maurycyz-com

Practical guide on optimizing battery life: understanding non-ideal battery behavior (internal resistance, voltage droop, aging), measuring ultra-low currents, and selecting components to maximize runtime, especially with coin cells.

Astrophotographer Maurycy Z captured NGC 4236, a barred spiral galaxy with uneven arms, using a C9.25 telescope over multiple nights totaling 1.5 hours of stacked exposure. The image also reveals a nearby, uncatalogued galaxy cluster. Due to the galaxy's low surface brightness and limited darkness, data was collected across several nights but was hampered by forgetting the dew shield.

The author tested five search engines and ChatGPT on five technical queries. None produced consistently good results; most returned blogspam, incorrect AI summaries, or irrelevant links. Good results in the top three were only about fifty-fifty, and the author concludes modern search results are truly poor.

A hobbyist salvaged vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) tubes from an old calculator and built a custom clock. The project involved reverse-engineering the tube pinout, designing a multiplexed driver circuit with a MOSFET and microcontroller, and using a 32.768 kHz crystal for accurate timekeeping. The finished clock was mounted in a CNC-milled wooden enclosure.

An AVR64DD32 microcontroller (8-bit, $1, 64 kB flash) was turned into a web server using SLIP over a USB serial adapter and a wired Ethernet-like connection to a Linux machine. Custom minimal TCP/IP and a hardcoded HTTP response allow it to serve a single page, which is proxied over WireGuard to a public VPS for internet access.

The author presents GopherTree, a Gopher client that displays menus as directory trees rather than web-like interfaces. The client hides informational selectors by default and fits within a thousand lines of C code. It includes features like a built-in text viewer, bookmarks, and aims to avoid the distraction of hypertext browsing.

The author has made their website available via the Gopher protocol, which uses simple text-based menus for navigation instead of hyperlinks. They explain Gopher's directory-style format and contrast it with modern web protocols, noting its historical interest and simplicity compared to alternatives like Gemini.

The article explains how TCP's initial congestion window of 10 packets results in approximately 13 kB of data being transferred in the first round trip. This occurs because TCP uses slow start to avoid network congestion, gradually increasing transmission speed. The author suggests web developers should ensure critical content fits within this initial 13 kB for optimal page loading.

The author explains that IPv4 addresses have been exhausted since 2011, leading to multiple users sharing addresses and causing problems like IP blocking. IPv6 with 128-bit addresses was standardized in 1995 but adoption remains low. To encourage IPv6 adoption, the author will disable IPv4 access to their site on the 6th of each month.

The MCUfont is a 5x5 pixel font designed for tiny screens on microcontrollers. It fits within 350 bytes of memory and maintains legibility while allowing constant-width character rendering. The font is based on earlier 5x6 designs and works well on low-resolution displays.