Hello there

2020-06-01

As stated in the title, hello there. You have (somehow) found this website of mine. I think a lot (at least that's what other people say about me) and I have for a while now wanted a place to put these thoughts. I wanted something that I could point friends to, if they wanted to read something.

About me

1970-01-01

Whoami

I am currently Electronics Engineer at Advantics and live in the Geneva Area. I currently work on the embedded linux stack for the Advantics charge controllers as well as writing Firmware for the various power conversion systems.

In the past I have:

tutored many students on electronics and detector related systems
written test orchestration software during my time as Technical student at CERN while working on characterizing part of a radiation hard read out ASIC.
Architected a configuration management and application system for configuring ASICS within the HGCAL detector
worked on FPGA based measurement systems and try to spend a lot of time thinking about the eventual user of the software.

I seek to design systems that are understandable, discoverable to the user and help them instead of being in their way. I also worked as a tutor for second semester students the course "Computergestuetzte Datenauswertung" and hope to get more into teaching as this has been very rewarding for me in the past.

I am keenly interested in a few things

Aircraft
Computers
(Formal)Languages

I strive to learn about stuff and would guess that I can be fascinated by any topic complex enough (which let's be honest is essentially every topic when done well). For this reason I generally don't have much free time on my hands that will not immediately be committed to one project or the other (which I again have a faaaaar to long list of).

What I do

Fly and build model aircraft
Tinker around with software systems of all type
I also like designing logic circuits using verilog/VHDL.
I am quite interested in high performance computing and electronics (which complement everything else quite well).
I am also doing more and more work towads being able to render graphics using rust and wgpu.
I am looking to eventually be able to visualize all kind of geometric algorithms using the stuff I have learned there.

I'm a generaly very curious person. I realy enjoy discovering and building things, and as most of it can be done using a computer, I have adopted a pretty minimalist lifestyle lately and am quite enjoying it.

I really think that we need to change our habbits as humans to consume less and try to be happier instead while providing the essentials to as many people as possible If you like what you read, or have some other oppinions, please let me know by writing to me.

As the internet is seemingly getting worse, you can find a list of interesting things that I have found on my blog.

Hope you find the things here useful.

Cool places on the web

1970-01-01

Here are cool places and resources on the web that I have used throughout some time now. adapted by me. Here are links (or actual propper book citations) where you can find the Ideas from where I got them from. Please remember though I have allways written my own texts where not quoted.

I have also produced some things that I have posted on wikimedia but this still needs some work.

The Idea with the NASCAR accelerator is taken from the XKCD-What-if No-Rules NASCAR
RFCs and all related internet documents may be fetched from the RFC-INDEX
The Datatracker for the RFCs is a nice way to roam arount RFCs
sourcehutis a very minimal git hosting site that is built by drew-de-walt who also built sway.
I read the Verge from time to time.
DuckduckGo has a cool 'text only' search engine interface for all the text based people out there (it's still a search engine)
Freifunk is a group of people that are trying to build WiFi based, free mesh networks mostly in the german speaking area of Europe

Blogs and other neat places on the web

Steffen Nurpmeso built s-nail and links to other quite interesting sites
Falstad has really cool numerical simulations of all kind of math and physics stuff (uses a lot of javascript as a result). Definitely worth a look.
mafghani has some really interesting experiments on molecular interactions with van der Waals and other forces
sp-codes is a german it enthusiast interested in providing free and open source alternatives to common internet services (chat, image sharing ...).
zpag.net is a french site that calls itself the 'Science Mansion' and really tries to live up to the name It seems to be run by a retired French person. under the electronics tab it has a real wealth of rather old but still quite good stuff.
icyfox is a nice, kinda similar tech blog to mine
airlied is a blog by someone deep inside the linux graphics rendering infrastructure
mairacanal is also someone with deep knowledge about the linux graphycs system.
Baldur Bjarnason Blog of an Icelandic web dev that I have enjoyed reading from.
basecamp A blog/book containing oppinions on software development and product design.
The Rust Performance Book A Book on rust performance measurement and optimisation

Tools I use

I have used the gentoo operating system and am quite happy with it.
I run the sway window manager on my machine
My text editor has been (and most likely will continue to be) neovim
My shell is currently the nushell. It's quite an interesting concept.
I really like the retro futuristic look of the clockworkpi computers
The people over at Pine also build pretty cool open source hardware
I program in python and rust.
btop is used to monitor system resources
I store my stuff on a nextcloud.
Inkscape is used to draw essentially all of the different svg/pdf diagrams.
Texts in printed form (or more often PDFs) are prepared using the LaTeX typesetting system.
This site was generated with the zola static site generator.
I use KiCAD to draw the schematics and layout any boards I build.
I use ngspice to simulate these circuits before/while I design them and definitively before I draw them.
Magic can be used to generate ASIC layouts
Yosys is a good entry point into the world of open source FPGA tooling
1bitsquared builds really cool open source hacking hardware and software.
verilator Is a tool for turning synchronous verilog designs into executable C++ Code
blender Tool for creating 3D renders, models and generally computer graphics outputs

Libraries

lib.rs is a nice place to find out stuff about libraries for the rust programming language
click is a cool library for python command line interfaces
numpy may not be ommitted in any case when building python proects
matplotlib is indespensible when creating graphs and data visualizations of any kind.
libopencm3 is a library that is quite useful for programming ARM cortex MCUs.

Rust references that I have read and found useful

rust foundation web site

Making WebAssembly better for Rust & for all languages An article on how web-assembly code can interact with the javascript runtime.
Javascript to rust and back again a wasm bindgen tale Article on how the wasm bindgen magic works
Hello wasm-pack Concept article by Ashley Williams on how wasm pack works
wasm-bindgen A rust software package that uses Rusts macro system to generate javascript glue code that allows for the javascript code to talk to the program running on the WASM-VM
wasm-pack A rust software package that allows to package the WASM binary produces from rust code with bindgen's javascript wrappers as npm package.
rust-wasm introduction A tutorial that guided me through the steps of setting up and running Connways Game of Life (of all things) in a browser.
wgpu A library that abstracts over various GPU backends to comply with the webGPU standard, allowing to use the GPU to render large portions of the examples on the GPU via the browser (or natively).
WASM An instruction set for a low overhead virtual machine that can run in the browser at close to native speeds.

Tutorials/introductions to check out

This webgpu tutorial in rust is where I learned stuff about WGPU
An exposition of some nvim config for rust
An introduction to using Verilator to simulate a logic device.

Phil's lab
Curious Mark
ThinkFlight
Drachinifel Is a Youtube channel that is an excellent source on naval history from the age of sail to including WWII.
RCTestflight

Papers I have read/skimmed

A 4-GHz 130-nm Address Generation Unit With 32-bit Sparse-Tree Adder Core
Cellular Automata as Simple Self-Organizing Systems A paper by S. Wolfram looking at cellular automata and the complex behaviour they exibit.

Random useful pages

An introduction to Pipewire It is a bit nicer than combing through the API docs
Another Pipewire intro This time from the very knowledgable people over at bootlin
A page with info on porting stuff to ZYNQ 7000 SoCs Has some quite useful info including ARM ABI.
Hashlife: An Algorithm to significantly speed up the computation of rule/grid based cellular automaton using pattern matching.

Contact me

1970-01-01

E-Mail

The best chance of getting my attention is probably writing me an email here nabla.becker@mailbox.org

Mastodon

I sometimes (rather infrequently) use mastodon. You can find me here

other options

Lets become friends and maybe you'll get infos to some more 'instant' communication methods

PGP key

1970-01-01

PGP Key

Fingerprint:

1AB7 A14E AA70 1386 4143 F633 74BF DC2A CF10 FB86

Public Key:

← Newer posts

Hello there

About me

Whoami

What I do

Cool places on the web

Blogs and other neat places on the web

Tools I use

Libraries

Rust references that I have read and found useful

WASM related

Tutorials/introductions to check out

Stuff on 'social medias' of the internet

Papers I have read/skimmed

Random useful pages

Contact me

E-Mail

Mastodon

other options

PGP key

PGP Key

Fingerprint:

Public Key: