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thomasjb

768 karma · joined November 16, 2022

thomasballantine.com
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thomasjb··on Extreme 220GHz+Broadband Silicon Capacitor X2SC 0201M 22nF BV11
https://www.digikey.ie/en/products/detail/murata-electronics...

A mere 2.40 euros each!

thomasjb··on Federal Communications Commission scraps limit on broadcast TV ownership
A single 6MHz channel at the top end of UHF band would be enough to implement a universal cellular telephony service - simple calls and texts - at very low cost if phones had modems for it. I think that would be the better use of spectrum.
thomasjb··on Stop Using OpenCode
It's not a great UI, but for messing with ideas in a VM, the free tier is very hard to beat, otherwise I'd be on Claude Code, but still on a VM, because I won't let them near anything I actually care about.
thomasjb··on Grok Build is open source
Easiest to use when sshing into a VM.
thomasjb··on Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU
I was inspired by that post also, got a Qwen Coder 1.5B up to 27tok/s prompt eval and 13tok/s decode on an e5-2650v2 inside a GNOME box
thomasjb··on Bonsai 27B: A 27B-Class model that runs on a phone
I aspire to someday move up to an AM5 system, but for now, the Dell T3610 has to do everything. Might get a second GPU for it though.
thomasjb··on Bonsai 27B: A 27B-Class model that runs on a phone
Or watch and wait as models get denser
thomasjb··on Bonsai 27B: A 27B-Class model that runs on a phone
I've been watching and waiting for this, interested to see how smart it is, as it fits with my interest of getting the smartest possible model running in 10GB of VRAM (RTX3060 that has to drive 2 monitors and run an llm)
thomasjb··on I Built the Only 2026 WWII Jeep
I can see the appeal, not having to deal with much rust or bolts breaking (the 2 things which cause the most trouble for me in working on vehicles). 800 miles across the desert is some way to run it in though!
thomasjb··on AI coding at home without going broke
Opencode's free models have been fine for me, they're what I tried after Gemma 4 8B proved hard to persuade into usefulness (I want to revisit with 12B and messing with harnesses, but I'm happy for now).
thomasjb··on Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
Unfortunately there's no gguf quants of the assistant model yet: https://huggingface.co/models?other=base_model:quantized:goo...
thomasjb··on Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
That's what I want to know too. A smarter E4B that's happy in opencode would be a good selfhosted model for me
thomasjb··on Code Storage by the Pierre Computer Company
There's probably still going to be a box of hard drives in a datacenter somewhere, it does make sense to have a layer to manage the agent interface, rather than letting agents completely loose on all your storage.
thomasjb··on How did the Maya survive?
I second this recommendation!
thomasjb··on NASA's WB-57 crash lands at Houston
One of them was returned to service after 40 years in the boneyard in Arizona, back in 2011, I would expect they'll look at the other airframes there to see if they're suitable sources for a rebuild. Wouldn't be surprised if this is the end of this one though, it was already doing pretty well for a design that first flew in 1949 (the English Electric Canberra design that was then built by Martin)
thomasjb··on Static site search without JavaScript (Perl + FastCGI + SA index)
It's snappy, seems to work well
thomasjb··on Ask HN: Who here is not working on web apps/server code?
Working in silicon design, Verilog and SystemVerilog are the bulk of the work, but a lot of scripting of EDA tools too. I enjoy it, I think it's very different working on something which has to be complete when you're done versus something that can be updated easily.
thomasjb··on Show HN: I designed my own 3D printer motherboard
It's been succeeded by Lemontron: https://lemontron.com/
thomasjb··on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
Possibly. Realistically this is replacing the expensive category of FPGA (Zynqs or similar with strong hardware CPU cores), this means they get all the peripherals they desire in hardware, and they can pick the core variant in order to optimise for their workloads (all the different vector extensions for example). There's an interesting market for that kind of thing, either full FPGA to ASIC replacement, or drop in replacement FPGAs of lower cost (The Rigol MHO98 replaced the Xilinx FPGA of the previous generation with a substitute from Fudan). If you're shipping a lot of hardware, that sort of thing becomes worthwhile.
thomasjb··on Advent of Code 2025
C, because it makes every problem into a memory management problem, which is good for you in an 'eat your vegetables' sort of way. It's also the starting point for a lot of other programming languages and related things like HDLs, which is helpful to me.

I'm plodding my way through the 2015 challenge here: https://git.thomasballantine.com/thomasballantine/Advent_of_... , it's really sharpened me up on a number of points.

thomasjb··on Viagrid – PCB template for rapid PCB prototyping with factory-made vias [video]
Burning off black spray paint for etch resist worked for me. An extra step but easy enough
thomasjb··on The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC
I think its another symptom of the problem of there not being a clear way to get from your smart brainbox which you run a proper operating system on and do heavy computation on to driving lots of motors or similar. There are options, but there's not one that everyone defaults to and you can get good information on.
thomasjb··on Google flags Immich sites as dangerous
What we need is a web made in a similar way to the wicker-bodied cars of yesteryear
thomasjb··on The Campaign for Vertical Television
I wonder what aspect ratio we'll settle on for little corner of our eye viewing on AR gear?
thomasjb··on Python on the Edge: Fast, sandboxed, and powered by WebAssembly
Inline Python where all you have to do is put in <python></python>
thomasjb··on Slow Liquid
I'd encourage you to get his email newsletter as well! He puts out really interesting and thoughtful content in my experience.
thomasjb··on Help us raise $200k to free JavaScript from Oracle
Do everything in serverside cgi programs, at least until WebAssembly disposes of the currently necessary JS wrappers to access the DOM.
thomasjb··on Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio (2024)
Note for anyone trying to receive lower frequency signals (below 10MHz): The supplied coaxial cable is really really lossy at those frequencies, a change of cable ought to make a big difference in what you receive.
thomasjb··on Trigger Crossbar
This is a really beautiful bit of kit, really like the case and the thought given to signing, but the analog side is really impressive too. Would it be viable to use the same hardware as a base for an NTP server?
thomasjb··on Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
Wayne Green [0] is responsible for that. Responsible for some publishing innovation in the electronics world, he started with writing about radioteletypes for hams in the 50s, and moved up to Peterborough after starting 73 magazine

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green

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