I have a new blog! I’ve been rather dissatisfied with this hosted WordPress service for a while and the recent unpleasantness from the Automattic CEO was enough to make me move on from here. All of the posts here have been exported and converted to the new blog. The new blog also has an ATOM… Read More A new blog
Ever wondered why 100nF is a go-to value for decoupling capacitors? This number has pervaded in datasheets and electronics advice going back to the 1980s, and is still widely present in the datasheets of modern components. Folks are out there sprinkling 100nF capacitors on their boards like seasoning, and when they decide 100nF isn’t enough,… Read More Proper decoupling practices, and why you should leave 100nF behind
Back in August I did a stream on Twitch where I dug through the OCP Grand Teton server chassis design. The Open Compute Project (OCP) is an organisation that works to design and publish open server standards. Their projects cover all sorts of datacenter tech, including entire server platforms. Many of their projects are published… Read More A neat trick in OCP Grand Teton’s power distribution design
This isn’t really a blog post in the normal sense. I got diagnosed with ADHD when I was 31, primarily as a result of seeing other people talk about ADHD and realising that their experiences strongly resonated with me. Part of the medical diagnosis process involved me putting together a list of symptoms I experienced.… Read More A list of ADHD symptoms
The SPICE models released by vendors are often really bad, producing results that do not anywhere near match the behaviour described in the datasheet. A recent example I ran into was for the CREE XLamp XP-E2 series LEDs, where the provided models underestimated the forward diode current by a factor of 6 compared to the… Read More Turning diode (and LED) datasheet IV plots into SPICE models
This is a short rewrite of a post I wrote elsewhere, but which is no longer easily searchable or accessible. If you’ve got a DIMM that’s going bad and your system supports Machine Check Architecture (MCA) / Machine Check Exceptions (MCEs), you might see alerts about memory errors popping up in your logs or console… Read More How to identify the physical DIMM from a Machine Check Exception (MCE) memory error log
Content warning: this post contains references to online stalking, doxxing, harassment, and deadnaming. I have a lot of opinions about copyright and the DMCA, but a vanishingly small proportion of those opinions are particularly unique or notable. There are plenty of people who are far better qualified than I to opine about the state of… Read More The DMCA enables harm
This blog post is a companion piece to my LED PWM Calculator web tool. Your eyes are part of an evolutionary pathway that started more than half a billion years ago. Vision capable of accurately identifying objects and movements in the dark has proven to be a key asset when it comes to the chances… Read More The problem with driving LEDs with PWM
Intel has a technology called Virtual RAID on CPU (VROC) that lets you set up RAID arrays of NVMe SSDs, with the RAID calculations being offloaded to specialised hardware on the CPU instead of being done in software. When I built my workstation back in 2019, I installed an Asus HYPER M.2 card, which is… Read More Fixing incredibly slow launching on Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology / Virtual RAID on CPU application
This is part two of my “convert a bunch of notes I made about capacitors into a blog post” series. If you missed part one, which covered ceramics and MLCCs, you may wish to read it first: Again, this article is mostly going to be useful to you if you already know a bunch about… Read More Notes on capacitors, part 2: aluminium electrolytics
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