121
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
122
8086 Microcode Disassembled
Recently I realised that, as part of his 8086 reverse-engineering series, Ken Shirriff had posted online a high resolution photograph of the 8086 die with the metal layer removed . This was something I have been looking for for some time, in order to extract and disassemble the 8086 microcode. I had previously found…
123
Why Intel Added Cache Partitioning
Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs . Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines . If you estimate an amortized total cost of $4k per machine per year , that's $8 billion per year. With numbers like that, even small…
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Programming with RISC-V Vector Instructions
Perhaps the most interesting part of the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) is the vector extension (RISC-V "V"). In contrast to the average single-instruction multipe-data (SIMD) instruction set, RISC-V vector instructions are vector length agnostic (VLA). Thus, a RISC-V "V" CPU is flexible in choosing a…
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Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted
The default timer resolution on Windows is 15.6 ms – a timer interrupt 64 times a second. When programs increase the timer frequency they increase power consumption and harm battery life. They also…
127
A Tale of Two Zippers
Recently, Akiba took me to visit his friend’s zipper factory. I love visiting factories: no matter how simple the product, I learn something new.
128
The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server
NTP on a Raspberry-Pi - documents configuring a Raspberry Pi for headless operation, configuring NTP for remote monitoring, adding a GPS/PSS device (two discussed), and how well NTP performs in WAN-only, LAN, and PPS configurations.
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Wifibroadcast – Analog-like transmission of live video data
Wifibroadcast is a project aimed at the live transmission of HD video (and other) data using wifi radios. One prominent use case is to transmit camera images for a first person view (FPV) of remote…
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Modchips of the State
Collection of my projects and hacks.
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Two new PebbleOS watches
Including my dream smartwatch…
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The Floppotron 3.0
After a long time it’s time for a big upgrade of my computer hardware orchestra. Here it is! The bigger and better Floppotron 3.0. 512 floppy disk drives, 4 scanners and 16 hard disk drives.
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Mmm, Pi-hole
I have a love-hate relationship with ad blockers. On the one hand, I despise the obnoxious ads that are forced down our throats at what seems like every turn. On the other hand, I appreciate the need for publishers to earn a living so that I can consume their
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1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5
Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2. The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0, an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models. The stack of…
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part II
Less than a month ago, I began investigating the Apple M1 GPU in hopes of developing a free and open-source driver. This week, I’ve reached a second milestone: drawing a triangle with my own open-source code. The vertex and fragment shaders are handwritten in machine code, and I interface with the hardware via the…
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Linux/4004: booting Linux on Intel 4004 for fun, art, and no profit
Dmitry.GR: Slowly booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit
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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
The global memory crunch and the great repricing of consumer electronics
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part III
After a few weeks of investigating the Apple M1 GPU in January, I was able to draw a triangle with my own open source code . Although I began dissecting the instruction set, the shaders there were specified as machine code. A real graphics driver needs a compiler from high-level shading languages (GLSL or Metal) to a…
141
How I built a keyboard/video/mouse switch for my two 4k monitors
How I built a Keyboard/Video/Mouse switch for my two 4K monitors for $30.
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Raspberry Pi 3 Fastboot – Less Than 2 Seconds
This post tells about my journey on fast-booting a Raspberry Pi 3 (RPI). In addition to that, some optimizations are discussed that can be applied to a Qt (QML) application. At the end, we will have a …
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RP2040 Doom
The Making of RP2040 Doom
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Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags
Complex software is, to put it mildly, hard to get right (for details, see almost any other posting on this or any other security blog). Especially for gadgets that are rich with microphones, cameras, location and environmental sensors, and communication links (such as, you know, smartphones), errors and security…
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Bringing back the iPhone headphone jack, in China
I’ve spent the past four months in Shenzhen, China, modifying an iPhone 7 to add a fully functional headphone jack. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has done anything like this.
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Trying to build the ultimate Raspberry Pi computer – Zero Terminal V3
Here's another iteration on the Zero Terminal projects I've been working on for a few years. For those of you who haven't seen them, I've been trying to design the most usable all in one Pi Zero computer out there.
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Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
Jeff Atwood, perhaps the most widely read programming blogger, has a post that makes a case against using ECC memory . My read is that his major points are:
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Adding a fiber link to my home network
Motivation Despite using a FTTH internet connection since 2014, aside from the one fiber uplink, I had always used network gear with 1 Gbit/s links over regular old rj45 cat5(e) cables. I liked the simplicity and uniformity of that setup, but decided it’s time to add at least one fiber connection, to get rid of a…
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The Sad Saga of Purism and the Librem 5
Today I’m going to tell you a sad tale of a device called the Librem 5 and the company behind it, Purism. As of right now, this story does not have a happy ending. I am writing this series of articles as a protest against the behavior of Purism, a company which claims that transparency and openness are their core…
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Build Your Own FPGA (2012)
The Open 7400 Logic Competition is a crowd-sourced contest with a simple but broad criteria for entry: build something interesting out of discrete logic chips. It's now in its second year, and this time around I was inspired to enter it.