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The Whitworth Three Plates Method (2017)
A visual step-by-step guide to Joseph Whitworth’s three-plate method for creating very flat reference surfaces.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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Pressing YubiKeys
If you work in tech, you probably have a YubiKey. I have this one, the YubiKey 5C Nano:
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Durability: NVMe Disks
Durability is the guarantee that data can be accessed after a failure. It seems like this should be very simple: either your system provides durable data storage, or it does not. However, durability is not a binary yes/no property, and instead should be defined as the kinds of failures you want your data to survive…
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Reverse engineering a Hit Clip (2013)
It’s hard to see a child outside today without some kind of iDevice pumping high fidelity 192kbps stereo lossless audio into their shiny white headphones, but BACK IN MY DAY, the iPod hadn’t been invented yet. Pickings were slim. Walkmen were outdated, CD players were pricey and would skip if bumped around despite…
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We need physical audio kill switches
PARDON!?
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Raspberry Pi – UASP, Trim, and Boot Performance via USB
In the past few weeks, I reviewed USB drive performance on the Raspberry Pi 4, and the importance of UASP support for USB drive performance. Both posts generated great discussion, and there were three things I wanted to cover in this follow-up, namely: Which drives support UASP Real-world performance benchmarks TRIM…
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Precursor – A mobile, open source electronics platform
Precursor (pre·cur·sor | \ pri-ˈkər-sər): 1. one that precedes or gives rise to; a predecessor; harbinger 2. a pocketable open development board
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Backdoors and other vulnerabilities in HiSilicon based hardware video encoders
Serious vulnerabilities (including a backdoor) in IPTV/H.264/H.265 video encoders based on HiSilicon hi3520d hardware.
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I overslept because iOS 14 disabled my alarm
I’m using the iOS Bedtime feature for years now. With yesterday’s iOS 14 update the feature got moved from the Clock app to the Health app. Unfortunately the migration is done by disabling your existing alarm and showing a button to open the Health app to set it up again. I woke up late and well rested today.
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Reverse-engineering the first FPGA chip, the XC2064
A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can implement arbitrary digital logic, anything from a microprocessor to a video generator or crypt...
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Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.
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Hacking Ethernet out of Fibre Channel cards
This story, like another in the past , started as an eBay purchase that I would soon regret. I was scrolling through my favorite eBay supplier when I found a listing titled Job Lot Of Roughly 350 Various Network Cards . This of course piqued my interest. Some close photo inspection identified a whole load of cards in…
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Which GPUs to get for deep learning
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
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A floppy-disk Walkman using a Raspberry Pi
I have built the most inconvenient way of playing music! It is lo-fi awfulness and cyberpunk grungy. Thanks! I hate it! Ingredients Raspberry Pi USB floppy drive Audio Cable / Headphones USB Battery WHY?!?! As I discussed yesterday, it's possible to fit half an hour of speech on a single floppy disk. The best band in…
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8086 Microcode Disassembled
Recently I realised that, as part of his 8086 reverse-engineering series, Ken Shirriff had posted online a high resolution photograph of the 8086 die with the metal layer removed . This was something I have been looking for for some time, in order to extract and disassemble the 8086 microcode. I had previously found…
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How I built a keyboard/video/mouse switch for my two 4k monitors
How I built a Keyboard/Video/Mouse switch for my two 4K monitors for $30.
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Inside the HP Nanoprocessor
The Nanoprocessor is a mostly-forgotten processor developed by Hewlett-Packard in 1974 1 as a microcontroller 2 for their products. Stra...
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CERN at Home: Building a Particle Detector
What do you do when you’re stuck at home with a 16-year-old son during a pandemic lockdown? Well, the first answer is that you build a gaming PC. That was a good project with a lot of incentives to complete, but that also meant it was soon over. So, what next? I spotted a post about an outreach project from CERN to…
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Gerät 32620: the machine that powered numerous number stations
A few years ago, I first stumbled over some recordings of number stations and started reading up on their history. For most of them, we have pretty good guesses who ran them and for what purpose. One example is the Gongs and Chimes Station , known for its melody that got increasingly creepy over the years, the more…
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TSMC Builds a Dedicated 28nm Fab for Sony Orders
IFNews reports that TSMC will build a OEM production line exclusively for Sony to produce high-end CIS in 28nm process at the Nanke 14B fab...
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Firefox 80 and my confusion over its hardware accelerated video on Linux
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…
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A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
One of the three basic circuit elements just got a lot smaller for the very first time, in what promises to be a trillion-dollar…
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Who needs a case? The 3D Printed Mil-Plastic is here
Short, medium, and long form tech projects. Detailed photos and build logs with benefits for paid subscribers.
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