Top all-time · #6479
Mumbling about computers
Personal blog · blog.davidv.dev · on HN as deividsystemsprogramminghardware
Mumbling about computers is a personal blog at blog.davidv.dev about systems, programming and hardware. Since 2021, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 38 times, most often “A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for posts on building a handheld PICO-8 console and on minimizing Linux boot times. One commenter said they were looking forward to reading the PicoPico posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Blog where I ramble about computer stuff
Most-linked posts?
- A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-07-28
- Minimizing Linux Boot Times2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-04-02
- Cursing a process’ vDSO for time hacking (2022)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-16
- Learning about PCI-e: Driver and DMA2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-27
- /posts/minimizing-linux-boot-times/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-02
What Hacker News says?
I keep a blogroll[0] mostly on computing/programming [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html
Comment linking /blogs-i-follow.html
on “I ditched the algorithm for RSS”Submitted Learning about PCI-e: Driver and DMA as a story · 229 points
HN discussionAh, I just found your blog posts about PicoPico, wonderful! I'm going to enjoy reading them and perusing the code. Good stuff. https://blog.davidv.dev/making-a-handheld-pico8-console-part... https://blog.davidv.dev/pico8-console-part-2-performance.htm...
Comment linking /pico8-console-part-2-performance.html
on “Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation”Submitted A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes as a story · 167 points
HN discussionGreat article, I went through something similar with TrainMore in The Netherlands, where they replaced an NFC key fob with a similarly refreshing QR code (but this one rotates every 30 seconds) In my case, I didn't make a native app because I don't use the wallet integration. I wrote about it here: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/trainmore-re/
Comment linking /posts/trainmore-re/
on “I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer”Submitted A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes (2024) as a story · 146 points
HN discussionSVG+CSS is super powerful, a simple feature that I love is making diagrams respect dark/light mode, without any javascript. Check the diagrams here for example: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/ipvs-lb/
Comment linking /posts/ipvs-lb/
on “Nice things with SVG”Submitted Revamping an Old TV as a Gift (2019) as a story · 74 points
HN discussionLinux can boot quite quickly with the right settings, I've written about it at [0], but distros (reasonably) build very generic kernels and initramfs, which are not particularly fast to boot [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/minimizing-linux-boot-times/
Comment linking /posts/minimizing-linux-boot-times/
on “Extreme Pi Boot Optimization”Submitted A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes as a story · 11 points
HN discussionReally nice post, some months ago I also wrote about linux boot, but a bit more focused on the IO side (what's on disk, how is it loaded), here: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/booting-x86-64/
Comment linking /posts/booting-x86-64/
on “The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel”Submitted A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI've written a little bit about writing a driver & using QEMU to create a custom device for it at [0] & [1] [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/learning-pcie/ [1]: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/pcie-driver-dma/
Comment linking /posts/pcie-driver-dma/
on “The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide”Submitted Live Image/Video Translation as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis[0] is my take on something like that, but I'm no k8s expert -- the post documents my first contact with k8s and what/how I understood these concepts, from a sysadmin/SWE perspective. [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/first-contact-with-k8s/
Comment linking /posts/first-contact-with-k8s/
on “I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either”Submitted Geo-distributed blog for $7/mo as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI did a similar thing a couple of years ago, but with a TV instead of a phone (and for my dad). https://blog.davidv.dev/revamping-an-old-tv-as-a-gift.html The gist of it was putting a Pi inside a b/w CRT, soldering the GPIO to the tuner and that way you could change the channels. I even put fake static on some of them. The software ended up horrible as I ran out of time.. but it worked great!
Comment linking /revamping-an-old-tv-as-a-gift.html
on “Show HN: Mum's 80th birthday present- a rotary phone from the 1970's”Submitted Using local translation models on Android as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> discoverability issues Webrings[0] are somewhat being used again. I keep a list of the blogs I follow[1] in OPML & HTML, so that you can either bulk-subscribe, or browse through blogs that you might find relevant; you can do the same! On RSS readers/organization, I didn't need a solution, because "personal blogs" post rarely enough that even following ~100 blogs, I see 3~5 updates per week. [0]: https://en.wikiped…
Comment linking /blogs-i-follow.html
on “Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time”Submitted A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes as a story · 3 points
HN discussionUnikraft is really cool, but Linux is not necessarily the blocker. You can boot to PID1 in firecracker in ~6ms, see my experiments: https://blog.davidv.dev/minimizing-linux-boot-times.html
Comment linking /minimizing-linux-boot-times.html
on “Making EC2 boot time faster”Submitted Minimizing Linux Boot Times as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've built a bunch of things: A snapcast client, which can play audio synchronized on multiple rooms https://github.com/DavidVentura/esp-snapcast An stratum-1 NTP _server_ (read: gets its time from GPS), and displays time with unreasonable precision (not necessarily accuracy!) https://github.com/DavidVentura/esp-ntp A few HUB75 signs which display public transport status (the public transport bits are not published…
Comment linking /extending-the-capabilities-of-dumb-devices.html
on “Ask HN: What have you built with ESPHome, ESP8266 or similar hardware”Submitted Spawning VMs for unreasonable workloads (2024) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI wrote down the kernel of the idea quite a while ago here[0], however, the actual version we run nowadays is using UEFI and written in Go (installer) + Python (API that generates the ISO on demand) Fly.io[1] also does this (although they boot the result in a VM, the concepts are the same) [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/docker-based-images-on-baremetal.htm... [1]: https://fly.io/blog/docker-without-docker/
Comment linking /docker-based-images-on-baremetal.html
on “Oxide builds servers as they should be [audio]”Submitted Cursing a process’ vDSO for time hacking (2022) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI build them from docker images: https://blog.davidv.dev/docker-based-images-on-baremetal.htm...
Comment linking /docker-based-images-on-baremetal.html
on “Firecracker MicroVMs”Some years ago I got hit by the retro TV bug and made one for my dad's 50th birthday [0]. It's fairly simple to put a Pi inside a tv and hook it up, but it does feel almost like the real thing [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/revamping-an-old-tv-as-a-gift/
Comment linking /posts/revamping-an-old-tv-as-a-gift/
on “My Retro TVs”It's not the only other option! It's not less yucky, but you can creatively stomp on the vDSO functions which back the time-related functions (gettimeofday, clock_gettime, time); I've written about it at [0] and have a "library" (more like a proof of concept) at [1]. [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/cursing-a-process-vdso-for-tim... [1]: https://github.com/DavidVentura/tpom
Comment linking /posts/cursing-a-process-vdso-for-time-hacking/
on “Quartz: A Deterministic Time Testing Library for Go”Amazing! I love projects that bring some new features to classic hardware; I did something similar for my dad's 50th birthday[0]. [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/revamping-an-old-tv-as-a-gift
Comment linking /posts/revamping-an-old-tv-as-a-gift
on “Bit-banging a BASIC Birthday”
