Here is a retro gaming product idea that I would like to see on CrowdSupply. I do not know if it is actually feasible but I thought I would write up the idea since I would definitely buy this product. The idea is to create an FPGA-based driver circuit connected directly to an OLED panel’s […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Pixel phones are sold with bootloader unlocking disabled
Request to Google: ungrey the “OEM unlocking” toggle in the factory, before shipping store.google.com devices to customers. Do not make your customers connect the device to the Internet before they are allowed to install the operating system they want. My wife had a requirement to use Android1, and she wanted to run GrapheneOS; I experimented […]
Printing an A4 document on US letter paper using Debian
My wife bought a dress pattern on Etsy that she received as a PDF. It was a large pattern that spanned many pages, meant to be trimmed and taped together into a large continuous sheet. The pattern was labelled “A4-letter“, meaning that it should be printable on A4 or letter paper. For accuracy, the pattern […]
llama.cpp and POWER9
This is a follow-up to my prior post about whisper.cpp. Georgi Gerganov has adapted his GGML framework to run the recently-circulating LLaMA weights. The PPC64 optimizations I made for whisper.cpp seem to carry over directly; after updating my Talos II’s PyTorch installation, I was able to get llama.cpp generating text from a prompt — completely […]
whisper.cpp and POWER9
I saw whisper.cpp mentioned on Hacker News and I was intrigued. whisper.cpp takes an audio file as input, transcribes speech, and prints the output to the terminal. For some time I wanted to see how machine learning projects performed on my POWER9 workstation, and how hard they would be to get running. whisper.cpp had several […]
Thunderbird and OpenPGP
I recently helped some friends set up Thunderbird and OpenPGP; the combination is much more user-friendly now. OpenPGP is end-to-end encryption for email. Each user generates a private and public key. Each user imports a copy of the other user’s public key in their Thunderbird setup (they can copy the keys onto a USB drive […]
An excellent machine
I finished building my Talos II system, and I decided to post my thoughts on it here. This is an excellent machine, the best workstation I’ve ever used. It’s very fast — it compiles Emacs and the kernel in 2 minutes, and just spins up the fans a little bit while doing so (under normal […]
Talos II available for pre-order
The Talos II is now available for pre-order. It is the more affordable, more power-efficient successor to the Talos I machine I wrote about in a previous post. This is a very affordable machine for how powerful it will be, and there are minimal mainboard + CPU + RAM bundles (e.g., this one), around which […]
Talos Secure Workstation
This is a very important machine that really deserves to get built. Anyone who cares about Free Software should consider funding this project at some level, and spreading the word to their friends. If this project succeeds, it will bootstrap a market for new, owner-controlled performant desktop machines. If it fails, no such computers will […]
Think Penguin
I bought a ThinkPenguin.com laptop for my Mom for her birthday. She’s a long time GNU/Linux user and she was ready for an upgrade from her ThinkPad T41. I decided to try ThinkPenguin.com. I’m really impressed with their service and their product. The laptop shipped within a few days, and when it arrived it had […]