KiCad
For a long time, serious PCB design meant paying for an expensive commercial license. That is no longer the case. KiCad has reached the point where professional engineers pick it on merit, not because it is free but because it is good. The workflow is what you would hope for:
AI
The most interesting thing happening in AI right now is not a bigger model in some data center. It is how much you can already run on hardware you own. With tools like llama.cpp and Ollama, capable open-weight models run locally and offline, and your data never leaves the
Mathematics
Here is a question that trips up most people. In a room of just 23 people, what is the chance that two of them share a birthday? Most guess something tiny. The actual answer is over 50%. The trick is to turn the question around. Instead of counting matches, count
Lazarus
Plenty of modern desktop apps ship an entire browser engine just to draw a window. Lazarus goes the other way. It is a free, open-source RAD IDE built on the Free Pascal compiler, and it produces real native binaries that are small, fast, and do not drag a runtime along
Yocto
Put Linux on a custom board and you hit a wall fairly quickly: no off-the-shelf distribution fits. It is too big, ships the wrong libraries, or has no support for your exact SoC. The Yocto Project takes a different route. Instead of trimming down somebody else's distro, you
Linux
One thing I still like about Linux is /proc. It is a virtual filesystem where the kernel exposes its own internals as ordinary files. Nothing is stored on disk; every time you read one of those files, the kernel works out the answer right then. Want to inspect a running