejo + XMPP

I recently decided to leave Codeberg and run my own Forgejo instance instead. After finishing the initial setup, I realized that a forge I host myself is a forge that I get to shape, and that I no longer have to settle for whatever feature set someone else considered reasonable. I can now make it truly mine, and switch on the things I have always wanted a Git host to do.

The first of those things concerns the registration. Right now Forgejo, like pretty much every other forge, wants an e-mail address and sends a verification link to it, because apparently a clicked link is still considered...

GL.iNet Mudi 7

tl;dr: After almost seven years my Netgear Nighthawk M2 has started rebooting on its own, reporting nonsensical battery percentages and ignoring most of my presses on its touch buttons, so I spent the past three months replacing it with the GL.iNet Mudi 7 (GL-E5800), a 5G NR Sub-6 travel router with two nano-SIM slots plus an onboard eSIM, WiFi 7, a 2.5 GbE port, two USB-C ports and a removable 5380 mAh battery. It is the most capable mobile router I have owned, its 13.5-hour battery rating is close to what I measure, and the LTE reception alone is a clear upgrade over the M2. Sadly the Tri-band...

Recreating a Titanic Spark-Gap Transmitter with Python, High Voltage, and ESP32

Let’s Bring Back Some Wireless History

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