Top all-time · #8399
Steve Kemp
Personal blog · blog.steve.fihardwareprogramming
Steve Kemp's personal blog at blog.steve.fi covers hardware and programming. Since 2016, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 86 times, most often “A Plea for Retrocomputing Books”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-01-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for posts about the author's own projects: a tiny BASIC interpreter written in Go and for Arduino, and a Go linter that checks functions are in alphabetical order.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- A Plea for Retrocomputing Books2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-07
- /so_i_wrote_a_basic_basic.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-20
What Hacker News says?
A lot of people started programming thanks to the ZX Spectrum, and I'm one of them too: https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html It was easily the most popular home computer in the UK at that time, though I imagine a large number of people started with the BBC - via the school integration. I still have my manuals, and recently paid for a print of the keyboard to hang on my wall. (I almost bought a dead 4…
Comment linking /how_i_started_programming.html
on “Sir Clive Sinclair has died”Submitted If your code accepts URIs as input, filter out “file://” as a story · 370 points
HN discussionMy blog is here https://blog.steve.fi/ and you should read if you like free software, and real life. I used to document projects, these days I talk about baking bread, open-source work, and the fun of raising a bilingual child. It's a little random, it's not got a narrow focus. I suspect that means it is harder to be involved with, but the blogs I follow? They have real life, not just one theme. I like those best.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Having fun with CP/M on a Z80 single-board computer as a story · 79 points
HN discussionFor the buttons I first of all wired a button to an ESP8266 device, made it connect to wifi and publish to MQTT and handled it that way. But when it came to time to setup a lot more of them I realized that would get expensive quickly. SO I cheated. I bought a bunch of 433Mhz-based radio-buttons: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/OWSOO-433MHz-Wireless-SOS-Bu... Then I hooked up an SDR receiver to my PC, and handle it t…
Comment linking /decoding_433mhz_transmissions_with_software_defined_radio.html
on “Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?”Submitted Porting a game from CP/M to the ZX Spectrum 48k as a story · 56 points
HN discussionThe Z80 I enjoy because of nostalgia, largely. I started with a Z80-based system: https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html The instruction set is simple, and clean. The fact that you don't need much supporting circuitry to drive it is a nice bonus, but mostly I remember coding the thing when I was 12 or so, and now I know what I'm doing for real :)
Comment linking /how_i_started_programming.html
on “ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop”Submitted How I started programming as a story · 51 points
HN discussionI was too scared to run randomly generated perl-code. But I did have some fun fuzzing awk/gawk a while back. https://blog.steve.fi/if_line_noise_is_a_program__all_fuzzer...
Comment linking /if_line_noise_is_a_program__all_fuzzers_are_developers.html
on “93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs”Submitted Caring for our toddler, Finnish-style as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI just have a simple header for each day: # 09/05/2020 Today I mostly ate cake ## Discoveries ## Meetings ## Projects - Worked on project 1 - Fixed issue <link> - TODO: Bugfix #1234 ## Misc So a fixed set of headers for each day "Projects", "Meetings", "Discoveries", "Misc", and free-form text. Sometimes I copy/paste commands and output. Searching is pretty much just grep. More detail here https://blog.steve.fi/keep…
Comment linking /keeping_a_simple_markdown_work_log__via_emacs.html
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?”Submitted A Plea for Retrocomputing Books as a story · 7 points
HN discussionFuzzing is fun, and still there are easy-to-discover issues lurking in even widely used tools. For example I setup a site where I require users to upload an SSH key (for access to a git repository), and figured I'd do what github, etc, do in the display - show the fingerprint. Given an SSH key you can get a fingerprint like so: deagol ~ $ ssh-keygen -l -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa 2048 4d:19:f2:de:ba:f6:06:31:98:af:9e:2a:di:ce:…
Comment linking /so_about_that_idea_of_using_ssh_keygen_on_untrusted_input_.html
on “Pulling JPEGs out of thin air (2014)”Submitted A plea for [Z80/Spectrum] books as a story · 4 points
HN discussion(g)awk was also fun to fuzz, recently: https://blog.steve.fi/if_line_noise_is_a_program__all_fuzzer... Though sadly still unfixed: https://bugs.debian.org/816277
Comment linking /if_line_noise_is_a_program__all_fuzzers_are_developers.html
on “The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]”Submitted Falsehoods I used to believe about shoes as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI got started programming doing similar things; hacking copy-protection code on games on my 48k spectrum, so that I could go on to patch the games for infinite lives: https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html Later I started doing similar things on shareware and trial-locked applications for the PC, via sites such as +fravia's reverse-engineering site. These days people put out "crackmes" which are fun ch…
Comment linking /how_i_started_programming.html
on “Introduction to reverse engineering and assembly”Submitted Show HN: Writing a simple Tcl interpreter in Golang as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you use `pass` I wrote a little plugin to export the values as environmental variables in a simple and consistent fashion: https://blog.steve.fi/password_store_plugin__env.html
Comment linking /password_store_plugin__env.html
on “How to handle secrets on the command line”Submitted Writing an Assembler as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've written about this before in more detail: https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html But the reason I started coding in BASIC was because when we received a ZX Spectrum for Christmas one year the cassette player was broken - no preloaded games for us. I was always more interested in programming, and hacking games for infinite lives than actually playing games!
Comment linking /how_i_started_programming.html
on “Pimp My BBC Micro”Submitted Keeping a simple markdown work-log with emacs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYes I performed an i386 -> amd64 migration, of a Debian system, back in 2012: https://blog.steve.fi/today_i_migrated_from_32_bit_to_64_bit... It wasn't hugely difficult, but it required a bit of attention to details and I think some forced-replacements of packages.
Comment linking /today_i_migrated_from_32_bit_to_64_bit__in_place.html
on “Upgrading from Debian Jessie to Bullseye after nearly 30 years”Submitted So I accidentally wrote a linux security module as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSame here: https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html I don't have a physical machine any more, but I have a framed print of the keyboard hanging on the wall behind me, and I've got a single-board Z80-based system running CP/M 2.x on the shelf to my side. Even now I still go back and play "Chaos" under emulation every month or two. I'm looking forward to introducing our child, currently five, to some of th…
Comment linking /how_i_started_programming.html
on “Celebrating 40 years of ZX Spectrum”Submitted Trivial Benchmarks of Toy Languages as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI use an overnight no-knead inspired approach as documented here: https://blog.steve.fi/this_is_mostly_how_i_make_bread.html There's only one bowl to clean afterward, and so I find it pretty simple. The pictures in that post don't really do it justice, but I've never had an inedible result, even if sometimes it doesn't look great.
Comment linking /this_is_mostly_how_i_make_bread.html
on “Baking a Better Loaf of Bread”Submitted I won't write another email client as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is an older post of mine, which has a video and images to show you what things look like at various steps https://blog.steve.fi/this_is_mostly_how_i_make_bread.html
Comment linking /this_is_mostly_how_i_make_bread.html
on “People are planting more vegetable gardens”Submitted Serverless deployment via docker as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
