Austin's Nerdy Things

Welcome to Austin's Nerdy Things, where we send punctuation to a frontier AI model 649 times and take notes on what crawls out. The night of July 27th, a weird Claude behavior was making the rounds on X. A thread from @merlindru (187K views) flagged a str

This project exists because I bought 30 sticks of 16GB DDR4-3200 RDIMM for an EPYC build in early April: an r/homelabsales find at $80 a stick, which was a fair price that day. The problem is that "that day" turned out to be the exact top of the market. B

Welcome to Austin's Nerdy Things, where we spend years chasing nanoseconds that nobody asked us to chase. Five years ago, I started this blog by building a microsecond-accurate NTP server with a Raspberry Pi and PPS GPS. Then I went simpler - a $12 USB GP

I've been messing around with local LLMs on my 3090 for a while now - I have a growing collection of Qwen models on D:LLM that I probably should be embarrassed about. A few weeks ago I stumbled across David Noel Ng's LLM Neuroanatomy blog posts, where he

I've been building SkySpottr, an AR app overlaying aircraft information on your phone's screen, using your device's location, orientation, and incoming aircraft data (ADS-B) to predict where planes should appear on screen, then uses a YOLO model to lock o

I've written before about building microsecond-accurate NTP servers with Raspberry Pi and GPS PPS, and more recently about revisiting the setup in 2025. Both posts focused on the hardware setup and basic configuration to achieve sub-microsecond time synch

I've been meaning to type this post up for a couple months, but with a 7 month old and a 29 month old at home, a new job, and a half-renovated basement, it took a bit of a back seat. First question you may have: What is ZFS? ZFS stands for 'zettabyte file

For around $100, you can have a Stratum 1 NTP PPS GPS system providing microsecond time to all of your computers & equipment.

Introduction Today's post will take us in a slightly different direction than the last few. Today's post will be about hooking up some Python code to the X-Plane flight simulator to enable development of an autopilot using PID (proportional-integral-deriv

Introduction - what is SDR? SDR stands for software defined radio. It is a term used to describe devices that can receive radio frequency signals over a wide range of frequencies. These devices most commonly interface with USB drives of computers / Raspbe