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Latest Hardware

Would You Pay for RISC-V? Doing the Arithmetic in Public

 · 14 min read

The worst benchmark number I ever published was an Orange Pi RV2 taking 650.60 seconds on a Rust compile that an RK3588 finishes in 52.55. I am now asking whether you would pay a monthly fee to rent RISC-V hardware from me. This is the arithmetic in public: what the SpacemiT K3 actually changed, why the one RISC-V box you can rent today implements a vector draft that was never ratified, what two nodes in a 1U at a Miami colo would really cost per month, and the strongest argument against the whole idea, which is a finding from my own build farm.
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Operating Systems A Mac, Two Disk Images, and an SSH Prompt: OpenBSD 7.9 on the Raspberry Pi 4B  · 13 min read Operating Systems Two Addresses, One Page: Finding the Firmware Bug Behind NetBSD Corruption on the Milk-V Mars  · 16 min read Philosophy The Same Bad Luck, Quietly: Why a Fleet of Cheap Boards Feels Flakier Than One Old Xeon  · 15 min read Hardware Reviews FreeBSD on a 2011 MacBook Pro: Fifteen Years of Progress, and Per Core It's a Tie  · 18 min read

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Programming Languages, Software Architecture

The Config Language That Was Already There: A Ballistics REPL Written in Lattice

 · 18 min read

Every serious calculator eventually grows a configuration language — YAML, TOML, a bespoke parser — and then grows the loop of frustration that comes with it. This is what happened when I refused to write that layer, and instead made an existing programming language do the job: a stateful ballistics laboratory written entirely in Lattice, driving a Rust solver over a process boundary, with no native extension and no C ABI. A case study in what you get when the scripting language and the config language are the same language.
Software

The Bullet Doesn't Go Where You Point It

 · 8 min read

A bullet fired at a target a thousand yards away does not travel in the direction you aimed it. It falls thirty feet, drifts a foot sideways from its own spin, and gets nudged by the rotation of the Earth. This is a piece about the Rust engine I wrote to predict all of that — how you test physics when you have no oracle, why the hard bugs were never in the equations, and the one problem worth charging for: solving ballistics backwards.
Hardware Reviews

FriendlyElec NanoPC-T6N Review: The Fastest Board on My Bench, and the Benchmark That Outgrew Itself

 · 28 min read

Hands-on review of the FriendlyElec NanoPC-T6N, a Rockchip RK3588 SBC with 16 GB RAM, dual 2.5GbE, and a 6 TOPS NPU running Debian 13 on FriendlyELEC's BSP. It posts the fastest ARM compile time on my bench (52.55s), pushes 2.19 GB/s of AES-128-GCM, and never throttles - peaking at 56.4C under sustained eight-core load. Also the story of why my standard benchmark stopped being comparable to its own history, and what the microSD it shipped booting from is costing it.
Operating Systems

Four Partitions and a Borrowed Bootloader: NetBSD on the Milk-V Mars

 · 17 min read

NetBSD now runs on my Milk-V Mars: 28 GB root filesystem, gigabit Ethernet at 0.0% packet loss, SSH like any other machine on the shelf. It is the only documented NetBSD Mars I'm aware of, and getting there took a weekend of archaeology: a vendor bootloader whose advertised boot logic is dead code, a QEMU time machine built from Debian's snapshot archive, an SD card doubling as a flight recorder, a serial console that demolished every blind theory in ten minutes, a kernel panic caught with full backtrace, and a filesystem-corruption incident I caused myself by "fixing" a safety mechanism I hadn't understood. The final fix for the whole device-tree saga is one line in a U-Boot defconfig. The whole build is scripted and reproducible; a flashable image is next.
Hardware Reviews

Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro Review: A 10-Gigabit Router Board I Put to Work as a Bastion

 · 21 min read

Hands-on review of the Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro, a MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) router board with quad Cortex-A73, dual 10GbE, and 8GB RAM running OpenWRT. Benchmarked for what a router actually does - CoreMark 9533/37952, ~1 GB/s hardware AES, GbE line-rate networking, 50C under load - and deployed as a real SSH bastion and nginx reverse proxy. A different animal from a compute SBC, reviewed as one.
Infrastructure

Nothing Was Using the Cores: Three Idle Arm64 Boards, One HA k3s Cluster, and a BSD Build Farm

 · 18 min read

I had three small Arm64 boards on a shelf, each doing one modest thing and idling the rest of the time — an Orange Pi 5 Max running an occasional local LLM, two Raspberry Pi–class machines mostly serving a web page. Between them they had sixteen cores, forty gigabytes of RAM, and four terabytes of NVMe, and almost none of it was doing anything at any given moment. This is the story of resisting the urge to buy two more boards into a memory shortage, and instead turning that idle majority into a real three-node HA k3s cluster with embedded etcd, then teaching it to do the job the boxes had quietly been built for all along — compiling native FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD Arm64 binaries — and the small pile of gotchas that stood between "three SBCs" and "a build farm," from a big.LITTLE crash loop to golden images that turned out to be live disks. And then everything else the reclaimed capacity paid for.

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Retro Computing AI & Inference Hardware Projects Philosophy Economics Systems Programming

Reading Series

8+ posts Jevons Paradox & AI Economics What happens when cognitive output gets cheaper. Demand expansion, the biological ceiling, and the AI vampire. 3 parts Heidegger & Technology Enframing, standing reserve, and what happens when AI treats specifications as raw material for code generation. 8+ posts Z80 RetroShield Running a real Z80 on modern hardware. CP/M, Forth, Zork, custom PCBs, and a dual-processor design. 3 parts Sampo CPU & Compilers A custom RISC CPU from ISA design through FPGA implementation to an LLVM backend. 6 posts Tesla P40 Home Lab Four eBay GPUs, 96GB of VRAM, and every workload we can throw at them. LLMs, TTS, video generation. 3 parts The Lattice Language A programming language where mutability is a phase transition. Novel type system, bytecode VM, 100 opcodes.
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Written by Alex Jokela Software engineer by trade, tinkerer by nature, single-board computer hoarder by choice. More about me →