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Reverse-engineering an unusual IBM modem board from 1965
The vintage IBM circuit board below has a large metal block on it that caught my attention, so I investigated it in detail. It turns out t...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
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Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off
Wireless and firmware hacking, PhD life, Technology
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Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
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Apple AirTag Bug Enables ‘Good Samaritan’ Attack
The new $30 AirTag tracking device from Apple has a feature that allows anyone who finds one of these tiny location beacons to scan it with a mobile phone and discover its owner’s phone number if the AirTag has been set to lost mode. But according to new research, this same feature can be abused to redirect the Good…
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I bricked then recovered my reMarkable 2
Let me start by saying that the reMarkable 2 is a great device. I’ve wanted something like this for a long time: a relatively open device that runs Linux with an eInk screen and the ability to write on that screen with a pen. The reMarkable 2 delivers: I can ssh into it, and there’s a whole bunch of people writing…
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Teaching a cheap ethernet switch new tricks (2019)
Ethernet rules everything around us, a large proportion of our systems communicate to each other with ethernet somewhere in the line. And the fast pace race to the bottom for embedded systems means that almost all network equipment is smart to some degree these days.
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iPhone 13 Pro camera review: Tanzania
The iPhone 13 Pro camera across southern Tanzania — macro, the longer telephoto, and Cinematic mode, from ants to helicopters.
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Raspberry Pi KVMs Compared: TinyPilot and Pi-KVM v3
In a strange coincidence, the authors of TinyPilot and Pi-KVM both emailed me within a week of each other and asked if I'd be interested in one of their KVM devices. Michael Lynch, founder of Tiny Pilot, said he'd used some of my Ansible work in building the TinyPilot update system, and Maxim Devaev, of Pi-KVM, liked…
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A different kind of keyboard
I’ve always been attracted to chording keyboards in theory, but I lack whatever childhood musical training is required to wrap my fingers around them. So I made something else: an arpeggio keyboard. Peggi is an eight-key keyboard that fits on the back of your phone. While chording keyboards require you to press…
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The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've used
This month marks the publication of "The Actual Star," a new, wildly ambitious, wildly successful novel by Monica Byrne, spanning 3,000 years of history from the ancient Maya to a distant future.
1603
More Casio Watch Mods
Hey everyone, it's been a while. Hope you're all doing well. Today I want to show you some more watch related stuff I've been working on.
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Rust on the MOS 6502: Beyond Fibonacci
On August 15th, the following answer showed up on the Retrocomputing Stack Exchange site :
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Alexa leaks private wishlists
This morning, my wife noticed that Alexa was insistently flashing its little blue lights. "Alexa... Notifications?" "You have one notification. An item on your wishlist has dropped in price. The … is now only £…" And that's how my wife found out what I planned to get her for her birthday! What happened to cause this?…
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Eyeway's Retina-Tracking Foveated Display
Introduction This article is part 3 on EyeWay Vision’s (EyeWay) foveated laser scanning display and follows up on Part 1 that discussed the technology, and Part 2 that showed through-the-opti…
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A Summary of Electronics
A summary of electronics that explains in a basic but comprehensive way the specialties of electronics and the most employed terms.
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How strong would a magnetic field have to be to kill you?
There’s a great joke in Futurama, the cartoon comedy show, about a horror movie for robots. In the movie, a planet of robots is terrorized by a giant “non-metallic being” (a mons…
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Monitoring my home's air quality with AirGradient's DIY sensor
A few months ago, I found this Hacker News post about the AirGradient DIY Air Quality Monitor. I had already been considering buying an AirThings Wave Plus sensor to monitor my home's CO2 levels, but the high price and limited 'ownership' of the data coming from it turned me off. So I built two AirGradient DIY air…
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M1 Icestorm cores can still perform well
What are the penalties in real-world use for running your code on Icestorm cores, using around 10% of the power used by Firestorms?
1613
Cat Automatic Sprayer
If you have a cat, you know that sometimes his instincts push it to eat green eatable-looking plants, whatever they are, and whatever the consequences may be.
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My MacBook Pro had over 10k USD in repairs
I treat my MacBook Pro laptop very well. It barely has a scratch and it’s never had any accidental drops or damage. Even so, my 4 years of owning it has resulted in:
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Home Lab Hardware Guide
My home lab in a 12U rack as of March 2026. What is a Home Lab? Think of a home lab as a place where you can fail in the privacy of your own home. As
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Tesla Project Dojo Overview
A couple of days back, Ganesh Venkataramanan, leader of the Tesla Dojo project, announced the Dojo machine learning training system. It’s an unusually network rich, power dense, and memory light design. I’ve summarized the architecture of the system below but I found three aspects of the system particularly…
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Adventures using and repairing an X131e laptop from 2011
This article covers several repairs, one including reverse engineering the BIOS to allow replacement parts. Feel free to scroll down and skip to this content.
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286 vs. 386SX
The 386sx wasn't much of an upgrade from the 286, but was popular for a time. Let's take a look at the 286 vs 386sx, and what the SX offered.
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