More Bioinformatics

Every IT geek is, to some degree, fascinated with the Apollo program which put a human on the moon for the first time.  Naturally, there is also curiosity about the computers on the Apollo moon lander, and the software that ran on them.  The source code that went to the moon is available now, and…

Home automation is coming into the mainstream a with recent offerings from the big tech companies, and I’m interested in it too. I’ve had a number of home automation controllers, most recently an H3 Pro SEL from HomeSeer. I’ve also become quite interested recently in DevOps monitoring, using InfluxDB, and Grafana.  Sensu, Telegraf and Prometheus…

I’ve been reading lots of interesting information about iTunes and IOS, so I thought I would investigate, just what is in an iTunes backup.  Typically, on OS X, you can find your iTunes backup here, under the appropriate OS X user profile: /Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup When you look at the backup, it’s a giant list of…

I’ve bee hacking away trying to set up Crochet-BSD to build boot images for Wandboard.  Wandboard uses Cortex A9 processor, so it’s ARM.  The linux distros for it use U-Boot, so that seemed like a likely place to start for FreeBSD. Looking at the Wandboard Wiki, there is an article on U-Boot which explains how…

Unix version 0 was written in 1963 by Ken Thompson, on a PDP-7.  Recently, the source code code Unix V0 has been discovered, and you can read it here, as pdf scans of printouts.  You can read about the discovery, and the effort to boot Unix V0 on a real PDP-7 here.  The project home…