This is a relatively short post 🤠, but I just want to write that I had a lot of fun during the hackathon at Dräger - this was in fact my first hackathon. We, the interns, formed a little group and decided to port games to the Alcotest A7000 devices, which are used by the police to measure the alcohol levels of pulled over car drivers. We first explored how the device works, especially how to program animations and shapes (since there are no graphics libraries, everything is handeled by frame buffers) as well as how to handle IO. Once that was done, we started working on an implementation of pong, a menu and I decided to port my old Intel 8080 emulator to the A7000. The reason I decided to port it is that both my emulator and the A7000 use frame buffers, so all I had to do was to take the existing code, remove the GTK frontend and rewrite some functions so that they could work on the microprocessor (a STM32l4). ...

A while ago I worked on a very interesting project - reading the book Ray Tracing in One Weekend I wrote a Ray Tracer 🖼️ in Golang 🐹. Motivation I’ve been meaning to tinker with graphics for quite a while and was motivated by a video programming a raytracing algorithm on a TI-84. Back in my school days I used to love to tinker with the TI-84 and also did some very elementary programming on it myself: ...

Introduction This article is about a strange fascination of mine - when you travel around the world one of the first problems you encounter are the different shapes of the power outlets 🔌. A question occured to me - do the various designs offer any advantage over others? Can we ask the question, which countries have the best plugs and power socket designs? Why do countries have various power outlets and why is so hard to standardise them ⚡? This article is my perspective on this matter and our journey starts in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧. ...

Introduction Turing Complete is a videogame that allows you to build your very own computer completely from scratch and then program it! It’s essentially the book Code by Charles Petzold but in a game format - it is one of those games I did not expect it to be as fun as it turned out to be. Turing Complete is in my opinion the best way to learn about the basics of computer processors and is a great preparation for emulation projects (or at least it helped me understand things better) - it is one of those games that I’ve played through twice (and was significantly faster the second time around) ...

Background I’ve always pictured traveling a lot through Germany during my studies. While I spent almost the entire first semester in my dormitory, the end of the second semester marked the first time I saw parts of Germany beyond Hamburg (apart from a conference in Berlin). Due to the Covid pandemic, the German government increased domestic spending and aimed to lower living costs, partly by reducing transportation expenses. The result: For June, July, and August 2022, it was possible to purchase tickets for 9€, granting access to all local transportation (including buses, ferries, and U-Bahn) and regional trains. Students at the University of Hamburg, who already had free access to local transportation in Hamburg, saw their tickets become valid nationwide. I had to seize this amazing opportunity to explore the country because there is nothing like exploring Germany by train. In May 2023, the German government introduced a successor to the 9€ ticket, the 49€ ticket or Deutschlandticket, which we students also received. ...

In this short blog essay I will present my perspective on Modern Monetary Theory (further referred to as MMT) - a new clever macroeconomic theory and why I belive it to be equivalent to raising taxes. What is MMT? Modern Monetary Theory is a macroeconomic theory that asserts that countries with monetary sovereignity (countries with full control over their currency and whose currency is held and desired by other central banks and which does not hold large foreign currency debts) like the US, Canada, UK, Japan and China, but not the EU (as member states with fiscal sovereignity do not have monetary sovereignity) and not countries like Pakistan, Chile or Argentina (whose currencies are not generally sought after by other central banks and their own citizens), are not constrained by tax revenues when it comes to government spending. ...

Motivation The idea to create my own website and blog sparked after watching Network Chuck’s video on why you might need a personal website: Sure, the most obvious benefit is learning how to make and manage a website. But the more significant perk? Complete control over your posts, presentation, and no reliance on algorithms. ...