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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 29 posts.
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Macbook charger teardown: surprising complexity inside Apple's power adapter
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
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Test iOS and Android Audio Latency with Superpowered Latency Test App
iOS and Android Audio Latency Test App with round-trip audio latency data for Apple, Samsung Galaxy, Xiaomi, LG, HTC, Nexus, Motorola, Sony, etc. devices.
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To ECC or Not to ECC
On one of my visits to the Computer History Museum – and by the way this is an absolute must-visit place if you are ever in the San Francisco bay area – I saw an early Google server rack circa 1999 in the exhibits. Not too fancy, right? Maybe even… a
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Farming Hard Drives: How Backblaze Weathered the Thailand Drive Crisis
The rain started in August and by mid-October 2011, violent floods in Thailand had damaged the factories that helped produce nearly half of the world’s
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Reverse engineering the ARM1, ancestor of the iPhone's processor
Almost every smartphone uses a processor based on the ARM1 chip created in 1985. The Visual ARM1 simulator shows what happens inside the...
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On MicroSD card problems (2010)
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.
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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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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.
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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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The Texas Instruments TMX 1795: the first, forgotten microprocessor
The first 8-bit microprocessor, the TMX 1795 had the same architecture as the 8008 but was built months before the 8008. Never sold commerci...
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How transistors really work (1995)
Most technician textbooks do a very poor job of explaining the details of transistors' internal workings. First they assume that the Base current is somehow controlling the Collector current, then they try to explain how one current can affect another. These explanations invariably fail because Bipolar transistors…
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Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer
Of all the things we do at Raspberry Pi, driving down the cost of computer hardware remains one of the most important. Even in the developed world, a programmable computer is a luxury item for a lot of people, and every extra dollar that we ask someone to spend decreases the chance that they’ll choose […]
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How I Hacked Amazon’s $5 WiFi Button
UPDATE: I’m now selling ready-to-use buttons at Buttonjoy.com!
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Homemade Memristor (2011)
Modified curve tracer is applying AC voltage. Horizontal axis represents voltage and the vertical axis represents current. In both cases, the curve always passes through zero voltage and current. This requirement must be met in order to be classified as a memristor.
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8088 PC Speaker MOD player: How it’s done
The last 100 seconds of 8088 MPH sound very different to the rest of the demo. The end tune is actually a 4-channel Amiga MOD file (which you can download here ) composed by coda . Playing back a MOD through PC speaker on such a slow machine has never been done before. Here is how we did it.
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What is the best hard drive?
Check out the latest Hard Drive Stats. It was one year ago that I first blogged about the failure rates of specific models of hard drives, so now is a
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What's New in CPUs Since the 80s and How Does It Affect Programmers?
My mental model of CPUs is stuck in the 1980s: basically boxes that do arithmetic, logic, bit twiddling and shifting, and loading and storing things in memory. I'm vaguely aware of various newer developments like vector instructions (SIMD) and the idea that newer CPUs have support for virtualization (though I have no…
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Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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Facebook to open-source AI hardware design
Visit the post for more.
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Laser-generated surface structures create extremely water-repellent metals
Scientists at the Institute of Optics have used lasers to transform metals into extremely water repellent, or super-hydrophobic, materials without the need for temporary coatings.
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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…
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Homemade synthetic aperture radar
Second version of the 6 GHz FMCW radar now with SAR images