The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but just 1 year ago when I started working on C64 OS, I didn't have the first clue how the C64 Keyboard worked. I knew there was a thing called the keyboard buffer, but I had cloudy thoughts of it being inside the keyboard itself. When I had to actually write the keyboard scanning…
My personal website and blog
It's risky business fighting Intel, AMD, and Arm, and that's exactly what Star Five is trying to do with this: The chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a computing revolution—at least that's what some people think! The VisionFive 2 has a JH7110 SoC on it, sporting a new Instruction Set…
I recently came home to visit with family, but right now as I write this, it's 1:00am and I'm running memtest86+ by myself in the basement.
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
A DIY wearable for avoiding recognition on IR security cameras.
Scott Mabin's blog
Weather is often hyper-local. For example, trying to suss out the temperature this morning:
I built a device that allows a pinball machine from 1984 to automatically upload scores to the internet. The device taps into the machine’s memory bus and monitors the game state, uploading scores after each game.
In which you probably wonder, but ...why?
A minimalist, non-commercial take on a handful of indispensable workshop tools.
This post will mainly focus on ROCm HIP wasted opportunities for adoption. I wrote an overview of ROCm earlier at https://threedots.ovh/blog/2021/11/what-is-amd-rocm/ . This post will specifically eschew talking about issues about the API renames in ROCm HIP – breaking source compatibility with CUDA quite needlessly.
This week I finally moved my gaming/Linux PC into my little office rack—it's that 2U box above the UPS at the bottom: I remembered seeing Linus Tech Tips' 4U build in a video a couple years ago—but he has a full 42U rack in his basement. I don't have that much space—just 2U (technically 3U if I wanted) in my little…
tl;dr: Use an old-fashioned USB 2.0 flash drive, format it FAT32, download the firmware, make sure it's named correctly, and use the motherboard's 'BIOS Flashback' option after powering off the computer. This past week, I devoted far too much time to the task of updating my brand new motherboard's BIOS. It started…
Ever wondered how cheap digital verniers are able to produce good precision at very low prices? I did, so I took one apart.
Table of Contents
Introduction Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a form of programmable hardware that has become inexpensive and accessible recently. I recently purchased a Digilent Basys 3 FPGA development…
Puya's 10-cent PY32 series is complicating the RISC-V narrative and has me doubting I'll ever reach for an 8-bit part again.
The solar kiln is based on the well know Virginia Tech design, adapted for my own needs and materials I could find easily on local hardware stores. Mine is a small one, with a gross storage space inside of about 1.5 m in length, 0.85 m wide and 0.65 high (~5’ x 2.75’ x 2’ ).
The ESP 32 was the most fun side project for me in 2022. For those who don’t know: the ESP32 is a small, cheap and wifi-enabled microchip. Many smart devices that you buy on Amazon have an ESP32 inside. It’s really amazing what you can do with a board that costs less than a good sandwich.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
...that was the question I asked my Dad, a radio engineer for many decades, who worked at the biggest AM station in St. Louis, KMOX. The station is approaching its centennial in 2025, as are—some YouTube commenters argue—its primary audience! I recorded that video during my convalescence at my parents' house (I am…
I am writing this memo to explain what happened to the case our NeXTCube Computer, Serial Number AA001032.
A few days ago, on a certain orange website, I came across an article about an improvised parallel printer capture device . This contains the line:
1MB and more
The ThinkPad as a server is back, this time with a couple of adjustments.
I always wanted to understand how a CPU works, how it transitions from one instruction to the next and makes a computer work. So I thought: let's implement one and run a C program on it.
