Conjuring a Linux distribution out of thin air

Everyone that has tried to make some nice charts in Grafana has probably come across timeseries databases, for example InfluxDB or Prometheus. I've deployed a few instances of these things for various tasks and I've always been annoyed by how they work. But this is a consequence of having great performance right? The thing is... most the...

Network switches are simple devices, packets go in, packets go out. Luckily people have figured out how to make it complicated instead and invented managed switches. Usually this is done by adding a web-interface for configuring the settings and see things like port status. If you have more expensive switches then you'd even get access to some...

Quite a while back I designed a small PCB for hooking up sensors to an ESP8266 module to gather data and have a nice Grafana dashboard with temperature readings. While building this setup I grabbed one of my spare ESP8266 dev boards and soldered that to the P1 port on my smart energy meter to log the power usage of the whole house. For those...

I don't generally get along great with CAD software with the exception of KiCad. I guess the UX for designing things is just a lot simpler when you only have 2 dimensions to worry about. After enjoying making a PCB in KiCad the annoying for me is always getting a case designed to fit the board. If I'm lucky I don't need many external holes to fit...

I've been working on the code that has become libmegapixels for a bit more as a year now. It has taken several thrown-away codebases to come to a general architecture I was happy with and it it has been quite a task to split off media pipeline tasks from the original Megapixels codebase. After staring at this code for many months I thought I've...