Ethiopian Jazz
I didn’t know this was even a thing, but it’s cool.
Apparently Jerry Wayne knows the proper etiquette for Ethiopian jazz
Amazon’s Graviton CPU is not just faster, it’s more secure
I have written about how Amazon’s Graviton4 CPU is starting to out-perform x86 offerings from Intel and AMD. Now there is yet another front that should worry Intel and AMD: security.
Like many custom chip designs coming from Apple, Google, and Amazon, Graviton4 is an ARM-based architecture. While AMD, Intel, and some other chip designers have struggled with the various forms of Spectre and Meltdown attacks, new designs are defending against them at their hearts.
ARM8.5-A and subsequent security extensions have been slowly and steadily introduced to combat the vulnerabilities found in classic chip designs. These features include things like Branch Target Identification to avoid branch prediction and speculative execution attacks. Memory addresses can be accessed only if they have been marked as valid for that execution prediction. Pointer Authentication adds a cryptographic signature to authenticate memory pointers and prevents data alteration. All data sent across high-speed hardware interfaces such as Graviton memory and AWS Nitro cards is encrypted to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. All of this is enabled by default for customers that use Amazon Linux 2023.
“Many people told me it was impossible to build a chip that could compete with the x86 CPUs and didn’t use the x86 architecture,” Ali Saidi, senior principal engineer at AWS, said in an interview published by Amazon’s A to Z blog. “But 25 years ago, x86 wasn’t the dominant architecture. The innovation and economies of scale of the PC drove success in other areas like servers. Since it happened before, I knew it could happen again.”
Hall-effect input is already yesterday’s news
Everyone has been going on and on about Hall effect controllers and keyboards since they made a splash on the scene just a year or so ago. I have even tried out one of the better hall effect keyboards to great effect (Corsair K70 Pro TKL with Hall effect switches). Hall effect keys can be tuned to trigger at different points in the keypress descent.
Having been using heavier brown switches in my gaming keyboard, my touch-typing was a little heavy handed at first. When I learned I could back off and even just feather the touches, my typing speed definitely went up by about 5-10wpm – going from about 70wpm to 80-85wpm. The problem was that I wasn’t really into the $179 price tag – so I returned it and am waiting for prices to come down.
But there is a new game in town: TMR (Tunnel Magneto Resistance), or sometimes called inductive switches. A few folks have been releasing TMR keyboards (Ducky OneX), but adoption seems slow and reviews seem to be scarce.
Eve Butt, however, wrote a review of a TMR game controller – the PB Tails Metal Crush Defender. She seems to think it does better than its Hall effect kin (like the 8BitDo Ultimate). She claims it gives noticeably more instant precision than the Hall effect equivalent and never suffers from the dreaded, well documented stick drift common in normal Switch controllers. Primarily, she notes much less dead space before input is registered.
I, for one, am excited about the input arms race that is delivering us some really fascinating new technology. If Hall effect keyboards come down in price, I definitely thought I’d buy one. But perhaps I should try out a TMR keyboard as well.
PlayStation project cancelations
President of PlayStation Studios, Shuhei Yoshida shared how they decided to continue or cancel games in an interview with Game File (paywalled):
We kind of calculate how much more money we have to spend to finish this game. If the revenue seems lower than the money we need to spend to finish, we cancel the project. We cancelled lots of projects after the prototype level and no one knows in public. And that’s fine. That’s just a process
Sometimes the game is in deep production. The largest I canceled were two games, after we spent $25 million. At that time, that was lots of money. Now, not as much. I felt really bad about how we couldn’t see this.
I produced, so I was really harsh on producers. That’s what I used to do.
I think that’s one area that many startups nor big companies do enough: honest mid-dev assessments that honestly ask if they should cancel or more strongly steer projects back into scope. In my experience, startups are encouraged to give perfect and rosy projections – even to the point of firing anyone that questions obvious or serious issues. This leads to all kinds of deception and fraud.
Bigger companies, conversely, tend to plan once, and then doggedly stick with it no matter how bad the estimates were or how off-track the project becomes. Rarely do they do an honest re-plan with project cancelation being seriously on the table.
Links:
LightBurn drops Linux due to packaging overhead
LightBurn, the defacto software for hobbyist laser cutters and engravers, was built as a multi-platform solution so it could be used on a wide variety of platforms. But in a recent email announcement sent out to users, they announced they would no longer be distributing their software for Linux systems.
Why? The developers claim that too much of their time was being spent supporting and packaging Lightburn software for Linux distributions relative to the size of the user base.
The segmentation of Linux distributions complicates these burdens further — we’ve had to provide three separate packages for the versions of Linux we officially support, and still encounter frequent compatibility issues on those distributions (or closely related distributions), to say nothing of the many distributions we have been asked to support.
They’ve apparently tried multiple distribution mechanisms designed to fix these issues such as flatpack and appimage – but still encountered too many problems.
It’s a reminder that the entire ecosystem must be healthy for your software to be healthy. [Hackaday]
Own a lighthouse
Do you want a 360 degree view of the Chesapeake Bay from your 1,500 sq ft 4 bedroom, 1 bath home? Now you can – and it comes with a really excellent night light. For just $450,000, the Smith Point Lighthouse could be your new home! Only a 2.5 mile boat ride into the bay.
Besides needing to take a 2.5 mile boat ride to go for a walk, get some milk, or pick up the mail – lighthouses often have usage limitations.
A little intro to reverse engineering
Low Level does a very brief but decent introduction to reverse engineering binaries (on linux).
He doesn’t discuss it, but when reverse engineering it’s always good to start with what your goal is. There’s a variety of reason to reverse engineering at the binary level:
- Learning how an algorithm or binary works
- See what assembly code your compiler is generating (for optimization, performance analysis, etc).
- Trying to debug or fix an issue without source
- Trying to discover vulnerabilities in enemy systems
- Trying to hack in/out behavior (copy-protection removal, remove checks that cause crashes, etc)
This is important, because each goal often focuses on a different set of reverse-engineering skills.
Real world reverse engineering also carries many possible legal dangers. In the past, companies reverse engineered mechanisms to compete against companies that had monopolies and ended up in massive lawsuits. Atari vs Nintendo lawsuit and Sega v. Accolade are good examples. The methods of doing legal reverse engineering is a complex legal topic that requires very carefully monitored and documented clean-room procedures.
It’s a fascinating world in which big companies to nefarious hackers engage in.
Adventure Game Fan Fair
In what turned out to be a shockingly un-advertised amazing event, The Adventure Game Fan Fair (blog feed, facebook) was held in Tacoma, WA on July 26, 2024. Present were all the amazing people who made the games from your childhood days at Sierra. Ken and Roberta Williams, Al Lowe, Graeme Devine (7th Guest), actors from Phantasmagoria, creators of Space Quest, and many others. It was surprising how small the event was with so many of the best dignitaries of the industry present. In fact, many online were shocked to learn about the event only after it was over.
If you did miss it, the entire event was livestreamed (source). They even used my copy of 7th Guest at the panel discussion. You certainly don’t want to miss Al Lowe playing the Leisure Suit Larry theme on the saxophone:
There’s no word yet on if it will happen again, but there are rumors it will come back in Q3 of 2026 – somewhere in the Midwest. So keep an eye on their website. I count myself lucky to have been there because the crowds were so small you could sit and chat with any of them at length about anything.
The right ordering of our lives
5Now this is what the Lord Almighty says:
“Give careful thought to your ways!
6 You have sown much, but have brought in little;
you have eaten, but have not been satisfied;
You have drunk, but have not been exhilarated;
have clothed yourselves, but not been warmed;
And whoever earned wages
earned them for a bag with holes in it.”9 “You expected much,
Haggai 1:5-6
but see, it turned out to be little.
What you brought home, I blew away.
Why?” declares the Lord Almighty.
“Because of my house, which remains a ruin,
while each of you is busy with your own house.”
This daily mass reading from Thursday really spoke to me about one of the biggest paradoxes, and cures, to our modern world. One of the great truths of our lives is that no matter how much we obtain, we are never happy for long. A remodeled kitchen. A fancy new car/SUV. New toys and gadgets. A bigger house. A new job with more authority and prestige. Even having children or getting married to your dream spouse.
We can achieve great things – and people in the past have literally conquered the world – but does it actually make us happy?
And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer
Alexander the Great after conquering the entire known world
The sad fact is that many wealthy, and increasingly, and even ordinary people are anything but happy. We have more convivences, medical care, and technology than any time in history. I worked with very successful people at the world’s most powerful companies – yet I have visited religious that have renounced all possessions and poor people in 3rd world countries that are much more full of joy. Even though they make in a year what many Americans make in a week.
This is what God is trying to tell people in this reading. We haven’t got our lives or prioritized right. God tells us if we turn away from self-directed happiness and attend to that of his Kingdom – it draws us all together and into a right relationship with Himself and with each other. We live in Truth and love for each other instead of just pursuing our own desires and agendas.
But more than just, my prayer time after mass made me realize how much I have been doing, but not listening. Even when we’re doing good things and helping others, if we are not listening to what God has for us personally, we are still just doing what we want. Even doing amazing amounts of good things can leave us unhappy and unfulfilled. Because what brings us happiness is not even those good works. It’s a daily, working relationship with God.
I recently read about a US chaplain that was killed in the Middle East by a roadside bomb. He was constantly visiting troops in the field despite the dangers. His quote when asked about being in harms way but knowing God placed Him there stuck with me:
“There is no safer place than to be in God’s will”
This doesn’t mean life will be easy or without trials or even death. But when we know we are united daily with God and lovingly doing what he calls us to do – I can attest that there there is no greater peace and joy in your heart. Even if there is fear. But just like the Israelites (and myself) – it is easy to be distracted with daily tasks and not actually listen for God’s will nor stay connect every day with the love of your life: God.
So let us take a little time today to stop running around mindlessly doing all the things we think we need to get done. Use Sunday as it should be used. Do not just pray at God, but listen to God. Today, I say, “Here I am God – I come to do your will” and be silent. Sit with the love, truth, and peace that is God – and you will indeed find that true peace and happiness for which you search.
Peru jockeys race (without their horses) for charity
I gotta admit – that’s pretty fun.