`$ ls /etc/`

Here’s my scrapbook! See also, the meta page for more on this website and how I built it.

Tools & Workflow

OS: NixOS since 2022, else Ubuntu from 6.06 (2006). I use macOS with Nix, too.
Text editor: neovim
- Plugins: copilot-lua, gruvbox-nvim, lualine-nvim, nvim-highlight-colors, nvim-lspconfig, nvim-treesitter, vim-caddyfile, vim-fetch, vim-nftables, vim-openscad, vim-rooter, vim-visual-multi, fzf
Terminal multiplexer: tmux with system colours
Desktop environment: GNOME with Tiling shell – it’s like fancyzones
Web browser: Firefox with uBlock Origin
Presentation software: marp and also my own engine for blog posts. I used to use impress.js.
Blog engine: Hugo with a custom theme and postprocessor
AI coding agent: Claude Code and sometimes OpenCode – Combined with Claude Opus, this integrates into my terminal workflow splendidly with a heavily curated system prompt.
Other terminal tools: eternal terminal, fzf, ripgrep and bat

Typefaces

No affiliation, just typefaces I like.

Pragmata Pro (Iosevka SS08 is a good free alternative)
Fira Code – My current terminal font
Berkeley Mono – Great for instrument panels!
Raleway – A sans serif typeface with a clean, modern look. A little like Helvetica, but with a bit more character.
Futura – A classic geometric sans serif typeface. Great for signage and headings.

Reading

Blogs

Bartosz Ciechanowski’s blog – Bartosz explains complicated systems and concepts such as GPS, colour spaces, cameras and lenses in an amazingly understandable way, complete with from-scratch WebGL (and other) interactive diagrams.
The Asahi Linux blog – such a high concentration of extreme technical expertise, applied to something I thought impossible without manufacturer support.
Phoronix – Michael Larabel covers Linux & Linux hardware extremely thoroughly and with great integrity
Jeff Atwood’s blog – opinionated, often right! He’s the guy behind stack overflow and discourse, so there’s a lot to learn from him.¹
Chips and cheese – Incredibly deep dives into hardware architectures
Jeff Geerling’s blog – Lots of experimentation with Linux and strange things with server/hobby hardware
Rodrigo Copetti’s blog – super interesting and astonishingly well communicated posts about game console architectures among other things
Ken Shirriff’s blog – Deep dives into electronics and processor architectures. The charger tear-downs are particularly illuminating
I Code 4 Coffee – Lots of hardware and game hacking
Ben Cartwright-Cox’s blog – All sorts of software hacking
Phoboslab – Lots of video game and otherwise 3D pipeline hacking
aintnobodygottimeforthat – Frill has made various highly precise clocks and runs one of the UK’s top NTP servers
Derek Sivers – Interesting articles from the founder of CD Baby
OscarLiang.com – Super insightful and detailed blog around FPV drone racing

Jeff’s also the guy behind commonmark, a standardised Markdown variant ↩︎

Blogs by friends and colleagues

Andrew Holme’s website – I used to work with Andrew. He’s made some impressive things in his spare time – like a GPS receiver from scratch!
Chris Bishop’s blog – A friend with some serious network skills and his own ASN
Rob Hague’s blog – I used to work with Rob; always an interesting read. Especially if you like keyboards
Eddie Pace’s blog – I’ve had the pleasure of working with Eddie for several years. He’s a talented developer with some serious knowledge and skills in multiple, sometimes unrelated fields.

Software

Learn X in Y minutes – Great quick run-through for many languages
Go by example – Straight to the point Go 101
Command Line Interface Guidelines – A good guide to making CLI tools without doing anything weird
Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI – Porting a huge codebase to rust using AI tools without breaking anything.² A great case study.
Passkeys – A good introduction to passkeys, which really are the answer to authentication
Google SEO guide – straight from the horse’s mouth.
I Sold TinyPilot, My First Successful Business – Acquisition terms and process are usually quite opaque. It’s nice to see some transparency!

In 2 weeks, no less! ↩︎

Graphics & UX

Ditherpunk – information about dithering. Dithering is interesting because it has applications in audio and video as well as images. It can be spatial as well as temporal.
Common shader mistakes – I’m yet to enter the world of shaders but I still found this interesting!
Divide by depth for instant 3D – 3D from first principles in 5 minutes
Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse – An article about using wave function collapse to generate hex terrain maps, complete with a rendering engine that’s undeniably a work of art.
The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art – How people think CRTs looked, vs what they actually did to the image
The laws of UX – A website version of the book. Lots of good rules.
Touch gesture reference – A good gesture cheat-sheet

AI

What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? – Stephen Wolfram’s excellent explanation of how modern AI tools work
How LLMs actually work – Good top level overview of how LLMs work and what has developed since 2017
How does deepseek work?
Kaggle.com Learn – ML/AI courses

Hardware & electronics

Keyboard latency – Dan Luu’s experiments with measuring keyboard latency and how it doesn’t align with marketing
Everything I know about SSDs – All about SSDs + NAND flash
I made a new backplane for my Terramaster F2-221 NAS – adding an extra SSD via a custom PCB
Control guru: Practical Process Control – for implementing a PID controller
Design for 3D printing – A great reference of tips and tricks when designing for manufacturing (DFM) with 3D printing
How to build an FPV drone – There’s a lot of standards and buzzwords to learn. This article covers it all in one place.
Open Infrastructure Map – Water, gas + electricity distribution. Interesting!

Networking

Sysadmin friendly high speed ethernet switching – running Debian on a Mellanox switch
Micro-mirrors – A super effective and interesting concept. A friend of mine runs one
The Promised LAN manifesto – Bring back the internet of the 2000s! Related: https://tpl.house/ and dn42
Wi is Fi – A comprehensive guide about how WiFi works
Better Internet Dashboard – a good survey of data services available in a given area

Audio

Richard Clark $10,000 Amplifier Challenge – Modern amplifiers are almost always fine if they are appropriately powerful
jwsound.live – Open PA speaker designs, often multiple-entry horns
Paul Carmody’s speaker designs – Open HiFi speaker designs. I made a modified version of the Speedster.
Toid’s designs – HiFi and home theatre speaker designs

Recommendations

Books

Some books really stand out to me. I reckon I need to read some from https://blog.codinghorror.com/recommended-reading-for-developers/ so I can grow this list!

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
The Art of Intrusion by Kevin Mitnick
The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick
Ghost In The Wires by Kevin Mitnick
Understanding Deep Learning by Simon J. D. Prince
The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries
The Art of Electronics – The book is a classic and still relevant

Films

I like 90’s/2000’s hacking/disaster films where technology is involved. Anything where sci-fi interfaces and sound design is involved.

Hackers (1995) – the definition of 90s cyberpunk. I met the director at EMF Camp!
Enemy of the State (1998)
The Matrix (1999)
Swordfish (2001)
Antitrust (2001)
The Core (2003) – ridiculous but fun
Takedown (2003) – Loosely based on the capture of Kevin Mitnick
TRON Legacy (2010) – mostly for the soundtrack and the visual design. TRON: Ares is fun if you ignore the weak plot and have a big subwoofer.
Interstellar (2014) – draining but great visuals and sound design
Don’t look up (2021) – I know it has its issues but it’s spot on…
Top Gun: Maverick (2022) – it’s just fun.
Project Hail Mary (2026)

TV

3 Body Problem (2023)
All Star Trek. Except S5 of Discovery. I couldn’t get past the first episode.

Musings

Quotes

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man
– George Bernard Shaw

If you have too many things to do, get something done
– Graeme at work.

Networking is optimising for serendipity

If you can’t make a decision, either you don’t have enough information or it doesn’t matter. If you don’t have enough information, determine the requirements.
– John, a previous line manager

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
– Goodhart’s Law

Thoughts that stuck with me

Think about impossible things like vaccines, photolithography machines, GPS, modern AI and the internet. The next one has to be viable quantum computing.

Elon’s 5 steps to process improvement:

Make requirements less dumb: Question and verify requirements to ensure they are not error-prone and to remove unnecessary work.
Delete parts or processes: Remove unnecessary parts or process steps.
Simplify and optimize: Simplify or optimize the design and process.
Accelerate cycle time: Streamline the manufacturing process to speed up cycle time.
Automate: Automate the manufacturing process to ensure efficiency, reliability, and cost reduction.

Importantly automation is the last step, not the first. This is the opposite of what many people think!

Making reliable systems:

Keep it simple, reducing the number of parts that can fail
Use timeouts with blocking operations
Catch all errors and start from a known state
Ensure failures are detectable. A system can be too reliable if failures go unnoticed! Stale data should be removed – a stuck system could otherwise appear fine.
Declarative is best. Imperative systems are more likely to get into weird states, and/or are hard to rebuild.
Properly constrain the design – opinionated and constrained is better than flexible and universal.

Ideation: Ignore existing constraints, start from the ideal and work backwards.

Things that have disappeared

I’m old enough to remember these things, things that were in the background and have changed how the world feels.

Low pressure sodium street lights
CRT monitors and TVs (a big loss for colour accuracy, contrast and persistence)
Physical media (CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, game cartridges, floppy disks, etc)
Dial-up internet
Landline phones
VHS tapes and VCRs
Teletext/Ceefax!