1261
A bug fix in the 8086 microprocessor, revealed in the die's silicon
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
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1262
Converting a WW2-Era Engine Cowl Flaps Indicator into a USB Peripheral
General Electric 8DJ4PBV quad engine cowling indicator with PIC16F1459 and MCP41HV31-502 board to its right. A Microsoft Surface in the background is controlling the indicators via USB.
1263
New two-factor authenticator: Commodore 64
Multi-factor authentication is ripe for disruption. SMS 2FA is inherently defective. Phone authenticators get stolen. Security tokens get lo...
1264
I over-engineered a Fast Fourier Transform for Arduino
PhD student in Photophysics
1265
More than you cared to know about PC fans
Fans, an active cooling element, move air in a system. Heat must be removed from the site of its production, and from the system as a whole. A fan increases heat convection with surrounding air via airflow. Air is at its highest pressure immediately in front of the fan, and at lowest pressure immediately behind it.
1266
Disassembling an Amazon Blink Mini camera
I used Ghidra twice, so that means I'm officially an expert in reverse engineering
1267
A secret Apple Silicon extension to accommodate an Intel 8080 artifact
Lately I’ve been spending time on Mastodon for … reasons. Here’s my link: https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot. In my recently active time on the platform, I have found quite a few excellent retrocomputing-related posts by creative members of the community. One such post, … Continue reading →
1268
Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended
The Game Boy Pocket SP
1269
Your Next Smart Home Device is a $30 Used Kindle
If you know how to use a command line, you can build one
1270
The unusual bootstrap drivers inside the 8086 microprocessor chip
The 8086 microprocessor is one of the most important chips ever created; it started the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and ...
1271
Building an e-ink weather display for our home
Building a battery powered e-ink weather forecast display for our home. This was a fun Raspberry Pi project.
1272
Why is Rosetta 2 fast?
Rosetta 2 is remarkably fast when compared to other x86-on-ARM emulators. I’ve spent a little time looking at how it works, out of idle curiosity, and found it to be quite unusual, so I figur…
1273
The Sad Saga of the 500 MHz Power Mac G4
In August 1999, Apple announced the first Power Mac G4: 1 The Power Mac G4 is powered by the revolutionary new PowerPC G4 chip architected by Apple, Motorola and IBM, and is the first personal computer in history to deliver supercomputer-level performance of over one billion floating-point operations per second. The…
1274
My DIY ergonomic travel workstation with aluminum and magnets
Ever since moving from NYC to SF to work at Anthropic I’ve been visiting NYC and working remotely quite often. So I designed myself a travel workstation that lets me get the best of ergonomics and packability.
1275
Recreating sci-fi terminals using VHS
I heard about VHS recently. It’s a tool for creating recordings of command-line tools, so you can create little demos and tutorials about how to use them. You can write a script to run comman…
1276
Modernizing my 1980s sound system
Where the last two posts were primarily about software ( Navidrome and beets , respectively), this post will be more about hardware (and a bit of software to control it). Hopefully it’ll be useful to others with older sound hardware, especially those who are compelled (as I am) to avoid buying a “connected” device…
1277
Audio CD ripping – optical drive accuracy listing
Tech-Tutorials, Howtos and buying advice2022208 points161 commentscited by 3Hardware & Electronics details
Audio CD ripping - optical drive accuracy listing
1278
Galois field instructions on 2021 CPUs
CPUs like to operate on data types such as uint8_t , uint16_t , uint32_t , and uint64_t . These data types can be viewed as integers modulo 2 8 , 2 16 , 2 32 , and 2 64 respectively. Addition and multiplication can be defined on these integers modulo 2 N in a way which is familiar to most people; for example, in…
1279
Creating a pick and place control board with the RP2040
A look into the hardware design of Starfish
1280
Pieca: A Raspberry Pi Camera System for Leica M Mount Lenses
Taking pictures and geeking out over cameras was one of my first hobbies starting with an old Olympus point and shoot, I then moved up to a DSLR upgrading as new and exciting technology became acce…
1281
Testing Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023
Last week Microsoft started selling their $599 Windows Dev Kit 2023, formerly known as 'Project Volterra'. I got my hands on one after a little bit of a shipping delay, and promptly started tearing it down to see what's inside. You can click here to browse the entire Twitter thread where I posted pictures of the box…
1282
Cache Associativity
Consider a strided incrementing loop over an array of size $N=2^{21}$ with a fixed step size of 256:
1283
I finally found a use case for my Raspberry Pi Model B+
I take a severely underpowered computer and make it do something useful.
1284
Classic 50mm “Normal” Lens
So, there you are, the proud parents of a beautiful new baby, and you can hardly contain your excitement as you unwrap that new 35mm camera kit you bought to document your child’s early years. Although you’ve had a point-and-shoot camera for a while, you wanted to step up to a “real” camera for the kind of quality…
1285
Childhood toys: 40 years on 2-XL works just fine
Sitting and literally gathering dust on a shelf has been my childhood 2-XL toy . A few years ago I turned it on and it seemed to work but th...
1286
The Talos II, Blackbird POWER9 systems support tagged memory
Nowadays, there is increasing interest in adding tagged memory functionality to CPU architectures. Such architectures associate one or more tag bits with each quantum of a system's memory. There are many motivations for this ability to associate “metadata” with individual memory words, but one of the most clear is the…
1287
Linux 6.1 on NanoPi R4S – On fixing SD-card support, Heisenbugs and Rabbit Holes
This little ARM64 single-board computer dragged me into the world of device trees, voltage regulators, and one of the worst Heisenbugs I encountered so far.
1288
I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily computer
For over a year now, I use a Raspberry Pi 4 (with 8GB of RAM) as my daily desktop computer. I browse the internet, read and send e-mails, program software, edit photos, create images, watch Youtube videos and play games on it. Without any significant problems.
1289
My thoughts on the Framework laptop
Like many others in the open source community, I was very intrigued by the idea of the Framework laptop , a modular laptop designed to be repairable and upgradable. With a bunch of designs, schematics and documentation released as open source and a product that's legitimately competitive with the proprietary…
1290
The mainframe in your pocket running minicomputer software
Running Minicomputer Software