Microcontroller

The Hardware Arms Race Is a Lie: I Ran Photoshop on a 60p Chip

📅 August 22, 2026 📂 Systems & Hardware

We’ve been conditioned to believe that creativity requires a $2,000 laptop, but the truth is, modern software is just badly written. By running Photoshop on a £0.60 microcontroller, we expose the absurdity of the upgrade treadmill. The chip isn’t underpowered; our expectations are just over-calibrated.

1980s 2026 Abstraction Abstraction Layer E-Waste Microcontroller Photoshop Software Bloat Upgrade Treadmill

Your Weather App Is Eating 200MB to Show You a Number

📅 August 16, 2026 📂 Tech Industry

Weather data is tiny — a few bytes of JSON. Yet typical weather apps consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM. The real inefficiency isn’t the app; it’s the entire OS and GUI stack it runs on. An ESP32 with an ePaper screen can do the same job with a few kilobytes. Efficiency is a design choice we’ve stopped making.

Abstraction Layer Abstraction Leak Design Choice Efficiency Embedded ePaper ESP32 Meshtastic Microcontroller Software Bloat