The year was 1978 and I was mowing lawns and doing odd jobs around my neighborhood to earn enough money to buy the coolest thing I had ever seen, a TRS-80 Model 1 computer at my local Radio Shack. It was awesome and changed the direction of the rest of my life. I spent all my free trime working with it and doing even more odd jobs to buy all the expansion options. I totally speced it out with a monitor, casset tape drive and eventually the expansion kit with a parallel printer. It started a life long hobby and a carreer that took me all over the county. Such great memories!

How can we understand the operations of technology and power in our era? Our technological systems are increasingly complex, interconnected, automated and opaque. Social institutions, from schools to prisons, are becoming data industries, incorporating pervasive forms of capture and analysis. Even places that were once off-limits to capital, from our emotional expressions to outer space, are now subject to computational control and extraction. Meanwhile, the industrial transformations in AI are

A microcontroller Macintosh

Artificial intelligence still can’t beat a human when it comes to programming. But it’s only a matter of time.

But behind the scenes, there’s a lot more going on. I’ll describe some of what happens, and (much much more importantly!) explain some tools you can use to see what’s going on behind the scenes yourself. We’ll use readelf, strace, ldd, debugfs, /proc, ltrace, dd, and stat. I won’t talk about the Python-specific parts at all – just what happens when you run any dynamically linked executable.

Writing Javascript without a build system

Hello! A few days back we talked about problems with floating point numbers.

It is not uncommon to hear about C/C++ programming as a shorthand for “C and C++” programming. This implies that C and C++ are similar, but distinct, programming languages with the obvious interpretation being that C++ is a proper superset of C. However, this does not accurately describe the situation. The C++ programming language is inspired by the C programming language and supports much of the syntax and semantics of C, but is not a superset that is built on top of C. Despite sharing a historical relationship to one another, the languages have evolved independently and are specified in separate language standards. Due to this separation of the two specifications, incompatibilities have crept into the shared space of code that can be compiled by either a C compiler or a C++ compiler.

At a macro level, you learn programming concepts that are largely transferable regardless of language. The syntax may differ, but the core ideas are still the same. This can include things like: data-structures (arrays, objects, modules, hashes), algorithms (searching, sorting), architecture (design patterns, state management) and even performance optimizations (e.g. eager vs lazy evaluation, memoization, caching, lazy-loading etc). These are concepts you’ll use so frequently that knowing them backwards can have a lot of value.

I created an Air Quality Index gadget made from a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a tiny OLED screen from Adafruit. It shows the AQI from my local PurpleAir sensor. I created a Flask web server on the Pi so I could remotely see the AQI and change the PurpleAir sensor ID.