Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 322 posts.
What is electricity? This question is impossible to answer because the word " Electricity " has several contradictory meanings. These different meanings are incompatible, and the contradictions confuse everyone. If you don't understand electricity, you're not alone. Even teachers, engineers, and scientists have a hard…
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
Why do AC cords need three prongs? If there is no positive or negative in AC systems, why do we have HOT and NEUTRAL? I attempt to shed light on some of these mysteries.
I have come up with a new way to win at chess: I have connected up a Raspberry Pi Zero in my pocket to some buttons and vibration motors in my shoes, so that I can surreptitiously communicate with a chess engine running on the Pi. The project is called "Sockfish" because it's a way to operate Stockfish with your socks.
Enhancing kernel isolation, one step at a time.
Dmitry.GR: My business card runs Linux (and Ultrix), yours can too. Details, kits, etc...
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became "one of the most important advances in the history of modern popular mu...
In 2018 I made the first lithographically fabricated integrated circuits in my garage fab. I was a senior in high school when I made the Z1 amplifier, and now I’m a senior in college so there are some long overdue improvements to the amateur silicon process. The Z1 had 6 transistors and was a great test chip to…
Next time you look at a transmission line, I hope you'll focus on the big four properties: characteristic impedance, high-frequency loss, delay, and cros...
Like many others, I was quite amazed to learn about a microcontroller sold for only 0.03 USD via the EEVblog last year. How was this possible? Many assumed this was a fire sale of an old product. D…
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
I unlocked Hypervisor.framework on my jailbroken phone and modified UTM, a popular QEMU port for iOS, to run arm64 Linux in a VM at full native speed. …for the clickbait - and to show iPhone’s untapped potential.
I am writing this memo to explain what happened to the case our NeXTCube Computer, Serial Number AA001032.
A visual step-by-step guide to Joseph Whitworth’s three-plate method for creating very flat reference surfaces.
This article was supposed to be published all at once on July 30'th. But because of the staggered launch delay into August 8 and 15, some sections of this article were redacted until August 14th.
Almost every smartphone uses a processor based on the ARM1 chip created in 1985. The Visual ARM1 simulator shows what happens inside the...
For a long time when I’ve wanted to test the latency of computers and UIs I’ve used the Is It Snappy app with my iPhone’s high speed camera to count frames between when I press a key and when the screen changes. However the problem with that is it takes a while to find the exact frames you want, which is annoying when…
The microSD ware for January 2010 was not an incidental post. It is actually snapshot of a much longer forensic investigation to find the ground truth behind some irregular Kingston memory cards.
Did you buy the new MacBook or MacBook Pro? Maybe the Google Pixel? You're about to enter a world of confusion thanks to those new "USB-C" ports. See, that simple-looking port hides a world of complexity, and the (thankful) backward-compatibility uses different kinds of cables for different tasks. Shoppers have to be…
A 6502 (or 65C02) in an FPGA, running at 100 MHz, ready to plug into your vintage computer
After beginning a compiler for the Apple M1 GPU , the next step is to develop a graphics driver exercising the compiler. Since the last post two weeks ago, I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run…
Windmills have always fascinated me and for a long time I was dreaming of one day building my own. Where I live there are still machines from the 1600’s that are just as magnificent today as when they were first built. When you see one standing in a field rotating and converting passing air into usable energy they…
Oh man, this is good! You’re looking at the first DB-19 connector to be made in the 21st century:
There comes a time in every photographer's life when they must ask themselves what to do about all those photo RAWs filling up the tiny-compared-to-spinning-platters SSD on their primary machine.
