I got it in my head that the factory BIOS on my venerable Lenovo X201 was too old, so I decided to replace it with a Coreboot BIOS. [1] Since I was going to all the trouble to hook my finicky Pomona clip to my Raspberry Pi, I also decided …
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Function Calls Considered Expensive
When I wrote both of my blog posts on increasing performance through code profiling, I linked to a blog post that measured function call overhead from Python 3.5 to 3.8. That post was enlightening, but it was written in 2020 and significant effort has gone into improving CPython …
read moreLiving With Calyx Internet: 60(ish) Days In
My Little Profiler Part 2: Profile Harder
A year or so ago I optimized a library I wrote - I made it faster but couldn't make a dent in memory-efficiency. A week or so back I got some free time on my hands and decided to try squeezing some more blood out of that stone while also working …
read moreXCP-NG On An EliteDesk 805 G8 Mini
read morePrologue: Computers Were A Mistake
I guess it was only a matter of time until a Youtuber showed me something I wanted to buy.
I'd been thinking about building a small homelab since late last year with the goal of having a local Git repository for my open-source code, and …
Four Cores Are Better Than One
Occasionally my mind regains the ability to recall something from more than two weeks in the past, the latest item being a blog post I read on the relative power of shell parallelization. Recently I found myself dreading an enormously parallelizable task and decided in lieu of spending 45 seconds …
read moreFlashing Heads On A Lenovo X220
read morePreamble
As a member of the infosec dork tribe of the computer yeller nation I have a travel laptop I use for attending conferences, but its intermittent wifi almost torpedoed my presentation at BSides last year so this year I decided a change was in order; luckily being a computer …
Needing Vital Memory Expeditiously For A Raspberry Pi
read morePrologue
This statement shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who's handled them for an extended period of time, but SD cards are one of the worst storage options to run a computer from - putting the godawful latency and throughput of your average card aside, the low-quality flash is almost …
My Little Profiler: Flamegraph is Magic
Until recently, profilers were a tool I'd heard people gushing over but never gotten around to trying myself. I put ox_profile on my list of neat tools to try out when I heard of it at PyCon in 2019 and replaced it with Scalene when I heard of that at …
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