New year, new account, same great open source energy. We are ready to see what you ship 🚢

New year's resolution, engage with open source developers on our new Bluesky account. ✨

This is going to date me, but in college I studied 90 to 45nm processes for my EE degree. I asked a professor about sub-45 and his response was: "oh, that's just dark magic." I dunno how he'd describe sub-10nm. Anyway, if you don't know how modern chips are made, check this out

RIP Stewart Cheifet. who died December 28. He was 87. I have no doubt his work creating and hosting the Computer Chronicles from 1984 to 2002 inspired many future journalists and engineers. Certainly was for me. obits.goldsteinsfuneral.com/stewart-chei... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute...

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/u... Crucial early evolutionary step found, imaged, and ... amazingly ... works <- by me on @theregister.com

This was pretty interesting, hearing how the small team behind the 8-bit BBC Acorn computer went from specifying ULA chip designs to designing the early Arm CPU series from scratch using BBC BASIC www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2yD...

And on to another week. Grateful for everything, especially these views from the weekend.

If you want to get started writing your own kernel for 32-bit RISC-V from scratch, here's how seiya.me did it in 1,000 lines of cleanly written C. There's documentation to go with it. Pretty cool IMHO! github.com/nuta/operati...

A 1956 general-purpose digital computer, the Bendix G-15, plus an algorithm from the modern-day CERN ATLAS experiment equals... this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y0D... What takes under a microsecond on hardware today takes about 15 minutes on this vacuum-tube machine

Wonderfully detailed per-frame performance analysis of NES Metroid, and why it lags at certain points. It's super interesting to see the software engineering decisions taken back in the day. As always, a great video by @displacedgamers.bsky.social IMO www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G6v...

#ziglang ’s Lovely Syntax matklad.github.io/2025/08/09/z...

I like alternative languages and architectures to see how syntax, structure, and other implementation details can be done differently. There's not only ziglang.org which I think is cool, but also SystemVerilog alternative Veryl: github.com/veryl-lang/v... Yet another side project coming on.

This looks like a super meeting for those interested in Acorn, Arm, and RISC OS history

FYI: Gerph has been re-implementing RISC OS – which started as Arm's very first OS – in Python, allowing 32 and 64-bit apps and other software to build and run on non-Arm systems. Amazing work More on RISC OS Pyromaniac: pyromaniac.riscos.online Latest here: www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums...

Recently enjoyed seeing and listening to quite a mix of live music in the Bay Area, from Kylie and Underworld in San Francisco to Kraftwerk in Berkeley. All pretty stunning, and all great sounds I grew up with that I finally got to experience in person.

Watching some old EEng videos, because why not, and find a 50-min 1988 video from Intel about the design and challenges of its 386 CPU And look who shows up, in his late 20s, talking about mixing automation and hand drawing of transistor layout on silicon and more www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQcL...

More adventures in #Zig and bare-metal RISC-V! Heap allocator is done, with merging of adjacent free blocks. A little more atomics for multi-CPU/thread support. And lots learned about the language. github.com/diodesign/di... And now onto device tree parsing and generation...

It's the holiday season, I've got some time off work, and so I'm gonna finally dive into Zig and RISC-V ziglang.org riscv.org/developers/ I've got bare-metal execution in Qemu, writing hello world out to the serial port. Let's bring up more of an environment and then try this on real hardware...

RISC-V CEO Calista Redmond resigns -- I have high hopes for RV, as I'm all for market competition. Calista had a tough job driving through a new ISA and IMHO did great riscv.org/riscv-news/2...

Been a fan of Orbital since I was a teenager. Never got the chance to see them live in the UK. Super happy to have caught them on tour in San Francisco this weekend. Amazing night of progressive-house-techno-whatever you want to call their unique sound :)

The tech migration from Twitter continues. One by one.

OK, now that the stampede to BlueSky has died down for a moment, and systems are a bit more stable, let's try sharing this again - our starter pack. Thanks for joining us! go.bsky.app/EsDR7M7

Debian has been a bedrock for me. Pretty much every dependable system I use has Debian at its core. I can't imagine using any other OS https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/17/debian_turns_30/

I quite like the design of this, and that it's aimed at devs. Neat way to get secure P2P into apps. Written mostly in Rust, too

First Zenbleed, now Downfall. We've got a fab overview of these two data-leaking CPU bugs in AMD and Intel processors, both found by Googlers, here: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/09/google_intel_downfall/