Teleprinter by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Way, way before instant messaging, there was... teletype!
Video 1.
Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal by CuriousMarc (2020)
Source.
PCI by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
PCIe computer explained by ExplainingComputers (2018)
Source.
lspci by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
lspci is the name of several versions of CLI tools used in UNIX-like systems to query information about PCI devices in the system.
On Ubuntu 23.10, it is provided by the pciutils package, which is so dominant that when we say "lspci" without qualitication, that's what we mean.
pciutils by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Sotware project that provides lspci.
Fog computing by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Our definition of fog computing: a system that uses the computational resources of individuals who volunteer their own devices, in which you give each of the volunteers part of a computational problem that you want to solve.
Folding@home and SETI@home are perfect example of that definition.
Advantages of fog: there is only one, reusing hardware that would be otherwise idle.
Disadvantages:
  • in cloud, you can put your datacenter on the location with the cheapest possible power. On fog you can't.
  • on fog there is some waste due to network communication.
  • you will likely optimize code less well because you might be targeting a wide array of different types of hardware, so more power (and time) wastage. Furthermore, some of the hardware used will not not be optimal for the task, e.g. CPU instead of GPU.
All of this makes Ciro Santilli doubtful if it wouldn't be more efficient for volunteers simply to donate money rather than inefficient power usage.
Bibliography:

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact