Kevin Boone
kevinboone.me · Personal blog · on HN since 2021
Kevin Boone writes about Linux, retrocomputing, privacy, software licensing and electronics, plus explainers on topics like Hamming codes.
What HN saysHN commenters link it for his explanation of the Hamming bound and for his piece on open source liability exemptions.
25HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
55stories submitted
2.6Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2021people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder2 people · 119 points · first shared 2025 · 86 comments on HN
- 2No good deed goes unpunished: can we now be sued over software we give away?2 people · 62 points · first shared 2025 · 50 comments on HN
- 3Why the Fascination with Retrocomputing?2 people · 15 points · first shared 2022 · 4 comments on HN
- 4Why I de-Googled2 people · 12 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Fitting an NVMe disk in a computer with no NVMe support2 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 6MBook – a proposal for a new, simple e-book format based on Markdown2 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 7Battle of the privacy-focused search engines: Kagi vs. DuckDuckGo2 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 82026 will not be the 'Year of Linux on the Desktop' – and I'm glad2 people · 2 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 9The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting1 people · 756 points · first shared 2025 · 445 comments on HN
- 10They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard1 people · 336 points · first shared 2024 · 212 comments on HN
- 11Getting back into C programming for CP/M1 people · 213 points · first shared 2024 · 101 comments on HN
- 12Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux1 people · 208 points · first shared 2024 · 300 comments on HN
- 13Rolling your own minimal embedded Linux for the Raspberry Pi1 people · 161 points · first shared 2021 · 60 comments on HN
- 14They don't make 'em like that any more: the 3.5mm headphone jack socket1 people · 160 points · first shared 2024 · 228 comments on HN
- 15How de-Googled is Lineage OS?1 people · 136 points · first shared 2024 · 116 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
aa-jv · 2026-05-20
You're Australian, didn't grow up on Dick Smith Fun Way kits .. but some German thingy sourced through Dads adventures instead?
Mate .. strewth! Hand in your Vegemite card, ocka!
Disclaimer: I had all the Fun Way books, all the beginner kits on crappy particle boards, the 'advanced' kits with PCB's and things, the soldering iron special bundle with all the books and a couple of kits .. but I still preferred hacking around with my Denshi blocks instead.. ;)
Denshi Blocks, oh boy are they great. Still got mine! It even has a synthesizer in it, ffs ..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denshi_block
Comparison with the spring kits:
https://kevinboone.me/denshi.html
stevekemp · 2024-08-18
I put together a simple CP/M emulator here:
https://github.com/skx/cpmulator/
Alongside that there is a collection of CP/M binaries, including the Aztec C compiler:
https://github.com/skx/cpm-dist/
So you can easily have a stab at compiling code. I added a simple file-manager, in C, along with other sources, to give a useful demo. (Of course I spend more time writing code in Z80 assembler, or Turbo Pascal, rather than C).
The author has a followup post here for thos interested:
* Getting back into C programming for CP/M -- part 2 * https://kevinboone.me/cpm-c2.html
spiderfarmer · 2025-05-24
Open Source is exempt, provided you don’t make a profit: https://kevinboone.me/open_source_liability.html
akhayam · 2023-05-14
Indeed, Hamming and Golay codes are an absolute thing of beauty. For folks that wanna read more about Hamming Bound, Kevin Boone does a good job in starting from the basics and explaining the intuition behind the proof:
https://kevinboone.me/hamming_bound.html?i=1