I own a Logitech Z506 5.1 audio system. I bought it in 2014 and it’s been doing its job just fine since then. It looks like this: Audio is easy. It’s just an analog signal you transmit over a wi...
Surround sound is hard

Running a Windows executable on Linux in 17 easy steps
What a time to be alive. GNU/NT is not a fever dream anymore, people actually play games on Linux, and—famously—the Windows ABI is actually the only stable ABI for Linux. Really, it’s something to ...

Write-up on a fun jigsaw puzzle problem
The Tweet The other day, Mathis Hammel tweeted this picture: This picture is a puzzle, or rather the solved version of a puzzle, available here on Pycto. If you don’t know Pycto, it’s a nice...
Stop using global variables in extensions
Adfly Skipper defines a property on window, called source. It’s only used for internal purposes. France’s IRS, in its decade-old authentication code, stores information in window.source. I’ve bee...
Be careful when naming fields in your Python exceptions
The Problem Here’s a Python dataclass: @dataclass class InvalidCallError: function: str args: list Nothing unusual in sight. We want it to be a real, raisable exception, so it needs to inh...

Block scoping in Python
Python uses function-level scoping, for most cases: def f(): x = 6 if x > 0: y = 5 print(y) # This works, even though `y` was declared inside the `if` A variable declared anywh...
Stack Machines and Where To Find Them
Ever tried googling “recursion”? There’s something quite peculiar about recursion. Every developer and their dog has heard of it at some point, and most developers seem to have quite a strong ...
Dell laptops, ruining audio drivers in 2023
This is a “rant + fix” blog post. If you’re looking for an interesting post, check out the other ones. I own a Dell Latitude 3420. It works well, has good battery life, good keyboard, and lots of ...
GPT: Straight Outta Copilot
I’m not a lawyer. You may have heard about this thing called GitHub Copilot. It’s a tool that can be integrated inside an IDE and allows you to rip off code from licensed code hosted on GitHub...

Crabs All the Way Down: Running Rust on Logic Gates
This article will discuss many topics, from CPU architecture design to historical shenanigans. Take a drink, it’s downhill from there. Even though the number has steadily decreased since the...