Reading The NVIDIA Way is a throwback. In the late 1990s, I followed graphics card launches with the kind of attention most people reserve for sports scores. 3dfx, S3, Matrox, ATI. Brands that have long since disappeared, or been absorbed, or faded into irrelevance. Cards that felt legendary at the time: the Voodoo, the Voodoo2, the Banshee. The wars were real, the stakes felt enormous, and the gap between generations was wide enough that an upgrade genuinely transformed what your computer could do.

What’s a Second Brain?

The term was popularized by Tiago Forte in Building a Second Brain: the idea is to offload the work of remembering, connecting, and retrieving information to an external system, so your biological brain can focus on thinking rather than storage.

In practice, this means keeping a structured, searchable collection of notes, meeting records, project plans, ideas, and references, all in one place and consistently organized. The most common framework is PARA: Projects (active, time-bound work), Areas (ongoing responsibilities), Resources (reference material), and Archives (completed or inactive items). Obsidian is one of the most popular tools for implementing it because it stores everything as plain markdown files that you fully own, links notes bidirectionally, and works offline.

About this edition

Publishing a web-edition of my master’s thesis report was a project that I kept delaying over the last years. Finally I had time to work on it. This report was delivered almost 7 years ago - at the time of writing - in June 2010.

Audio processing with Python

Introduction

The weather was bad today. So I stayed at home and decided to learn something new. I remember to study digital filters in the faculty and it was somehow boring. At the time it was not so easy to create useful and practical examples.

Fortunately nowadays Python exists and it’s really easy to play with sound processing as can be seen on this page.

Most of the code found on this page was created using snippets found on the internet.

1. Introduction

When I started to learn SystemC-AMS one of the first circuits I decided to implement was a Phase Locked Loop. The reason for this is because I have had an experience simulating a 2.4GHz PLL while I was member of the Microelectronics Student’s Group, and I realized how difficult is to simulate such circuit, specially when the output and the reference frequency are several orders of magnitude apart. The simulator has to use a small time-step to accommodate the higher frequency but at the same time, the PLL will take a relatively long time to lock and reach the steady state.