In Defense of Simple Architectures
In defense of simple architectures In defense of simple architectures | I’m trying some experimental tiers on Patreon to see if I can get to substack-like levels of financial support for this blog without moving to substack! Wave is a $1.7B company with 70 engineers1 whose product is a CRUD app that adds and subtracts […]
Future of 32-bit platform support in FreeBSD
From: John Baldwin Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2024 17:12:17 UTC FreeBSD is deprecating 32-bit platforms over the next couple of major releases. We anticipate FreeBSD 15.0 will not include the armv6, i386, and powerpc platforms, and FreeBSD 16.0 will not include armv7. Support for executing 32-bit binaries on 64-bit kernels will be retained through at […]
Adding Keyboard Shortcuts to a 24 Year Old Government Website with Userscripts
February 19, 2024 7 min read Background For the past year, I’ve been cleaning the data from the FDA’s 510k database. 1 This database contains applications for the 510k program, the FDA’s clearance process that is used for 99% of human medical devices. 2 A search on archive.org 3 reveals that this website has existed […]
Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 sold on eBay
A version of OS/2 2.0 from Microsoft, not IBM, just surfaced on eBay. This pre-release version came out after Windows 3.0. How much might you be willing to pay to own a piece of operating system history? Would you pay two-thirds of a grand? No, us neither, but fortunately for posterity, Reg reader Brian Ledbetter […]
Stonelifting Etiquette
liftingstones.org Stonelifting is unlike most other physical activities. And although stonelifting has gotten more popular over recent years, it’s still very niche. Therefore, many people don’t know the general stonelifting etiquette or even that there’s etiquette at all. Cleaning dirt from a stone. — Image: David “Tamotsu” Dunlap. Most stonelifters have a background in strength […]
AI your home on street view
Have you ever wanted to radically alter the ambiance of your neighborhood? Perhaps you’ve always dreamed of turning your sleepy suburban road into a bustling inner-city street. Or maybe you’ve always wanted to dig up your nearby traffic heavy roads and replace them with green fields and trees. Well now you can – at least […]
Have front end frameworks destroyed the web?
Yes. Many web developers don’t know what a sitemap is. Basic proper usage of , , and tags are nowhere to be found, making screen reader’s job difficult (in fairness, however, accessibility has always been complicated). You have to teach React developers the difference between the and tag, and how doesn’t swap nor replace your […]
Translating OpenStreetMap data to HTML5 Canvas with Rust and WebAssembly
Using the Overpass API to read OSM data, parsing the data with Rust, and then drawing the map onto HTML5 canvas. I’m working on a revamp of an old project of mine called Line Buddy (github). It used a now-deprecated API library called themeparks (github) and A-Frame to visually represent the wait times in the […]
WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering
In recent years we have had an ongoing effort to improve graphics performance of the WebKit GTK and WPE ports. As a result of this we shipped features like threaded rendering, the DMA-BUF renderer, or proper vertical retrace synchronization (VSync). While these improvements have helped keep WebKit competitive, and even perform better than other engines […]
DJI – The Art of Obfuscation
Study of an Android runtime (ART) hijacking mechanism for bytecode injection through a step-by-step analysis of the packer used to protect the DJI Pilot Android application. Introduction In the world of Android applications, it’s not uncommon to come across applications protected by a packer. The role of a packer is to protect all or part […]