I built a new server that's also going to serve as a NAS. It consists of 8 NVMe drives from Samsung (970 Evo 2TB) with a total capacity of 10.2 TB in RAIDZ2 configuration (2 drive redundancy). Server specs: Neil's Lab Server Specifications CPU Model Intel® Xeon® Gold 6326, | Continue reading
I routinely make a fool of myself when I tell friends I want a Martin Baker ejection seat as a chair in my living room. Of course, with the pyrotechnic charge removed. Seriously, I would totally buy it if it weren't $5,000 on eBay and I've got a watchlist | Continue reading
I got tired of Lorem Ipsum text and created Quantum Lorem Ipsum, now with 100% more physics jargon! To those who are not familiar, Lorem Ipsum is a piece of latin text, comprised of multiple paragraphs, that is used as a placeholder during the design process of building a page | Continue reading
I ranted on HN the other day about Google Meet's user interface gore. Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center | Continue reading
I was browsing the interwebs and came across this beauty: https://diskprices.com/ Diskprices.comThere is a distinct absense of a header, branding, anything that takes away screen real-estate. The design of Diskprices.com orients towards what the user came to the website to do - t … | Continue reading
Throughout my engineering career (Semiconductor industry), I've come across dozens if not hundreds of equipment suppliers. But there are a few suppliers that leave a long lasting impression. Thorlabs is one of them. Why? It is quite silly actually. Everytime I order a linear actu … | Continue reading
I was visiting my family in Anand, Gujarat (India) in 2018 and got to meet our neighbor, Bharatbhai Patel, who is a painter and a professor of Arts at a local college. These graphic design studies are from his archives and he was eager to give us a tour of | Continue reading
I think CASIO during the 80's exemplified peak design, engineering and quality control. FX-880P is the flagship calculator model with a built in scientific library. Unfortunately, the one I have does not work anymore, but that should not prevent us from taking it apart. Classic 8 … | Continue reading
Good Design (Dieter Rams, Braun e. al)is innovative makes a product useful is aesthetic makes a product understandable is unobtrusive is honest is long-lasting is thorough down to the last detail is environmentally-friendly is as little design as possible Good Engineeringis inven … | Continue reading
This thing is straight up ugly. It is too simple, useful, pragmatic, dense and practical. Boring. These days the cool things are purple gradients, lots of negative space and loss of contrast. People on HN keep raving about this design thing but boy they are so wrong. Let's fix it … | Continue reading
I don't think it deserves the magical word "Design". This thing is straight up ugly. It is too simple and practical. Boring. A portion of the browser viewport as Hacker News plops itself on the canvas looks like this: Eeww....It lacks the following. Targeted advertisement Oh redd … | Continue reading
Definition: Application Programming InterfaceReddit is a place that instantly evokes an end-to-end spectrum of society - quantized and discretized in little blocks of interests called sub-reddits. These communities are can be accessed by sending a GET request to https://reddit.co … | Continue reading
I'd like to call this observation part of a larger concept - "Explicit Design". It is best explained perhaps by looking at an example that I recently came across: Nipponia NPR Font ShopNipponia is a type foundry from Japan. Just above the checkout button, there is a little file i … | Continue reading
PANTONE Color of the Year - 19-4052 Classic BlueThese things bother me. It seemsto me that it is a completely arbitary set of people, using arbitary rules tocome out with a "Color of the Year"[https://www.pantone.com/color-intelligence/color-of-the-year/color-of-the-year-2020]. P … | Continue reading
Advertisement needs to end. It is insane to think that a piece of software, so fundamental to running computers, an operating system is selling user behavior to advertisers. | Continue reading
Earlier last week, I stumbled upon Brandur's blog post about 'AtomicTransactions in PostgreSQL'. It was a fantastic read and I couldn't help butnotice ridiculously beautiful diagrams [https://brandur.org/postgres-atomicity] about database transactions. These monospaced diagrams a … | Continue reading
Engineers build stuff. They need to put together complex systems, most oftenfrom pieces that others have built. I jokingly talk to my colleagues thatsoftware engineering is similar to plumbing - take various pieces of softwareand link them through an interface (API or in case of … | Continue reading