My DAB radio seems to have got louder in the last few days; anyone else noticed this?
(Robert's clock/alarm/radio bought a few months back). Not sure if it's firmware updated, some change in some platform a lot of channels are using or what. Or just me.
Todays surprise source is an aerosol filter that ran from April 30th to May 2nd in 1986.
Still has 20 cps at the Cs-137 full energy peak, and I'm considering to throw it into the Alpha Spectrometer.
We're going to be hiring someone to work on CHERIoT software things soon. Full remote, but UK Only (for various funding purposes, we need more people in the UK). Happy to talk to junior people who have some C/C++/Rust experience. You'll initially be mostly writing C++, though we expect this to move to more Rust over the next year or so.
Some of the job will be driver development gruntwork (here is a datasheet, here is a software interface for this device class, please write a driver for the device that exposes the interface), some will be at a higher level of the stack (so, how do you design a secure, compartmentalised {something} stack?).
If these sound interesting, let me know!
EDIT: The hiring manager is going to be out for the next couple of weeks, so I'll probably be a bit slow to set up interviews / respond. If you see this in a week or two, don't assume you're too late!
Steve Wozniak presents Liza Loop with a replica Apple I computer, 50 years after he presented her with the first Apple 1 off the line, serial number 1.
Damn, valgrind didn't flag any un-initialised reads on it, which for something which gives random results each time is a pain. Hmm, more cerr debug then I guess.
Having previously fixed my nice small test case, I'm now on a test failure that only happens on a case that uses ~35G of RAM. Hmph. Good thing is in my broken world the debug output is varying each time I run it; Breaking out valgrind.....
For the owners of RTL-SDR devices:
you can use nearby GSM base stations to calibrate your RTL-SDR.
Here in Germany I can use GSM stations in 900Mhz area:
https://fluxcoil.net/wiki/hamradio/sdr#calibrate_rtl-sdr_on_fedora
Hmm a website with a 2 line 'hamburger menu' - what is this a diet? And..it's on a page which already has a account drop down on the other side of the page; and it's hiding the logout under the 2-line. Very odd.
Damn; *now* I know why it's buggy, hmm that's a pain to fix.
Oh arse, after removing the hex addresses they're actually the same; I guess I need more debug...
For more information on the tube module, including circuit diagrams, see my latest article: https://www.righto.com/2026/07/ibm-604-trigger-tube-module.html
I've finally got a pair of log files with a difference between a working and failing piece of code; alas they're both ~2.1G and neither of meld, vimdiff or kdiff3 will load them even on my 64GB host. Hmph.
Amazing how many big patch series are being posted on the last (Fri)day of the month. As everyone told their boss they'd get it done by the end of the week/month.
Just finished reading a ~1949 pop-science article on viruses; it's fascinating - they've just got electron microscopy so they're now able to see them and go WTF without understanding what's going on. Their only other tool previously was measuring relative amounts of nucleic acids, and their only definition is really 'it passes through smaller filters than bacteria'. And then getting confused by things like King Edwards potatoes that almost all carry a virus but are resistant!
I want a version of 'rr' or similar that runs two copies of the program (one with a patch) and tells me the earliest correspond point they diverge. And then tells me why.
#linux on Snapdragon laptops is interesting; it's pretty usable for me; but there's lots of patches still flying around - but Qualcomm do seem to be sending lots of patches upstream, so it's good to see that.
Right! That's better - I had the blade the wrong way up! It's the opposite way from most sharp things - the bevel is away from the direction of travel.
I'm looking for a new job.
I've been in security for 13 years. I spent the last year at Trail of Bits doing code reviews and security assessments on desktop/web apps, kernelmode code, and firmware. I co-wrote the C/C++ testing handbook we published recently, contributing the Windows usermode and kernel sections. I've got strong hardware skills and industrial experience.
UK based but flexible on operating hours. Looking for similar work, full-time remote.
Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline
Wrote up some of my own notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/anatomy-of-a-frontier-lab-agent-intrusion/
Ahha! Someone pointed me at https://www.bobswoodstuff.com/articles/hand-plane-parts-how-a-chip-breaker-works which is exactly what I need.