State of the Blog - Year 4

October is a month I look forward too for many reasons. Primarily: it's spooky season, and I love Halloween. But also it's because I get to write one of these shorter "State of the Blog" posts which gets me out of doing two projects this month. But that leads me to consider... should I only be doing one project a month?

Failed Attempt to Lap GPU Dies

Integrated circuits are beautiful. They are perhaps the most complex structures humans have created. The fact that they work at all is nothing short of a miracle. And if you've ever seen an exposed die of some of the more complicated chips like microprocessors or GPUs or things of that nature, you know that the structures printed on the silicon are absolutely stunning. Our mission today is to try and get at the structure of some chips and expose their beauty. Spoiler alert: it didn't go well.

Remote Audio Transmitter with an ESP8266

The motivation for this project was to have a wireless way to listen to my building's intercom remotely, be it from another room or from another state. Having the ability to do this doesn't necessarily add security to my residence like cameras would (maybe keep an eye out for a post on that), but it's interesting nonetheless. So what we can do is capture the audio over WiFi with an ESP8266 and capture it on a server. All with the power of Docker, of course!

Fixing a Broken Midi Keyboard

If you can't tell by this post and the last post, I'm really running low on things to write about here. So I looked around my room. What could be fixed quickly and relatively painlessly. Something I had been putting off for months. Then, in the corner of the closet, I saw it: a two octave Axiom keyboard that wasn't recognized by my computer anymore. Easy fix, right?

'Reuse' Comes Before 'Recycle': Low Power Server from a Scrap Laptop

If you know literally anything about me, it's that I believe that computers are only useless when they're off. They're still capable of a lot - even the old ones - but only if they're on and working. So when I see perfectly good computers going to waste, I try and figure out something to do with them. This was the case with a Dell Latitude E4300 I found in the trash a little while ago.

Dumping and Decompilation of Old Stereo Firmware

Remember that game console that I made a while back out of old computer parts and a stereo enclosure? It still had the motherboard intact. I desoldered everything from it and got some interesting (and somewhat usable) parts. There were some parts that I didn't dive into though, and I'd like to take the time now to shallow dive into one of them now: the EPROM.

Make Something That Isn't A Computer A Computer - Episode 4: Amazon Fire TV Stick

With each passing episode of this series I can hear you screaming at your screen more and more. "BUT TUCKER!" I hear you yell. "THE AMAZON FIRE TV STICK IS BASICALLY A COMPUTER ALREADY! WhY iS iT tHe SuBjEcT oF tHiS sErIeS???" And I suppose you're right. But that's not the intent of the product. The intent was to plug it into your TV and use it like a Roku. What we're essentially going to do is change it into a compute stick.