The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Software / engineering practice

Dmitry Brant

dmitrybrant.com

He's just this guy, you know?

Software / engineering practiceReverse engineeringEmulationRetro computingMath

’00’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
184 from 16 Apr 1999 to 27 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (7 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://dmitrybrant.com/feed

2026 7

  1. Timeline of the far future
  2. Relativity Park: taming the speed of light
  3. Return to Zork: now moddable!
  4. Claude × retrocomputing: emulating a QIC-117 tape drive
  5. Claude × retrocomputing: emulating the TC2000 supercomputer
  6. Brain dump, May 2026
  7. Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle

2025 6

  1. Brain dump, October 2025
  2. Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver
  3. DiskDigger + Avalonia UI: a success story
  4. Brain dump, June 2025
  5. Software update roundup, February 2025
  6. Brain dump, January 2025

2024 5

  1. Brain dump, October 2024
  2. Brain dump, September 2024
  3. Brain dump, August 2024
  4. Homeowner’s log, July 2024
  5. Programming a chip programmer with another chip programmer

2023 11

  1. More huge updates to DiskDigger and FileSystemAnalyzer
  2. Brain dump, October 2023
  3. Updates to DiskDigger and FileSystemAnalyzer, October 2023
  4. Brain dump, September 2023
  5. LK-99: an unintentional social experiment
  6. Thoughts on UFOs
  7. Brain dump, April 2023
  8. Homeowner’s log, March 2023
  9. Artificial stupidity
  10. Brain dump, February 2023
  11. ECC RAM should be a human right

2022 9

  1. Brain dump, December 2022
  2. Brain dump, October 2022
  3. Brain dump, September 2022
  4. A few guidelines for navigating social media
  5. Brain dump, July 2022
  6. Brain dump, June 2022
  7. Brain dump, April 2022
  8. A retro laptop like no other
  9. Brain dump, January 2022

2021 5

  1. Software update round-up
  2. In praise of Windows Forms
  3. Minimalist programming, Android edition
  4. Homeowner’s log, February 2021
  5. Brain dump, January 2021

2020 11

  1. The lost art of system-level thinking
  2. How to recover data from QIC tapes
  3. Discovering little worlds
  4. Thoughts on the new Star Trek
  5. The problem of recovering data from SSD drives
  6. Reverse engineering a 25-year-old Visual Basic app
  7. Homeowner’s log, May 2020
  8. Confirmation dialogs
  9. Recovering data from QIC-80 tapes: another case study
  10. Where did we go wrong?
  11. Home security with Raspberry Pi

2019 17

  1. Homeowner’s log, November 2019
  2. Homeowner’s log, October 2019
  3. Homeowner’s log, September 2019
  4. Proper wiping of free space on your Android device
  5. NTFS compression minutiae
  6. Euler walks
  7. Pi walk
  8. Ulam’s spiral in your browser
  9. Send me all your floppies! They nourish me.
  10. Reverse-engineering the QICStream tape backup format
  11. More data recovery war stories: recovering QIC-80 tape backups
  12. There are people alive today…
  13. Chinese intellectual property theft hits home
  14. When you need some perspective
  15. A deep dive into optical disk file systems
  16. Misrepresentations of evolution in popular media
  17. FAT12 is alive and well!

2018 17

  1. Rewatching Star Trek: Voyager
  2. Ray tracing black holes
  3. Dear Pittsburgh, please drive better!
  4. Simple ray tracing in pure Javascript
  5. Long-form podcasts: a hope for political discourse
  6. Knock-off apps: the sincerest form of flattery
  7. The age of instant nostalgia
  8. Premature optimization of Android View hierarchies
  9. Higher-level illusions
  10. Digital hoarding
  11. FileSystemAnalyzer: a tool that does what it says
  12. Hard hack: reading Soviet magnetic reel tapes
  13. Revisiting the Windows 10 thumbnail cache
  14. The dead dream of chatbots
  15. A quick utility for SQLite forensics
  16. New tool for analysis of Outlook PST files
  17. A simple 3D model viewer for your Android device

2017 9

  1. The steel pig
  2. MushroomHuntr
  3. But do they believe it themselves?
  4. Love what you do, and show it in what you make.
  5. Stop it, Stephen Hawking!
  6. VR needs several more generations to succeed
  7. RJ11 to RJ45
  8. Homeownership
  9. Disabling comments

2016 6

  1. Big updates to DiskDigger!
  2. A quick (but useful) update to an oldie-but-a-goodie
  3. No Man’s Sky: All Breadth, No Depth
  4. Data recovery war stories: more fun with QIC-150 backup tapes
  5. The state of emulation on Android
  6. Planetarium app for Samsung Gear VR!

2015 7

  1. Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Obligatory Commentary
  2. DiskDigger for Android no longer requires rooting! (with caveats)
  3. A shot of nostalgia
  4. A big update to DiskDigger for Android
  5. Mandelbrot in Android and C#
  6. View 3D MPO photos with Google Cardboard
  7. Experimenting with Google’s Project Tango

2014 3

  1. Deus ex machina
  2. A poem by J. Jayson Poryk
  3. A first look at Google Glass

2013 3

  1. Dealing with Google Play Store reviews
  2. DiskDigger Pro for Android!
  3. A new low in SEO scams?

2012 3

  1. My BASIC beginnings
  2. DiskDigger now available for Android!
  3. Refuting the Fine-Tuning Argument

2011 5

  1. Correctly naming your photos
  2. Pi is wrong! Long live Tau!
  3. Good and bad science, and faster-than-light neutrinos
  4. Atheism as a religion
  5. The FujiFilm .MPO 3D photo format

2010 3

  1. Thumbnail cache in Windows 7 / Vista – a rumination
  2. Accommodation vs. confrontation
  3. A few nitpicks of Star Trek (2009)

2009 9

  1. Discovering the 3D Mandelbulb
  2. Make your USB flash drive indestructible!
  3. The Math Book: Get it Now!
  4. Beginning Java ME: A Simple Mandelbrot Viewer
  5. Remembering a dear friend
  6. Seven-Segment Display for .NET
  7. The open-mindedness of skeptics
  8. DiskDigger – Version 0.8.0
  9. Reiki clinic at MetroHealth

2008 6

  1. My Conversation with God
  2. This just in: You create your own reality!
  3. Binomial Coefficients and Stirling Numbers in C#
  4. Project Euler — Problem 197
  5. Elementary Number Theory in C#
  6. Reviving the Veo Observer

2007 14

  1. The Growing Importance of Strong Passwords
  2. The philanthropist
  3. More Modding of the RAZR V3xx
  4. Modding the Motorola RAZR V3xx
  5. The Intention Experiment(s?)
  6. The non-science of Lynne McTaggart
  7. More Tachyon Energy
  8. In the Path of Greatness
  9. Does Faith Explain Anything?
  10. Conservapedia
  11. Mandelbrot Set in VB.NET
  12. The Moon Rulz
  13. Hyperbolic Tessellations
  14. Ulam’s Prime Number Spiral

2006 10

  1. On the Existence of George Washington
  2. This is What I Think About!
  3. Bible Code Finder
  4. Another Thought on New-Age Nonsense
  5. Getting NTFS to Work in Linux
  6. Takionic Follow-up
  7. Tachyon Energy for the Masses
  8. Open-Source Tools for Everything
  9. On Mind-Body Duality and the Afterlife
  10. A Glimmer of Hope

2005 7

  1. Evolving Straight Into the 15th Century!
  2. Upgrade Your Mouse Cursor, Free!
  3. Sure-fire Ways to Annoy Me
  4. Appeal to Imagination
  5. On the Bible Being Divinely Inspired
  6. Loebner Prize misguided?
  7. A Disclaimer

2004 2

  1. Getting the Damn STB TV Tuner Working in RedHat 9
  2. Getting the Damn Aureal Sound Card Working in RedHat 9

2003 6

  1. Viewing Various Image Formats with VB 6
  2. Assembler and Linker for SIC/XE
  3. Top-down Parser with Backtracking in C++
  4. Recursive Descent Parser in C++
  5. Markov Chains in Maple
  6. DFA (Deterministic Finite Automaton) Builder

2000 2

  1. Clean Up Your Damn System Tray!
  2. Serial Mouse “Driver” / Tester

1999 1

  1. A JPEG Viewer for QBasic