Learn Prolog Now
Learn Prolog Now! is an introductory course to programming in Prolog. The online version has been available since 2001, and now there is also a throughly revised version available in book form. We wanted to do two things with this course. First, we wanted to provide a text that was relatively self contained, a text […]
Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
TLDR: I built a portable step-sequencer synthesizer for my daughter’s third birthday. It has four sliders that control four notes in a looping sequence. Slide up = higher pitch, slide down = lower. It includes: An onboard synth module + speaker Tempo, volume, scale, pitch, and instrument controls An OLED screen with visual feedback + […]
Ruby Symbols
Symbols and Why You Should Care# I should start, aptly, with the manual. A Symbol object represents a named identifier inside the Ruby interpreter. Okay, it’s a token of a sort, I think. I’ve been befuddled when seeing :name instead of name and I didn’t know what it was at first. I spent some time […]
The Geometry Behind Normal Maps
I first ran into tangent space while learning about normal mapping. It was described as this in-between space that connects surfaces and UVs, something you need to make lighting work. Nobody really explained what it was. Tutorials showed math and shader code snippets, but none of them answered the real question: what is tangent space […]
Micro.blog launches new ’Studio’ tier with video hosting
The core of Micro.blog’s mission is to make it easy for people to own their presence on the web. At first, it was a simple blog host that also incorporated a Twitter-like social timeline that put short (title-less) and long (titled) posts on equal footing. In the years since its 2017 launch, Manton Reece — […]
CoMaps emerges as an Organic Maps fork
Benefits for LWN subscribers The primary benefit from subscribing to LWN is helping to keep us publishing, but, beyond that, subscribers get immediate access to all site content and access to a number of extra site features. Please sign up today! The open-source mobile app Organic Maps is used by millions of people on both […]
A brief look at FreeBSD
Recently I’ve been playing around with FreeBSD in a virtual machine. The reason for this is that (if all goes well) some time in December my new Framework laptop will arrive, replacing my current X1 Carbon that is starting to show signs of old age (e.g. a keyboard where certain keys don’t always work). Framework […]
Mojo-V: Secret Computation for RISC-V
Mojo-V (pronounced “mojo-five”) is a new RISC-V extension that introduces privacy-oriented programming capabilities for RISC-V. Mojo-V implements secret computation, enabling secure, efficient, and data-oblivious execution without reliance on fragile software and programmer trust. By sequestering sensitive data in dedicated secret registers and encrypting memory under a third-party key, Mojo-V prevents disclosures and enforces computation that […]
Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support
This is a follow-up to #14404, which announced that yt-dlp will soon require an external JavaScript runtime (e.g. Deno) in order to fully support downloading from YouTube. With the release of yt-dlp version 2025.11.12, external JavaScript runtime support has arrived. All users who intend to use yt-dlp with YouTube are strongly encouraged to install one […]
I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset
The meeting stakes are high when you can get hung up on As you may remember, or completely not know, I have a bit of a fascination with old rotary phones. Occasionally, when people learn about this fascination, they donate their old rotary phones to me, so I have ended up with a small collection. […]