Top all-time · #19543
Zachary Vance
Personal blog · blog.za3k.comprogramminghardware
Zachary Vance writes blog of zachary "za3k" vance, a personal blog at blog.za3k.com about programming and hardware. Since 2022, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Zachary Vance's blog covers small, low-power hardware projects such as the Forth Deck mini portable Forth computer, and paper-based data archival. Comments cite or discuss these posts without judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
TL;DR: Thank you for confirming some mismatch in display hardware and project goals > also, evaluating things 60 times a second is not a good fit for low-power systems of any kind. Agreed. As to a terminal-mode UXN, you pointed out: > as for uxn, uxn is the first attempt at frugal "write once, run anywhere" that's good enough to criticize. everyone should read devine's talk about its aspirations I think it's the pri…
Comment linking /zorchpad-update-cardboard-mockup-mk1/
on “The Forth Deck mini: a portable Forth computer with a discrete CPU”Submitted Reverse Vibe Coding as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTL;DR: I love this idea and have two questions: 1. For early iterations / similar projects, could all-metal screw terminals[1] accept power internally? 2. Would supporting UXN/Varvara[2] be an option? More on these questions below after initial comments. ## Initial Comments > if you aren't worried about going batteryless, or about mass production, you could literally buy an alphasmart neo and wire its keyboard and d…
Comment linking /zorchpad-update-cardboard-mockup-mk1/
on “The Forth Deck mini: a portable Forth computer with a discrete CPU”i've been wanting that for years myself, and with the advent of sharp's memory-in-pixel lcd displays and ambiq's subthreshold-logic arm microcontrollers, it's become possible to make it work under a milliwatt, which means it can run purely on solar power without batteries, using parallel nand flash for mass storage at a low duty cycle. i haven't progressed beyond the earliest prototyping stage myself; my design note…
Comment linking /tag/zorchpad/
on “The Forth Deck mini: a portable Forth computer with a discrete CPU”Looked into using paper as an archival for small amounts of data as a long-term backup of very important data, and found this[1], which would allow encoding ~200kB of data per A4 page. Should be applicable for avian IP as well. [1]: https://blog.za3k.com/paper-archival/
Comment linking /paper-archival/
on “IP over Avian Carriers RFC 1149 event (2001)”