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6th generation x86 CPU Comparisons
Paul Hsieh's 6th generation x86 CPU comparision page including K6, P-II and 6x86MX geared towards the high performance software developer audience
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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Weird monitor bugs people sent me in the last 5 years (2022)
I develop 🌕 Lunar, a macOS app for getting intelligent adaptive brightness on external monitors and controlling every aspect of your monitor using DDC and other obscure protocols. I get tons of email about Lunar, especially after it became my full time “job” in 2021. A lot of those emails complain about Lunar bugs…
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Why good external SSDs are faster with Apple Silicon
Why an Intel Mac’s up to 40 Gb/s from Thunderbolt 3 is less than an Apple silicon Mac’s up to 40 Gb/s from USB4, and how you can benefit from it.
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I made a thing to help you make a thing out of a keypad
I do a lot of electronics projects in my spare time, and I tend to try to make reusable parts to save myself effort in the future. Because I have to order ingredients in certain quantities, I often wind up with more than I need for my project.
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An IRC client in your motherboard
I made a graphical IRC client that runs in UEFI. It’s written in Rust and leverages the GUI toolkit and TrueType renderer that I wrote for axle’s userspace. I was able to develop it thanks to the vmnet network backend that I implemented for QEMU. You can connect to an IRC server, chat and read messages, all from the…
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Homemade 6 GHz pulse compression radar
Designing a modern pulse compression radar that uses digital signal processing.
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Receive push notifications from your rice cooker
I have a lovely, and reasonably priced, Mini Panda Rice Cooker. It does not have any SmartHome features. You put in water and rice, press a button, it cooks rice. Nice! The only problem is - I don't know how long the rice will take to cook. It uses "Fuzzy Logic" to work out exactly how much heat and time is needed for…
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Error Handling in Baby Toys
Electrical baby toys are interesting to disassemble and look at how it’s made. Not up to the …
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The Hearts of the Super Nintendo
When I start studying a vintage system, the first thing I like to do is understand how its components work together at the hardware level [1] .
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An unusual 7400-series chip implemented with a gate array
When I look inside a chip from the popular 7400 series, I know what to expect: a fairly simple die, implemented in a straightforward, cost-e...
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Running a Raspberry Pi with a read-only root filesystem
While there are downsides, using a read-only root filesystem will dramatically increase your Pi SD card's lifetime.
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The Apple Jonathan: A 1980s concept computer that never shipped
In the middle of the 1980s, Apple found itself with several options regarding the future of its computing platforms. The Apple II was the company’s bread and butter. The Apple III was pitched as an evolution of that platform, but was clearly doomed due to hardware and software issues. The Lisa was expensive and not…
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Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture
Looking in more detail at Google's first Tensor Processing Unit
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How do MRI Headphones work? (2022)
Thoughts and more by Tom Lingham
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Thoughts on Vision Pro
A month ago, I flew from London to NYC, paid $3500 for a Vision Pro headset at Apple Fifth Avenue, and flew back home. I’ve been using it every day since — here’s what I think. My background, for context: I’ve been working in AR for many years. I built...
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Radios, how do they work?
A brief introduction to antennas, superheterodyne receivers, and signal modulation schemes.
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ARM64EC (and ARM64X) Explained
ARM64EC (and ARM64X) Explained Probably the most confused looks I get from other developers when I discuss Windows and ARM64 is when I used the term " ARM64EC ". They ask is the same thing as ARM64? Is it a different instruction set than ARM64? How can you tell if an application is or ARM64 ARM64EC?
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Creating an autopilot in X-Plane using Python
Introduction Today’s post will take us in a slightly different direction than the last few. Today’s post will be about hooking up some Python code to the X-Plane flight simulator to enable development of an autopilot using PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controllers. I’ve been a fan of flight simulators for…
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The Intel 8088 processor's instruction prefetch circuitry: a look inside
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor. IBM's decision to use the 8088 processor in the I...
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Electronic project kits: hands on with a vintage 160-in-1 (2016)
In this day and age with the bewildering availability of electronics readily available, deciding on a project to embark on can be…
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Tiny Undervalued Hardware Companions
After playing/working with computers for more then 25 years I started to appreciate small but handy valuable stuff – like adapters or handlers or … yeah – all kind of stuff. With …
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Atari Falcon030
Impressive, but too late to the party
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RP2040 Boot Sequence
This document has been assembled to supplement a set of instructions about writing one's own bootloader for the RP2040. Writing a bootloader requires some understanding of the boot sequence, but it became a bit too cumbersome to include that explanation in the bootloader documentation.
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How I replaced deadly garage door torsion springs (2002)
Replacing broken torsion springs on a garage door.
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Got my ultimate retro KVM setup working
By Ruben Schade in Eora/Sydney, Australia.
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Hackintosh is almost dead
While I knew about and even tried various very early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple hardware, it wasn’t until early 2020 that I’ve built my first proper one. Then I built several more which are still seeing daily use.
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Affordable Wheel Based Refreshable Braille Display
On HN [1] I came into contact with Mahmoud Al-Qudsi ( mqudsi@neosmart.net ) , who mentioned that he'd been working off-and-on on a braille reader that is both affordable and easy to manufacture. He sent me a some files and pointed to a patent [2] that he took out on a device that uses octagonal wheels with codes on…