Hardware
A medical technician's adventure in flashing SSD firmware to clone serial numbers, tricking a Toshiba Aplio 500 ultrasound machine into accepting replacement drives — and discovering that a quirky bug in Chinese flashing software was the key to success.
Essays
A nostalgic deep-dive into creating an authentic retro New Year greeting for the ZX Spectrum computer in the style of early 1990s Soviet demoscene crack intros, complete with assembly code, borrowed game graphics, and period-appropriate techniques.
Essays
A deep profile of Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of C and Unix, whose quiet genius at Bell Labs shaped every aspect of modern computing — from smartphones to satellites.
Science
A raw file from a camera sensor looks nothing like a photograph — it is a grayscale grid of integers with a narrow dynamic range, a mosaic color pattern, and nonlinear brightness. Here is the step-by-step process that turns it into an image your eyes can read.
Programming
Ever wondered what a truly raw image from a camera sensor looks like before any processing? This article walks through each step -- from gray ADC data to a viewable photograph -- revealing that every 'unprocessed' photo is heavily computed.
Essays
The dramatic history of Moscow's Lyublinsko-Dmitrovskaya metro line, built during the collapse of the Soviet Union amid economic crisis, material shortages, and worker heroism that brought the line to completion on New Year's Eve 1995.
Science
A pattern doodled in a school notebook became a wall decoration, then a 12-year mystery, then a journey through L-systems, matrix number bases, and the strange mathematics of why the construction only works in dimensions 1, 2, and 4.
Career
A scathing critique of the modern IT industry in 2025 — from absurd hiring funnels and cargo-cult Agile to vibe-coding with AI and the death of engineering expertise, arguing that the field has lost its way in a fog of bureaucracy and hype.
Essays
A detailed build log of a miniature IBM PC-shaped Christmas ornament powered by an ESP32-C3 microcontroller that plays Doom with sound and wireless BLE controller support.
Essays
A deep dive into the rise and fall of BASE as a database philosophy, how ACID evolved to support distributed systems through Google Spanner and NewSQL, and why strict consistency has become the engineering default once again.
Science
The Ka-22 convertiplane promised to combine a helicopter's vertical takeoff with an airplane's speed and range, setting eight world records before two fatal crashes ended the program in 1964.
Management
Drawing on Selectel's engineering culture, this article catalogues the most damaging management behaviours — from micromanagement to heroism culture — and explains why each one destroys team performance and trust.