Graham Sutherland / Polynomial

he\him

heavily ADHD.

into electronics, windows internals, cryptography, security, compute hardware, physics, colourimetry, lasers, stage lighting, D&B, DJing, demoscene, lepidoptera, socialism.

I am mothman. LÄMP 💡

nullsector/laser team @ EMF Camp

lasers & lighting orga @ NOVA Demoparty

I sell funny warning stickers at Unsafe Warnings: https://unsafewarnings.etsy.com

all posts encrypted with ROT256-ECB.

header photo by James (npub17qh…xe2r)

Web: https://poly.nomial.co.uk
Blog: https://blog.poly.nomial.co.uk/
Warning Stickers ⚠: https://unsafewarnings.etsy.com
Streaming: https://twitch.tv/gsuberland

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Last Notes

2026-05-03 21:19:14 UTC

ASIC knowers: I know that SRAM is more expensive per bit compared to DRAM because each cell requires a whole flip-flop and therefore consumes more die area. but when I think through the total number of transistors (and die area) required for an 8Gbit SRAM, it seems like it should be roughly comparable ta a typical dual core ARM SoC that costs 2-3 orders of magnitude less. is this purely a sales volume issue, or is there a more fundamental manufacturing constraint that makes them so expensive?

2026-04-16 01:55:17 UTC

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I had to buy an under-desk PC mounting bracket to attach it. honestly it's done quite well, but I think something more compact and modern would be nice.

2026-04-16 01:52:17 UTC

upgrading my audio setup with a matched pair of Yamaha HS8 monitors and a refurbished Scarlett 16i16.
will see how the speakers sound. they're brand new so I can return them if I hate them, but I scored them for almost 40% off the usual sticker price which probably outclasses the competition.
these are replacing Wharfdale Diamond 9.1s, which were ok but not amazing, and an old Onkyo receiver which is also fine but very large mounted sideways hanging off my desk.

2026-02-26 16:58:19 UTC

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I'm expecting a bunch of Asian market versions to pop up on LCSC at an eighth the price before too long.

2025-09-05 16:04:51 UTC

yesterday's weird discovery is that every regular sized carrot I have tested is almost exactly 100kΩ end to end with sharp probes stuck in it. a couple of them come out at 100.0k on the dot.
inb4 NIST carrot-based electrical resistance metrology reference

2025-09-04 18:20:46 UTC

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ah, ok, so this is specifically about friction in the process of moving from the legacy X11 compositor to the new Wayland stuff. suddenly this makes a lot more sense. thanks.

2025-09-02 13:09:20 UTC

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the one that always gets me is when you have a company that's facing an existential legal challenge over worker rights or malpractice or something else horrible, and the stock goes *up* because they're in the news and investors view them as being unilaterally profit-focused and unencumbered by morality.

2025-08-29 05:46:18 UTC

No NUT November? but how am I supposed to monitor my UPS?

2025-08-24 03:22:39 UTC

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LTT built a machine for this and they have testing data up on their labs site. the trick is generally to calibrate out servo delay with a camera, then move at a constant velocity and measure the time deltas between key-touch, bottom-out, and incoming message. repeat for mean, median, percentiles.
since the goal is product testing, key scan delays are included in the latency.

2025-08-24 02:50:00 UTC

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thought: poke the key with a servo.

2025-08-20 12:58:45 UTC

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another one I didn't know about: we now have laws against inertia selling. in most cases it's illegal for a company to market a service to you based on a free trial or introductory rate and then automatically charge you for the full price a month later (relying on inertia, i.e. you forgetting to cancel) without active opt-in from you. they also have to make it just as easy to cancel as it was to sign up.

2025-08-20 12:48:29 UTC

new-ish bit of UK law you should be aware of: the DMCC Act 2025.
it prohibits drip pricing, requiring the full price of products and services to be stated upfront, including any fees, taxes, charges, or other payments that the consumer will necessarily incur if the consumer purchases the product. if the amount cannot be calculated at the time of sale, full information must be provided on how that pricing will be calculated, and it cannot be hidden away in T&Cs. this includes freight & delivery.

2025-08-14 13:21:29 UTC

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and while you're at it, make sure you choose a backup solution that gives them privacy by separating access to their data from yours.
something like Backblaze's local encryption password feature, for example.

2025-08-09 03:11:41 UTC

asymmetric coplanar differential striplines are weird

2025-08-04 02:22:14 UTC

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citric is just as effective without the hazards, and cheaper

2025-08-04 02:16:57 UTC

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I have two related ones and they're about cleaning.
first: most kitchen and bathroom cleaning products are just citric acid with perfumes and dyes added. that includes coffee machine cleaner. it's a phenomenal descaler and it's safe to use on metal, ceramic, plastics, glass, rubber, basically anything. buy a kilo of it as powder, super cheap. it'll get brass and copper looking brand new in minutes.

2025-08-01 16:05:13 UTC

listening to Mac Glocky's "what if Alien Ant Farm wrote Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen" again.
every time I listen to it I am awed by how flawless it is. not just in production quality, but also in how well he captures the artists' idiosyncracies. immense talent.
https://youtu.be/v6hWq0UT3yo

2025-08-01 15:11:10 UTC

blue cheese (the blue is Cherenkov radiation)

2025-07-25 20:33:41 UTC

so how long do we reckon it'll be until we see a story about a VPN company having quietly thrown a bunch of money into lobbying for the online safety act, knowing full well that it'll net them thousands of customers?

2025-07-23 13:42:06 UTC

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not specific to systemd, more linux's general thing in recent years of having everyone's pet project suddenly change shit out from under you and break things in random ways, and also their inability to name things sensibly going back to the 90s.

2025-07-22 22:36:37 UTC

are you using the new command? it's in unetconfd. it's literally on sysptkm. it's configurable via xchwnt. it's literally under /usr/share/pnetdx2. you can probably grep for the qvjconf. you can update it via bungpkg. update via bungpkg. fetch it with bungpkg. you can bungpkg it. bungpkg has it for you. bungpkg has it for you.

2025-07-18 01:34:39 UTC

MSP430 noscope

2025-03-13 04:01:14 UTC

rate my buck converter
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/114/153/101/520/184/433/original/19b7e2f4b678a016.png
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/114/153/115/682/984/542/original/e2566d462cc78de7.png

2025-03-04 11:47:56 UTC

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yeah I feel like people get the wrong idea a lot of the time when I say "I want a tool not a toy" but it is in exactly this sense
so many things are toys these days

2025-01-15 17:25:02 UTC

it took just 15 days for one of my silly 2025 infosec predictions to come true:
http://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/

2024-12-22 10:11:04 UTC

I think the world needs more ridiculous RF things. AM radio on Ku band. OOK doorbell on a mmWave carrier.

2024-11-23 04:28:05 UTC

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wouldn't need Linux at all. pretty simple firmware on a microprocessor.

2024-09-05 04:17:13 UTC

looking at people's schematics on EE SE is just pain, why are so many of them completely unreadable spaghetti. have some pride in your work!