I moved from an apartment into a house in 2020. A large Norway maple threatened to fall on the garage, so we had it felled and I spent a blissful fews months chopping firewood by hand like I used to as a kid. Dissatisfied with the haphazardly stacked wood lying on free palettes scrounged from … Continue reading From Zero to Hand Tool Woodworker in 7 Months →

I wrote recently about completing part one of the NAND to Tetris course. This first part of the course is focused on building up from basic logic gates (NAND) to a working computer architecture that includes a CPU, a ROM unit for storing the program being executed, and a RAM unit that provides the computer’s … Continue reading Emulating the Hack Screen on the Mac →

When I say “building”, I don’t mean physically. I did not buy parts, have them shipped to my house, assemble them into some kind of housing, and install an operating system. I started with simulated circuitry — NAND gates — and assembled them into more complex parts until I had a freaking computer.

I completed From NAND to Tetris: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles, Part I.