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New Ubuntu-based Precision line-up
Update: Precision 7520 and 7720 available as of March 28; Dell Precision 5720, a 27” All-in-One available as of April 18. Today I am excited to announce the next generation of our Ubuntu-based Pre…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 322 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
272
Fixing the MacBook Pro
Despite my love for the previous Retina MacBook Pro , I won’t be able to use it forever. The best laptop to ever exist should be in the future, not the past.
273
HFS+ Bit Rot
HFS+ is a terribly old filesystem with serious flaws. I sincerely hope that Apple comes with an update of the filesystem for WWDC 2015. After all they have been working on Swift for the past 4 years and we have just learned about it last week. HFS+ is seriously old HFS+ was released in 1998, in the era of Mac OS…
274
ESP32-S3 has a few SIMD instructions
Intro Espressif Systems released their ESP32-S3 SoC a few years ago, but only recently have they released more documentation and support of ...
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How Does an Intel Processor Boot?
When we switch on a computer, it goes through a series of steps before it is able to load the operating system. In this post we will see how a typical x86 processor boots. This is a very complex an…
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Reverse Engineering a Real Candle
Two years ago, I spent some time analyzing the algorithm used in a candle flicker LED as commonly found in cheap artificial candles. I reverse engineered the algorithm from the flickering pattern…
279
Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.
280
The Secret Life of Machines
SERIES 1 The Vacuum Cleaner The Washing Machine The Sewing Machine The Refrigerator The Central Heating System The Television
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Everything about the state of the Mac
Updates: October 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , November 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 18 , 22 , 27 , December 2 , 5 , 12 , 13 , 27 , January 2 , 5 , 5 , 9 , 11 , 13 , 22 , February 2 , 19 , March 15 , 17 , 21 , 22 , 28 , April 3 , 5 , 6 , 12 , 20 , 23 , May 3 , 6 , 19 , June 4 , July 27 …
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The GPU Banana Stand
Freshly whipped WebGPU, with ice cream
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Verilog Is Weird
Verilog is the most commonly used language for hardware design in America (VHDL is more common in Europe). Too bad it's so baroque. If you ever browse the Verilog questions on Stack Overflow , you'll find a large number of questions, usually downvoted, asking “why doesn't my code work?”, with code that's not just a…
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Turning an iPad Pro into a classic Macintosh
I’ve started work on the next in my 1-bit Woodblocks series: “Tekagami” (Ito Shinsui’s “Hand Mirror”). So it’s a good time to talk about how I turned an iPad...
287
Everything I've learned building the fastest Arm desktop
This is the fastest Arm desktop in the world, yes, even faster than the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. And today, I made it even faster. I upgraded everything: Faster RAM, 128 core CPU, 40 series GPU, I did it all, and we'll see how much we can obliterate the M2 Mac Pro. 128 cores—that's five times more cores, I'm also going to…
288
Understanding the BeagleBone’s built in microcontrollers (2016)
The BeagleBone Black is an inexpensive, credit-card sized computer that has two built-in microcontrollers called PRUs. While the PRUs provi...
289
Fearless concurrency in your microcontroller
A blog about Rust and embedded stuff
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The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC Toolbox)
Most of my systems are microcomputers (and commensurately sized), though I do have some moderately larger beasts: you've met homer , my 1987...
293
Oculus GoBlack – How to Make Your Oculus Go Better
Oculus Go, like all products, is the result of a series of compromises around cost, schedule, quality, and competence. It is clearly the best standalone VR platform on the market, but anyone …
294
The next Raptor OpenPOWER systems are coming, but they won't be Power10
I'd like to first start out by saying I've been aware of new developments but made certain promises to keep my mouth shut until all the pa...
295
A new cycle-stepped 6502 CPU emulator
TL;DR: The how and why of the new 6502 emulator in the chips project.
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Some small suggestions for the Intel instruction set
Programmers trying to make crypto run fast often say things like "Why can't the CPU designer just add a 128-bit multiplication instruction?" Sometimes these questions turn into academic papers analyzing the cycle counts that would be obtained from various instruction-set extensions. What's missing from most of these…
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SIMD < SIMT < SMT: Parallelism in Nvidia GPUs (2011)
Programmable NVIDIA GPUs are very inspiring to hardware geeks, proving that processors with an original, incompatible programming model can become widely used.
298
Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)
From home temperature monitoring to a Kubernetes cluster hosting a live Drupal website, I have a lot of experience running Raspberry Pis. I've used every model through the years, and am currently using a mix of A+, 2 model B, and 4 model B Pis. The 3 model B+ was the first generation that had me concerned more about…
299
Atreus – kit to build your own mechanical keyboard
My last post documented my initial exposure to the wild world of custom keyboards and the numerous ways it's possible to improve on the conventional design. As I dug deeper into the topic, I was struck with the simplicity of the underlying concepts. While the Ergodox is a notable and admirable achievement of…
300
Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound chip from die photos (2017)
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...