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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
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Review: A Dive into Mikrotik's Weird SmartNIC (2022)
an addendum has been posted, read it here 2023/12/02 - Hello, Hacker News! Check out these pictures of my cat: https://emma.pet Back in February, Mikrotik announced the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, a peculiar 25gbps NIC. They’ve thrown an entire router into a PCIe NIC. But why? Wait, why? Mikrotik’s product listing has…
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The Intel 386 processor die: the clock circuit
Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip. In this blog post, I'll examine the clock-generati...
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My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
An adorable side project featuring SwiftUI, MapKit, and open-source APIs
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FPGAs and the renaissance of retro hardware
Almost every few weeks, a new and exciting retro hardware project is announced. These are truly …
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Evaluating M3 Pro CPU Cores: General Performance
Using assembly language test loops to understand the differences between M1 Pro and M3 Pro CPU cores casts new light on their differences.
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How Apple's developers reflashed Mac ROMs in the '90s
After I wrote about the possibility of programmable Mac ROM SIMMs in Quadras a couple of months ago, I suspected that there had been a way for developers at Apple in the 68k Mac era to reflash the ROM in their Macs during development, just like BIOS updates on PCs. The reason I believed this is because the ROM SIMM…
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Analyzing the Monoprice Blackbird HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Down Converter
I got my hands on a Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Converter . According to the marketing copy it “is the definitive solution for playback of new 4K HDCP 2.2 encoded content on 4K displays with the old HDCP 1.4 standard.”
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Signal reflections in electronic circuits
What are "signal reflections", really? And do they matter in circuit design?
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A DX7 USB Dongle
The amazing Rene Stange added USB Gadget (i.e. device) support to the Circle bare metal Raspberry Pi environment a while ago so I’ve now incorporated that into MiniDexed. This allows MiniDexe…
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Apple's Pro Display XDR takes Thunderbolt 3 to its limit
I like Thunderbolt a lot. Mostly because USB's land of optional features is a mess which makes choosing a cable/peripheral difficult. With thunderbolt you have a single number to get right. And then you are supposed to be golden. However the idyll with Intel's interface took a hit when I tried to make sense of Apple's…
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Interesting features of John Harrison's sea clocks
I recently got to see John Harrison's sea clocks at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. I recommend visiting if you get the chance. This post is about some of the interesting things I observed.
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Welding and the automation frontier
The big question about Artificial Intelligence, other than whether it will destroy human civilization, is the effect it will have on employment.
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What has changed in CPU cores in M3 chips?
Little seems to have changed in CPU cores in M3 chips, if you read reviews. Dig a bit deeper and there are major changes, as explained here.
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Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)
I’m beginning to think that the Windows PC that I built in 2015 is ready for retirement (though if Joe Biden can be president at 78, maybe this […]
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I Hacked the Magic Mouse
Magic Mouse hack with USB-C charger
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A PCIe Coral TPU Finally Works on Raspberry Pi 5
Coral.ai TPUs are AI accelerators used for tasks like machine vision and audio processing. Raspberry Pis are often integrated into small robotics and IoT products—or used to analyze live video feeds with Frigate. Until today, nobody I know of has been able to get a PCI Express Coral TPU working on the Raspberry Pi…
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The laptop that won't die
My $200, 12-year-old Thinkpad has outlasted two high-end Macbooks
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Building an occupancy sensor with a $5 ESP32 and a serverless DB
How I built an occupancy sensor with an ESP32C3, Cloudflare Workers/D1, and Grafana
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Don't waste money on a math coprocessor they said
Well it’s been no secret, but OS/2 6.123 on my PS/2 model 80, is insanely unstable running simple MS-DOS based games (large EXE’s)
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A kernel developer made my styluses work again on newer kernels
Both styluses of my XPPen Artist 24 Pro and XPPen Artist 16 Pro Gen2 styluses are now usable again on newer Linux kernels.
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The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC Toolbox)
Most of my systems are microcomputers (and commensurately sized), though I do have some moderately larger beasts: you've met homer , my 1987...
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Reverse engineering the Intel 386 processor's register cell
The groundbreaking Intel 386 processor (1985) was the first 32-bit processor in the x86 line. It has numerous internal registers: general-pu...
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Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V
A bipartisan group of 18 lawmakers in the US Congress have recently amplified a request to the White House and the Secretary of Commerce to place restrictions on Americans working with RISC-V (see also the initial request from the Senate ) in order to prevent China from gaining dominance in CPU technology.
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Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
The 80386 is the most important CPU Intel ever produced. It confirmed the importance of the x86 line and sparked a computing revolution. And yet it almost never saw the light of day. This is the history of the 386 and why it was such a landmark.