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 …
Author Archives: Thomas Fitzsimmons
ulisp-repl
Read-Evaluate-Print Loops are great for doing quick experiments. I recently released two new REPL packages for Emacs to GNU ELPA. This is the second in a two part series. Here is part 1. For microcontroller projects, uLisp is a great option. It provides a Lisp REPL on top of the Arduino libraries. It implements a …
firefox-javascript-repl
Read-Evaluate-Print Loops are great for doing quick experiments. I recently released two new REPL packages for Emacs to GNU ELPA. This is the first in a two part series. Here is part 2. I wanted something along the lines of SLIME or CIDER’s REPL (just the REPL part) but for JavaScript. There have been many …
Excorporate and OAuth 2.0
I recently released Excorporate 1.1.0 to GNU ELPA. Excorporate allows Emacs users to retrieve calendar entries directly from an Exchange server such as Office 365, without the need for external programs. The latest release adds experimental OAuth 2.0 support, via a new library I wrote and published to GNU ELPA, called url-http-oauth. With Excorporate 1.1.0, …
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 …
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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 …
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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 …
Mastodon and HTML
Request to Mastodon instance operators: Provide a read-only anonymous HTML-only mode. Update 2022-11-17: Mastodon supports RSS; try just tacking “.rss” onto the end of a Mastodon URL. It doesn’t seem to work for comment threads, but it does work for main threads. For example will create a Gnus group containing the author’s Mastodon posts. This …