I’ve written about connecting an external GPU to your laptop/NUC system before, but now there’s yet another solution from AMD.
The Tiny Corp showed off connecting an AMD GPU over USB3 via libusb. It should work on Windows, Linux, and even Mac systems. They use a user space driver to simplify development and is limited to AMD RDNA 3/4 GPUs.
Github link for the eGPU USB3 feature.
Ron decided to learn to code in 2024. He proceed to use AI to vibe-code a game called Letterlike. It’s now one of the top ranked mobile games on Steam and the #1 paid word game on Android.
He tells his story on this reddit post.
Vibe coding is here. People are building viable commercial products with less than a year of coding experience. Sure this isn’t a solution that needs a lot of security like an online service, but here it is.
Hate that Windows 11 requires an internet connection and registering a Microsoft Account?
The most popular bypass was “oobe\bypassnro” which, when typed into the command prompt (opened with Shift + F10) during the Windows 11 setup experience, would enable a button that let you skip connecting to the internet and the Microsoft account requirement.
@witherornot1337 on X, used “start ms-cxh:localonly” into the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup experience will allow you to create a local account directly without needing to skip connecting to the internet first.
It was the year 1960 and a brainteaser was formulated as “The Secretary Problem”. You need to hire a secretary; there are n applicants to be interviewed. You meet each of them in a random order. You can rank them according to suitability, but once rejected an applicant they cannot be recalled. How can you maximize the probability of picking the best person for the job?
Other versions of this include the “fiancé problem” (same idea, but you’re looking for a fiancé instead of a secretary) and the “googol game” – in which you are flipping slips of paper to reveal numbers until you decide you’ve probably found the largest of all.
The answer is… surprisingly predictable, it turns out.
“This basic problem has a remarkably simple solution,” wrote mathematician and statistician Thomas S Ferguson in 1989. “First, one shows that attention can be restricted to the class of rules that for some integer r > 1 rejects the first r – 1 applicants, and then chooses the next applicant who is best in the relative ranking of the observed applicants.”
So, when faced with a stream of random choices and wanting to pick the best, the first thing you do is reject everyone. That is, up to a point. Once you reach that point, just accept the next applicant, suitor, or slip of paper, that beats everything you’ve seen so far.
The statistics are fascinating; and it says that you reject the first 37% of applicants and then take the next one that’s better than what you’ve seen in the rejected pool.
This works if it’s apartments, job candidates, or potential life partners.
Article:
Collada was an interchange file format for 3D application that started around 2004 and largely died around 2016. I actually worked in a group with Remi Arnaud when it was being used for a project at Intel.
It was a sound idea. With lots of 3d packages and engines out there, getting files from one tool or engine to another was never easy. Since every authoring tool and game uses different structures for storing mesh, material, animation data, etc – the Collada format tried to define a open-standard format to store these relationships in an XML style text file. This allowed maximum flexibility to define relationships; but had the unfortunate side effect of generating sometimes gigantic files that were extremely slow to load.
While it was an extremely flexible format for exchanging data between packages or game engines, once you got there, it was dramatically faster to use a native binary format. Trying to load or save a XML based file format to load a block of content often took 10-100x longer than a binary version. The speed alone meant that it wasn’t practical for any realtime purposes.
Additionally, supporting the entire Collada spec would mean supporting every kind of data relationship – even if the tool or game didn’t need it. It meant that loaders often only implemented the desired features – which meant that you were almost back to where you started from. Custom loaders and savers with limited features. Except Collada files were gigantic and slow to load/save. A real problem when your primary costs are the speed of your content development.
Collada’s practical use was therefore primarily in one or two time transfers between tools. As time went on, and tools and engines consolidated on a few efficient binary formats, formats such as Collada became less and less useful. By the early 2010’s, development and work on it largely died. The last loaders were apparently updated in 2018 and the github site that hosts the binary versions is kind of broken.
At any rate, if you do need to load an old Collada file (.dae, etc) then you’ll need a copy of 3D Studio Max or Maya, and a plugin loader. You can download one of the last collada loaders here.
Install the plugin (make sure Maya is closed) and then start your tool (Maya in my case).
Ensure the Collada plugin is loaded. Go to the Windows-> Settings/Preferences -> Plug-in Manager in Maya and ensure the fbxmaya, FBX, or ColladaMaya pluings are loaded and/or set to auto load:
When you want to import a Collada file, go to File->Import and select the fbx/collada file you want to load and it should load it up.
Links:
Techmoan shows off some more oscilloscope music/art – and the problems he encountered while getting it working. This video is interesting because he shows how he debugged some issues he had.
More info at https://oscilloscopemusic.com
If you don’t happen to have hundreds of dollars in an oscilloscope and time to debug, you can watch the whole, clean version of N-SPHERES video here:
I recently acquired not one, but 2, 8″ floppy drives. Behold a Data System’s Design DSD 440:
To get this all working in my experiments, I used the following guides
Parts and equipment
David Gewirtz reviews a bunch of AI tools for coding; and does some ranking.
Article:
not-matthias has blogged his journey on writing a kernel driver with Rust.
He has a few other fun hacky posts about reverse engineering a digital jukebox in a bar to vote for his songs.
The author’s of the 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development book have provided their intro book for free online. It’s basic for those getting started, but nothing beats free and the author has done a number of GDC talks.