Following a Hewbot program from commands to replay
Run a ten-command Hewbot route in the browser, then inspect the tape and a replay that carries no source.
ARTICLES // TECHNICAL NOTES
53 ENTRIES
// WRITING
Articles
Writeups, deep dives, and devlogs — antennas and packet radio at one end, emulators and language design at the other.
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Hewbers workflow states and bounded review retries
Run the real Hewbers lifecycle machine and gate decision functions, then follow how their results connect to durable workflow execution.
MeshCore Willow KISS framing in Hew
Decode fragmented KISS input, recover after malformed escapes, and run Willow's real framing code without a radio.
The car radio in the floppy drive bay
An old car radio, the computer's twelve-volt supply and a basement stereo gave me FM music while I worked at the computer.
Catching up on messages over a radio mesh
Thinking through how a MeshCore message store could fill in a missed conversation, and how devices would find it without using up the shared airtime.
Printing invoices with PostScript and plain text
How a Business Basic customer's invoice forms led to a PostScript program that laid out pages and calculated bills from CSV records.
Giving an I²C packet modem a serial interface
How i2ckiss-ng translates between a TNC-Pi or TNC-Black and an ordinary KISS client, including the bytes that need changing.
Recovering packets from overlapping radio signals
Following MOSAIC's receiver from a decoded packet to a reconstructed waveform, and separating the UHF measurements from the remaining HF questions.
Validation and freshness in Rust
Using Requisite's Rust types to make an input check visible to the code that depends on it, and why freshness still needs a clock.
Sharing one radio sample stream
What rtlmux shares between clients, what happens when one falls behind, and why TCP reads don't line up with tuner commands.
What a supervisor restarts in Hew
Following a counter from ordinary messages to a crash and replacement, using the June 2026 Hew release.
Blinking fireflies on an FPGA
Five flashing LEDs, independent phase counters and the timing problem that appeared when their updates began sharing a pipeline.
What a code-history graph is counting
A large drop in the analyzer's own history leads back to a template extension, a counter's rules and the meaning of a line of code.
Anatomy of a Retro BIOS
Designing firmware for emulated retro computers—reset vectors, service calls, UART I/O, toolchains, and the boot theatre that makes it feel real.
Deep Dive: Audio Bus Architecture
Centralizing modem, line, backend, and peripheral audio in a single bus system, after a demo where the volume knob only worked on half the sounds.
Deep Dive: Audio Sonification for Code Visualization
Mapping code history onto sixteen oscillators: why a harmonic series turned to mud, how gain has to follow perception, and the double-ramp bug behind the pulsing.
Deep Dive: Balancing a Goose Game
The iteration that turned a text adventure into something playable: balance tuning, achievement scaffolding, and the 1081-line manual that made it legible.
Assemblers, Memory Maps, and Madness
Building cross-assemblers for retro CPUs in Rust, migrating to Pest parsers, and discovering why load addresses matter more than you think.
Deep Dive: Building a Canada Goose Simulator
A deadpan text adventure about mild chaos, built on a time budget: 79 tests, procedural honk audio, and a migration ending instead of a game over screen.
Deep Dive: Custom Canvas Charts for 30fps Animation
Chart.js redraws the full scene on every update, which is right for a dashboard and wrong for playback. Replacing it with a Canvas 2D renderer.