Using E-Ink tablet as monitor for Linux
Published on December 08, 2025 By Alireza Alavi • 6 minutes read • Table of Contents Table of Contents Showcasing end results Attempt1: Deskreen Attempt2: VNC Setting up the VNC server Install and initial setup Run x0vncserver directly Running x0vncserver automatically Running things in a script Footnotes Yesterday, I was writing and doing research about […]
Why frozen test fixtures are a problem on large projects and how to avoid them
Tests grow to thousands All make their claim on fixtures Frozen by demands An ancient Japanese Haiku about a common problem with software test fixtures Act 1: The problem, frozen fixtures Fixtures have a lot going for them: super fast, clearly structured, reusable across tests … That last one is also the source of a […]
SSE sucks for transporting LLM tokens
SSE sucks I’m just going to cut to the chase here. SSE as a transport mechanism for LLM tokens is naff. It’s not that it can’t work, obviously it can, because people are using it and SDKs are built around it. But it’s not a great fit for the problem space. The basic SSE flow […]
ZX Spectrum Next on the Internet: Xberry Pi ESP01 and Pi Zero Upgrades
Getting my ZX Spectrum Next onto Wifi and the Internet, plus Pi Zero Accelerator I’m enjoying my Xberry Pi ZX Spectrum Next, but I have to say the ‘simple’ upgrade of getting it onto Wifi via the cheap and cheerful ESP 8266 was not fun. While I had every intention of setting up my Speccy […]
How Google Maps allocates survival across London’s restaurants
I wanted a dinner recommendation and got a research agenda instead. Using 13000+ restaurants, I rebuild its ratings with machine learning and map how algorithmic visibility actually distributes power. I needed a restaurant recommendation, so I did what every normal person would do: I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London and built a machine-learning […]
The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn
The Renaissance Period We are living through a Saturn renaissance. Buckets of titles previously locked away in Japan are seeing new audiences, thanks to the herculean efforts of small but dedicated teams of enthusiast translators, removing the veil of Japanese illiteracy from before our tired eyes. Interestingly, the majority of efforts are being directed at […]
Standalone Meshtastic Command Center – One HTML File Offline
A fully offline, single-file web interface for managing Meshtastic mesh networks. The Meshtastic Standalone Command Center is a zero-dependency, browser-based management interface for Meshtastic mesh networks. It runs entirely from a single HTML file, requires no backend server, no installation, and no internet connection. This project is built for reliability in field conditions, emergency scenarios, […]
Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev environments
I built my first Dagger function yesterday with Solomon Hykes, and just got it published up on the daggerverse! Dagger is awesome, and I plan on continuing to find ways to use it. At a high level, dagger lets you use containers as a first-class object in code, and stitch together complex orchestration pipelines using […]
A thousand-year-long composition turns 25 (2024)
As of midday today (GMT), New Year’s Eve, Longplayer has been playing continuously, without repetition, for 25 years. Playing since the cusp of the new millennium, at midnight on 31 December 1999, the composition will continue without repetition (if circumstances permit it to) until the last moments of 2999, when it will return to the […]
The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets
The nature of time is one of the most profound and longstanding problems in physics – one that no one can agree on. From our perspective, time seems to steadily progress forward with each tick of the clock. But the closer we look, the more bizarre time becomes – from equations that state time should […]