Linux

The Magic of /proc: Your Kernel as a Filesystem

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 process? cat /proc/<pid>/status. Need to see which files it has open? ls -l /proc/<pid>/fd. The command line it was started with sits in /proc/<pid>/cmdline, and its full memory layout in /proc/<pid>/maps.

It goes further than that. /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/meminfo are where tools like htop read their numbers from. And /proc/sys is a live control panel: write a 1 to /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward and routing turns on immediately, with no reboot.

This is the old Unix idea in practice. When everything is a file, you do not need a hundred special APIs to inspect a system. You need cat, grep, and a bit of curiosity. Spend ten minutes poking around in there and you will understand your machine better than any dashboard will show you.

KiCad: Professional PCB Design, Fully Open Source

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:

Local LLMs: Owning Your AI Stack

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

The Birthday Paradox: Why 23 People Is All It Takes

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: Native Cross-Platform Apps Without the Bloat

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

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KiCad: Professional PCB Design, Fully Open Source

Local LLMs: Owning Your AI Stack

The Birthday Paradox: Why 23 People Is All It Takes

Lazarus: Native Cross-Platform Apps Without the Bloat