My corner of the internet

Mostly electronics and software, but occasionally chemistry and photography. Feel free to check out my photos of space, random programs, weird electronics projects and atom arranging.

I have my very own (copyright respecting) nonsense generator – guaranteed to be cheaper then any LLM.

For a something more casual, check out my fun section

Because search engines are increasingly terrible, here’s a list of blogs I have found useful or interesting, and can verify are not LLM generated.

Recent Posts

Life TV: Video with 2 bits to spare

The Sony FD-30A has a very weird display:

On the surface, it looks like a normal CRT, except that it's impossibly thin: the whole device is just under 4 cm thick. To do this, the tube is mounted sideways, and the phosphor is viewed from the back.

Unfortunately, this rather unique display is completely useless: There are no analog TV stations on my continent... at least not with that attitude.

The web in 1000 lines of C

Modern browsers are hugely complex: Chromium (the open source portion of google chrome) currently has 49 millions lines of code, making it bigger then any other program on my machine.

... but how much of that is needed if I just want to visit websites instead of running multi-gigabyte Javascript abominations that just happen to render to the browser?

Remove annoying banners

This is a small javascript snippet that removes most annoying website elements:

// For everything on the page...
(document.querySelectorAll('*').forEach((node) => {
        // Read style information
        var style = getComputedStyle(node);

        // Remove "dick bars" and the such
        var bad = (a)=>(["fixed","sticky","hidden","clip"].includes(a));
        if (bad(style.position))
                node.parentNode.removeChild(node);

        // Show hidden content
        if (bad(style.overflow))  node.style.overflow  = "visible";
        if (bad(style.overflowX)) node.style.overflowX = "visible";
        if (bad(style.overflowY)) node.style.overflowY = "visible";
}),null)

Why does C have the best file API?

Ok, the title is a tongue-in-cheek, but there's very little thought put into files in most languages. It always feels a bit out of place... except in C. In fact, what you get is usually a worse version of C.

In C, files can be accessed in the same way as memory:

Be careful with LLM "Agents"

I get it: Large Language Models are interesting... but you should not give "Agentic AI" access to your computer, accounts or wallet.

To do away with the hype: "AI Agents" are just LLMs with shell access, and at it's core an LLM is a weighted random number generator.