Home on Sven's blog

"Porting" Coreboot to the Piesia N-Box T2

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I got my hands on a couple of Piesia N-Box T2 mini-PC’s from a scrap pile.

They’re pretty cool little passively-cooled PC’s equipped with an Intel J1900 quad core processor (Bay Trail platform) running at 1.9 GHz, one slot of DDR3L memory, four gigabit ethernet ports and two mini-PCIe slots. One of the mini-PCIe slots is SATA-only, meant for the SSD, and the other one is PCIe-only with the SIM slot routed to it for a cellular modem. Pictures of the motherboard PCB are at the bottom of the article.

Mythos Engine Update 19-06, and on writing tools

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 22:16:02 +0300

Tilemaps

Mythos Engine is almost untouched since the last post. I did implement tilemap rendering on 14th of June, so there’s at least something ;).

The tilemap geometry is generated in the geometry shader, since it seemed nicer that way. Basically, I dump a bunch of unsigned integers onto the GPU that denote the tile ID (starting from top-left corner) which the GPU turns into properly placed and textured quads.

Mythos Engine Update 12-06

Sat, 12 Jun 2021 20:06:24 +0300

Decided to start writing up some of my work on my game engine. I don’t have a lot of media from my previous game engine projects, so I’ll give this a shot.

Since this is the first post in the Mythos series, then I’ll give a bit of background. It’s going to be a JRPG-ish 2D tilemap engine. Haven’t got a precise plan for what to do with the engine, so mostly just implementing things I find fun at the moment. First check-in was May 23th where it was just windowing code, then on May 30th I integrated RmlUi into the engine. Today is the third time working on it.

Implementing hot reload for a ExpressJS and EJS site

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 03:35:29 +0300

When working on another personal web project I faced the issue of hot reloading project files on change. The web project is doing a bunch of server-side rendering using ExpressJS and EJS and I couldn’t find a nice hot reload system for it. There were some examples on using webpack for this purpose, but I don’t want to introduce a whole bundling system just for the hot reloading.

So I’m writing my own :).

E-mail

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 02:50:30 +0300

I have added a contact e-mail to the About page! Feel free to write to me if you’ve got feedback or just want to say hi! I might take some time to respond and the response might end up in your junk mail folder, let’s see how it goes :).

There used to be an image containing my e-mail here, but I’m not running a mail server nowadays.

To do that I set up Exim and Dovecot onto this server. Probably not one of the best mail server practices, but I think it’ll be fine for a single-user mail server.

Creating a page hit counter with nginx and bash

Sun, 06 Jun 2021 06:18:51 +0300

So earlier today I posted about the idea to add a hit counter to this webpage. I did it and now I’m going to try my hand at writing more tutorial-ish posts and show you how :).

I didn’t want to use one of those weird hit counter services, because where’s the fun in that.

Like with all technical problems, I split the “how do I add a hit counter” into smaller problems that I solved one at a time:

Feedback

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 21:10:23 +0300

Post carried over from my old blog, links don’t work.

Today, after doing a bunch of work on the page templates, I added a feedback page.

For that I wrote a little microservice in NodeJS that stores the submitted data into an SQLite database. Since I didn’t want to have to deal with having any HTML on the microservice, then the microservice does the usual microservice business (validation, stuffing data into the database, etc.) and then responds with a redirect to a pre-made static page.

Changes in the page theme

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 16:58:30 +0300

Finally had some free time and felt like working on the site. Tuned up the theme a little bit, still not fully functional, but I think it’s a lot better!

I added a rather fancy series outline to the modem series page. Doesn’t serve much of a point right now, but if I ever get around to making other longer post series then it’ll come in handy. Another function it serves is automatic generation of “next post” and “previous post” links, as beforehand I had to write the links into the post contents. Cool!

Getting root on a USB LTE modem

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 22:06:06 +0300

This was originally a series of multiple posts on my previous blog. I’ve merged them into one post and did some minor changes during my blog domain migration in 2025.

A couple of weeks ago I bought one of those no-brand LTE modems off of Aliexpress to network my laptop while I’m away from home. After some time in the electronics box curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to see what makes this thing tick and if, maybe, I could figure out why the USB data rates are so slow (125kbit down!! Upstream data rates look as expected).

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About

I’m Sven, a generalist software engineer from Estonia. Interested in computing and doing cool things with computers, both big and small.

At my dayjob I mostly write Java, C for embedded systems and JavaScript, with some minor amounts of Flutter and Python sprinkled in at times.

I’m also interested in electronics and mechanics. Sadly I’m a bit too space-constrained at the moment to be able to do any interesting projects in those fields (yet).