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Phyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display
One of nature's beautiful patterns captured in dancing lights
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
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Reverse-engineering the Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC
I hope you're not tired of the 8087, because I have another article about Intel's floating-point chip. 1 In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087...
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Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
The best platform for cycle-accurate retro PC emulation may just be the Mac. The M6 achieved a stable 600MHz clock using a 6.0 derived 86Box build.
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The Lost Atomic Update on Loongson CPU
杰哥的{教学，运维，编程，调板子}小笔记
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RAM: the forgotten history (2024)
We owe computers not to Charles Babbage, but to the invention of electronically-controlled working memory.
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Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware
In one of my classes I asked the question I was afraid to ask but I just needed the answer to: “Who is afraid of not getting a job after graduating?” About eighty percent of the 150 people in the room raised their hands. That is roughly 120 students answering, in one motion, that they […]
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How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
People still tell me that CPUs are boring. That nothing much happens anymore. Let us look at AMD Ryzen 7 processors from 2022 to 2024: the 5800X3D (Zen 3), the 7800X3D (Zen 4) and the 9800X3D (Zen 5). They are comparable 8-core chips with 3D V-Cache. I have written about them before, in How stagnant … Continue reading…
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How SpaceX streamlined the Raptor engine
If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’ve seen this famous image of three iterations of SpaceX’s Raptor rocket engine.
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The Secret Life of Circuits
Some pics, endorsements, and the reason the book exists in the first place.
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Recreating Voodoo Graphics and a Late-1990s Gaming PC on an FPGA
I've spent the last month adding features and improving performance in z486_MiSTer , mostly working through games from the first half of the 1990s. Looking a few years ahead brought me to another change I wanted to explore: the arrival of 3D graphics cards.
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Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
Personal website of Cody Ho
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How my e-reader lost its stripes
I’ve been a lifelong reader, which has proved a fragile habit in our era of endless trivial distraction. While books and e-ink readers solve the problem of competition for attention, they can’t compete with a phone for convenience. That tiny device in my pocket has made reading both easier and more vulnerable to…
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This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5
An experiment to design a cute PCB (without touching any tools) in plain English
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Microcode in Intel's 8087 floating-point chip: the scale instruction
In the 1970s, floating-point arithmetic was a mess. Computer manufacturers had a dozen incompatible arithmetic standards. Moreover, floating...
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Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine
I stopped working on the reverse-engineered Apple Neural Engine (ANE) driver three years ago, upon a sad mini realization that the ANE block is just not that useful, and I could be doing more useful things, and moved onto upstreaming other, more useful, blocks. The ANE's architecture was too opinionated to build a…
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Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey! It’s not just me!” I scrolled across this skeet from Tyler Gaw : I just dug to the…
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Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust
I reverse engineered the hardware and firmware of my Egret GT E-Scooter. I describe how I got in, analysed communication between components, and reverse engineered firmware. I speak about writing custom firmware for the display unit.
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Getting 50 GB/S Back from the Apple Neural Engine
An RTL performance erratum in the Apple M3 Neural Engine throttles DRAM weight streaming throughput down to 17–19 GB/s from the nominal 45–60 GB/s, whenever the total weight size is an integer multiple of 1 MiB, which currently affects 7 of ANEMLL ’s 15 models. Avoiding the problematic path in the kernel DMA engine's…
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Apple iPod Engraver (2019)
Making the iPod engraver page for Apple’s online store
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How to build a printer
If you're giving me e-paper, I'm going to make an e-printer.
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ZX Spectrum: Experimenting with 1-Bit Sound
As part of the ZX Spectrum tour, I implemented some routines that would let you play simple tones out of the 1-bit beeper. These were in large part inspired by earlier work I did on the Apple II. W…
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The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
Ok it’s not exactly $60 but you can get the board itself for that amount of money on eBay if you’re lucky, but on average the price is around $70-$100 (as of November 2025) which is still very cheap considering you can play Cyberpunk 2077 on this.
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Decoding the NEC V20 Microcode
reenigne's decoding of the 8088 microcode in 2020 opened the doors for extremely accurate emulation of the 8088 CPU. Although I had added...
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Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
A generation of technology workers grew up using it
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My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini
I run a local LLM server on my M4 Pro Mac mini with 48 GB of RAM.
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A PCB business card with a batteryless LED, powered by the phone that taps it
I made a circuit-board business card that opens my website and lights an LED with power harvested from the phone tapping it.
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Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
A little over a month ago, I ran into a Tektronix TDS7104 at the Silicon Valley Flea Market , where else?
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I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
I turned three security cameras into an automatic bird identification system using BirdNet-Go. Now my wife and I can track every bird species that visits our yard in real-time.