The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
From home temperature monitoring to a Kubernetes cluster hosting a live Drupal website, I have a lot of experience running Raspberry Pis. I've used every model through the years, and am currently using a mix of A+, 2 model B, and 4 model B Pis. The 3 model B+ was the first generation that had me concerned more about…
FM radio headphones were given out at the door. Each set was tuned beforehand to receive a broadcast from my programmed station. Visitors were then invited to walk around the room, contemplating the artifacts of the exhibit.
I spent my childhood in France, playing a lot of soccer and watching way too much TV. In the 80s, there were three channels available. Two of them, Antenne 2 and FR3, were state funded and boring while TF1 was privatized and offered plenty of Japanese cartoons. My generation grew up with Captain Tsubasa, Saint Seiya…
What is electricity? This question is impossible to answer because the word " Electricity " has several contradictory meanings. These different meanings are incompatible, and the contradictions confuse everyone. If you don't understand electricity, you're not alone. Even teachers, engineers, and scientists have a hard…
This article is part of a series: This article How I moved my setup from a Mac to a Linux laptop Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop. The grass is not greener on the other side The M1 Macbook Air, one year
After seeing it in action at FOSDEM (from afar, as the crowd was too large), I decided to buy a Pinebook Pro for personal use. From the beginning, the intention was to use it for pkgsrc development, with NetBSD as the main OS. It was finally delivered on Thursday, one day earlier than promised, so I thought I would…
For a long time when I’ve wanted to test the latency of computers and UIs I’ve used the Is It Snappy app with my iPhone’s high speed camera to count frames between when I press a key and when the screen changes. However the problem with that is it takes a while to find the exact frames you want, which is annoying when…
As I was debugging a wireless mouse based on a 2.4 GHz proprietary protocol, I wanted to detect the transmitted signals. Note that I purposefully wrote “detect”: It was sufficient to see how often the transmission occurred (and if at all) and whether the link was unidirectional – i.e., only the mouse transmits and the…
Floating-point numbers are very useful for scientific programming, but early microprocessors only supported integers directly. 1 Although...
Taking a second look at the newly introduced mask registers, this time with the benefit of a SKX die shot from Fritzchens Fritz.
A few months ago, after my System76 Galago Pro had its second experience with a dead/swelling batery, I decided that it was time to replace it. On February 15th, I ordered a Dell Latitude 7390.
TSMC showed the power of modularization, and now they are core to the U.S. national security strategy.
T The problem Every once in a while I get involuntarily dragged into heat...
Intel introduced the 8087 chip in 1980 to improve floating-point performance on the 8086 and 8088 processors, and it was used with the ori...
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
How I found a vintage Apple IIe computer on the sidewalk and brought it back to life
Blog about vintage computers and homebrewing computers.
After anki trashed my history, uploaded the trashed history to the sync server, and then repeatedly re-synced the trashed history every time I tried to restore from backup, I wrote my own spaced repetition app. It reads input from a markdown file, asks questions in the terminal and stores state in a json file. I wrote…
I saw an ad for a tiny chip 1 that provides 5 volts 2 of isolated power: You feed 5 volts in one side, and get 5 volts out the other si...
Iran’s new military satellite, NOUR 01, most interesting fact may not be that it resembles a college engineering experiment but rather that it may have a connection to a Mexican military payl…
I spent last week-end getting accustomed to CUDA and SIMT programming. It was a prolific time ending up with a Business Card Raytracer running close to 700x faster [1] , from 101s to 150ms. This pleasant experience was a good pretext to spend more time on the topic and learn about the evolution of Nvidia architecture…
The Nintendo Game Boy Color is a handheld game console that was released in 1998. It uses an audio amplifier chip to drive the internal s...
A prototype Raspberry Pi dashboard to save me talking to my smart assistant.
Last year, I was lucky enough to be gifted a Gameboy Color in great shape. Apart from its intended gameplay features, I also wanted to try and build something meaningful with it, so I made this application to control my air-conditioner over its existing, reverse-engineered infrared protocol.
A common myth about USB keyboards is that they can only support 6-key rollover, and not report more than 6 keys being pressed at a time. In fact, this is wholly untrue; the USB HID device class can support full N-key rollover (NKRO). While keyboards which purport to support USB NKRO are now common, some of them have…
The iPhone SE is an excellent value if you’re fine with the smaller display and Touch ID instead of Face ID. It’s an astoundingly good value if you flat-out prefer the smaller form factor and familiar Touch ID experience.
