DISCLAIMER: All views expressed on this page are entirely the views of myself and/or the other authors and are in no way representative of the views of any employer, institution, etc. that the author(s) may be associated with, in the past, present, or future, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

This blog is mainly a side project for things I occasionally want to talk about or highlight. Therefore, entries will be sporadic in timing and not on any consistent schedule.

Project Garden Part 1: Ideation
A random idea for a fun progress and info-vis project I had.
Last updated on Sun, 10 Dec 2023
Go read the Broken Earth Trilogy!
There are many ways to measure how good a book was. A reasonable indicator for me has always been how quickly I finish it. A good book keeps you absorbed, encourages you to keep reading and explore the world that has been set up in your mind. And wow does the Broken Earth Trilogy ever do that!
Sat, 14 Oct 2023
The Starless Sea
Reading “The Starless Sea” is like watching an intricately put-together puzzle unfold and reveal its workings. There are stories within stories, fables, bits, and quotes, all of which initially seem unrelated, but weave in and out of each other, enhancing, revealing, exploring, detailing various facets of the story and its characters.
Sun, 16 Jul 2023
Renewing GPG Keys
Past me set up GPG keys at a time where I thought I’d encrypt everything. I think I used them 3 times right after setting them up, and then never again.
Thu, 13 Jul 2023
So long, Reddit
As of today, 2023-06-30, my Reddit account (u/CodingCellist) has been deleted due to the ongoing controversy with API pricing and third-party apps. I’m aware this is a drop in the ocean or something, and I was genuinely sad to see my account go, but sometimes that’s just how things be.
Fri, 30 Jun 2023
The Fifth Season - Heavy and intense, but fantastic
The Fifth Season is set in a world where major tectonic activity almost never ceases. Every couple of hundred years or so, there is an extinction-level event. The book explores what society and civilisation and everything would look like in a world like that.
Wed, 7 Jun 2023
Hunting an Idris2 Codegen Bug
I accidentally discovered a bug in the Idris2 codegen. Let’s explore how to narrow it down, and hopefully fix it.
Tue, 25 Apr 2023
Functional Programming Nomenclature Intro
A brief (ish) overview of common terminology and syntax used in FP, with the aim of getting you to think in words rather than weird symbols.
Mon, 24 Apr 2023
Glove80 First Impressions
Glove80 is an ergonomic split contoured keyboard designed and produced by MoErgo. I backed the Kickstarter just over a year ago and got the parcels Friday afternoon. I haven’t yet had a chance to look at them, so without further ado, let’s see how it is!
Sun, 26 Mar 2023
A month of Zen
I finally got around to configuring my tiny Corne-ish Zen r3 keyboard. This is a discussion of the advantages, challenges, ease-of-use, etc. of using a 42-key split keyboard. It’s definitely portable and very useable, but there are some caveats.
Fri, 24 Mar 2023
Writing a PRNG using ChatGPT
What do you do if you need a pseudorandom number generator but don’t know anything about how to implement that and, crucially, don’t care how good it is? You could read some papers, but ChatGPT had been making waves for a while, so why not try that?
Thu, 16 Mar 2023
Dai Station: an Idris Constraint Solver
As part of my Ph.D. exploration on how we know the types we’re using model what we think they do, I decided to try to implement a constraint solver in Idris (technically Idris2, but Idris1 is deprecated at this point, so I use ‘Idris’ and ‘Idris2’ interchangeably).
Thu, 16 Feb 2023
Booting from a USB on an Odroid N2
If you’ve flashed an ISO to a USB-drive rather than the boot card of your SBC, is there any way to load the thing? Yes, but it requires a bit of digging around in a weird pre-boot environment…
Thu, 15 Dec 2022
Earthquake near Basel!
Well that was wild! I was sitting in bed when it suddenly started wobbling from side to side. My first thought was that the fan had made it shake, but that didn’t really make sense in terms of the amount of shaking that was going on.
Sat, 10 Sep 2022
Type You an Idris – Part 1: Warmup
The best way to learn & understand a thing is to implement it. So let’s implement (a subset) of Idris2! This part is an introduction and covers some function exercises that will help later.
Fri, 2 Sep 2022
Applying for a UK EHIC
With Brexit, etc. health insurance when travelling has gotten a bit complicated and the application process is slightly confusing. So I thought I’d document my experience.
Tue, 24 May 2022
A Crash Course in Sequencing IO Functions
Intro This is yoinked from an answer I gave on the Idris2 discord where someone was confused about using IO when there was multiple functions involved. I’ve slightly restructured it, but it’s still basically the Discord answer verbatim.
Fri, 25 Mar 2022
An attempt at explaining Decidable Equality
One of the more difficult concepts in Idris, I’ve found, is proving things through dependent types. The ‘simplest’ introduction to this is probably the DecEq interface, which this post aims to introduce, explain, and implement.
Tue, 15 Mar 2022
Happy Swiss Siren Day!
It’s the first Wednesday of February. If you’re Swiss, y’all know what that means!…
Wed, 2 Feb 2022
Booting via the UEFI Shell
After having the motherboard replaced in my laptop, I was unable to reconfigure the boot-manager to rEFInd the normal way. Fortunately, I had a tiny bit of experience with the UEFI shell and ‘recovered’ things through that.
Fri, 6 Aug 2021
Recovering From a Broken Smartcard
My Nitrokey suddenly broke. This is some ramblings about working my way through the harebrained backup schemes I established, and setting up something a bit more sane+safe…
Wed, 28 Jul 2021
Implementing Condition Variables in Racket
Explaining and implementing Birell’s 2003 paper on Condition Variables for Modula-2+, in Racket.
Tue, 27 Jul 2021
Cross-Compiling Splash-3
Cross-compiling can be a bit difficult to put it mildly. This should hopefully be straightforward to follow and help you if you’re looking to cross-compile Splash-3 for use with gem5 or a similar simulator.
Wed, 10 Mar 2021
Debugging Idris2 Racket Threads
A dive into functional concurrency, FFIs, and thread weirdness.
Wed, 24 Feb 2021
Dualbooting Arch Linux and Windows with Full-System Encryption
A step-by-step guide to dualbooting encrypted Windows and Arch Linux, using the rEFInd boot mananger.
Last updated on Fri, 14 Aug 2020
View on gist.github.com
How to install Arch on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme (Gen 1)
A detailed overview of how I installed Arch Linux on my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme (Gen 1), having never install Arch before.
Thu, 17 Jan 2019
View on gist.github.com