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Using a Minitel 1B as a serial terminal
So you've got your hands on a late 1980s Minitel 1B (or something slightly later) and then you realize that the entire Minitel network shut ...
John Graham-Cumming
The SidePulse Pro is a fun project that puts some LEDs in an "SD card format" to go into the side of a MacBook Pro. My MacBook Pro is very old and so it doesn't have an SD card slot, but my Mac Studio does. And since I like to live dangerously (and thought it would look cool), I stuck my newly received SidePulse Pro…
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Visit blog.jgc.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jun 2010 – Jan 2026
Hardware & Electronics 19Society, Policy & Culture 17Software Engineering 17Life, Learning & Writing 16History & Retro Computing 16Tools & Productivity 14
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The inner beauty of a Tesla Stropkov DS 3600 telephone from the early 1980s
This is a DS 3600 analog telephone made by Tesla Stropkov in about 1982. It's still functional and to my mind it's absolutely beautiful. Bu...
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Speeding up HTTP with minimal protocol changes
As SPDY works its way through IETF ratification I began wondering whether it was really necessary to add a complex, binary protocol to th...
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"All your base are belong to us" intro to my 2004 MIT Spam Conference talk
As I've mentioned before my talk at the 2004 MIT Spam Conference was about using one machine learning system to beat another. In that case ...
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That'll Never Work
I got invited to speak at the last Hacker News London meet up and gave a talk called That'll Never Work! about crazy ideas and what to do ...
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Restoration of an IBM Thinkpad 701C Butterfly-keyboard laptop
Just over a year ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about the IBM ThinkPad 701c (the one with the lovely folding "butterfly" keyboar...
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Childhood toys: 40 years on 2-XL works just fine
Sitting and literally gathering dust on a shelf has been my childhood 2-XL toy . A few years ago I turned it on and it seemed to work but th...
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One way to fix your rubbish password database
Suppose for a moment that you are running a web site that has a poorly implemented password database that stores password hashes using some...
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Update on Go 1.1 crypto performance
Some time ago I integrated OpenSSL's MD5, SHA1 and RC4 functions into Go because Go's native implementations were slow. The Go team has ma...
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The Demon Machine
Over the weekend I was reunited with the first two computers I spent extensive time programming. The Sharp MZ-80K (released in 1979) and t...
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GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter
The other day at work a colleague posed the seemingly innocent question "Can I find out the value of the GNU make -j parameter inside a Ma...
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Repairing a tiny ribbon cable inside a 28 year old IBM ThinkPad 701c
I'm in the middle of turning two badly treated IBM ThinkPad 701CS machines (the ones with the lovely unfolding keyboard) into a single, wor...
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Breaking the Reddit code
A few days ago an entry on Reddit asked for help breaking a code . Because I was laid up in bed yesterday with something chesty and nasty I...
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Facebook's DKIM RSA key should be crackable
If Facebook sends you a mail they will sign it using DKIM . Here are the headers from a mail I received the other day: DKIM-Signature: v=1...
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How to sleep on a long haul flight
To the annoyance of people around me I have no trouble sleeping on long haul flights. And I don't take any fancy medication to do so. Havi...
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