Technical – Page 7 – Matt's Homepage

X-ray backscatter with compressed sensing

October 22, 2025 matt Comments 0 Comment

Compressed sensing is an image/signal processing algorithm that allows you to re-construct an image/signal even when you’ve lost up to 95% of the samples. It’s so good that it can even be cranked up to restore images even above what would normally be the Nyquist limit.

Applied Science walks through using an X-ray backscatter device to reconstruct images as near to x-ray vision as you can get at low doses.

Links:

Robert Taylor paper on Compression Sensing in Python.
Steve Brunton’s introduction to compressed sensing

Finding huge primes really fast

October 15, 2025 matt Comments 0 Comment

PurpleMind goes over the Miller-Rabin Primality Test that can determine primes very quickly – but only with a non-100% probability. This test, combined with other prime principles, are how modern huge prime numbers are generated.

Vector Databases for Semantic search and AI application

October 13, 2025 matt Comments 0 Comment

IBM has a good video on what vector databases are and how they’re used by AI systems.

Good evaluation of different Windows UI dev frameworks

October 13, 2025 matt Comments 0 Comment

Windows Developer does a decent job of covering different Windows UI frameworks such as WinUI, WPF, WinForms, .NET MAUI, Uno Platform, Avalonia, React Native, and Progressive Web Apps.

Hacking SecuROM in an old Jurassic Park game

October 11, 2025 matt Comments 0 Comment

Nathan Baggs wanted to play a retro version of Jurassic Park, but found it was busted due to DRM. He then proceeds to walk through how to hack it with a debugger and binary/disassembly tools such as Ghidra, x64dbg, CFF Explorer, and PE Bear.

It’s a great video on how people go about hacking old programs.

Another ASCII rendering method

October 10, 2025 matt Comments 0 Comment

I wrote previously about Acerolas ASCII shader, here’s another method by Useless Game Dev.

Descent 3 open sourced

October 10, 2025 matt Comments 0 Comment

Kevin Bentley, a programmer who worked on Descent 3 way back in the ’90s, has released most of the original source code for the game on GitHub under the GPL 3 license.

Worst Volume control

October 9, 2025 matt Comments 0 Comment

In 2017, there was a contest to design the worst possible volume control. It goes to show you that just because you make something look cool – it could be the worst design ever.

Even more can be found here.

Database Normalization

October 8, 2025 matt Comments 0 Comment

I had forgotten the rules for the levels of database normalization. Not surprising since I last had the class over 20 years ago. Those problem sets immediately came back to me.

Imphobia demoscene magazine

October 7, 2025 matt Comments 0 Comment

The 90’s were an amazing time to learn to code. Especially in Europe, hundreds and even thousands of people would gather for weekend-long, round-the-clock caffeine fueled coding sessions to flex their latest graphics programming tricks on Amigas, Commodores, PC’s, and other hardware.

Imphobia was the leading PC demoscene diskmag of the first half of the 1990s. Founded in 1992, it issued until 1996. In that period, 12 issues were released.

Early issues of Imphobia run in DOSBox except issues 6 and beyond where the graphics are not displayed correctly, probably because of the use of an obscure video mode. Nevertheless it’s possible to read the articles. All Imphobia issues are available at scene.org and can be seen at Demozoo.