learning from data

Ben Eater starts a series building a working computer on breadboards around the 6502 microprocessor. In this first part he gets a 'hello world' running from scratch.

The first stream in the Emacs From Scratch series, building a custom Emacs configuration from zero while teaching basics. It covers a usable baseline setup and the packages for completion, themes and productivity.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make radiative sky cooling paint from grocery and hardware store materials, including a novel calcium carbonate microsphere synthesis. The paint can cool a surface below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight without electricity.

The first lesson of MangoJelly's FreeCAD 0.20 beginner course, covering setup, preferences and navigation. The series teaches fundamentals through complete workflows such as sketching, Part Design and STL export.

A walkthrough of installing Synapse, Riot and Jitsi from scratch on Debian to run your own Matrix communication service. The description warns it is now quite outdated and links to updated material.

Dodoid gives an in-depth look at an SGI Onyx RealityEngine2, a $250,000 graphics supercomputer from 1993, covering its history, a physical overview, a teardown and some demos and games.

Loopop reviews the Polyend Tracker hardware tracker-style sequencer and walks through a tutorial from sampling to finishing a song. It covers most of the device's features.

A screencast tutorial on Specter, a Clojure library for navigating and transforming nested data structures declaratively, demonstrated in a REPL.

A reupload of Joel Spolsky's talk teaching spreadsheet users the Excel features they are probably missing, such as keyboard navigation, named ranges, tables and lookups. The original disappeared and this copy comes from the Wayback Machine.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a cartoon character painting entirely from math, using signed distance fields in a Shadertoy shader. He explains each step of building the image from formulas.

Ben Eater explains how VGA signals work and builds a breadboard circuit that produces correct sync timing so a monitor recognizes the signal. He then builds toward displaying an image from simple logic chips.

Inigo Quilez live-paints a mountain landscape using only math in a shader, building up from a basic polynomial noise surface through fractal terrain, lighting and atmosphere. The code runs in real time on Shadertoy so viewers can edit it as they follow along.

Russ Cox gives a 23-minute tour of the Acme text editor from Plan 9, showing its mouse-driven interface, executing commands from text, and its filesystem-based interface to other programs.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

George Brocklehurst of thoughtbot demonstrates Vim's built-in completion mechanisms, from word, line and block completion to ctags. The aim is to type less and make fewer typos.

James Trunk introduces Clojure syntax and thinking, covering its core data structures, immutability, the thread-last macro and live data analysis in the REPL.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build flat panel speakers from exciters and foam board, with construction guidelines, measured SPL comparisons and a complete system playing music.

Ben Vallack walks through designing a custom keyboard PCB from scratch using Ergogen and KiCad, ending with a gerber file ready to order from a PCB fabricator. The example is a split keyboard.

Markus Triska tours Prolog's most distinctive features, including its use as a database and query language, rule processing, constraint solving and compile-time rewriting. It also covers concise meta-interpreters.

Everyday Astronaut's guide to visiting Starbase, Texas to see Starship, covering what and where it is, which areas close during launches, where to watch from, where to fly into and stay, and things to do.

Ben Eater finishes building a minimal VGA video card from logic circuits. He explains analog RGB signals, stores an image in an EEPROM and builds a simple digital-to-analog converter to display it.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build cheap, high-performance flat-panel speakers using audio exciters on sheet materials such as foam-core board. It explains how distributed-mode speakers work and walks through experiments to find good designs.

LifebyMikeG lists 15 common mistakes beginner sourdough bakers make, with advice on fixing sticky, wet dough and other issues.