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New Macbook Pro power efficiency and time remaining
A look at the impressive real-world power efficiency of Apple's newer MacBook Pro models and what it means for battery life.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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Analysis of Soviet smoke detector plutonium
Technical nuclear forensics-themed discussion of the age, activity, and grade of plutonium found in a KI-1 Soviet smoke detector.
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A DIY M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine
This project, the M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine, was on my to-do list for a long time. I finally managed to complete the project after working on it for several months in my free time. The machine uses an Arduino microcontroller, stepper motors, an RGB colour sensor and 3D-printed parts to sort several types of…
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Retina iMac owners can greatly improve graphics performance of many applications
Hmph! Not sure which one is "correct" there... hmm... If you use kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedFirst for the CGBitmapContext rather than kCGImageAlphaNoneFirst, then it looks closer to the original, maybe. ? Also other caveat: NSBitmapImageRep can't seem to deal with the ARGB format either, so if you use that you need to…
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My Next Mac Mini
I think I might be getting old, but it took me completely by surprise that the Mac Mini we use in our lounge room as our TV was 6 years old. It's been such a...
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I returned my 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar
tl;dr: After two weeks of use, I returned my 2016 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and bought one with Function Keys instead. Read on for detailed Battery stress tests, performance tests, and an exploration of how Apple's botched this year's Pro lineup. I've owned almost every generation of Mac desktop and laptop…
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New Ubuntu-based Precision line-up
Update: Precision 7520 and 7720 available as of March 28; Dell Precision 5720, a 27” All-in-One available as of April 18. Today I am excited to announce the next generation of our Ubuntu-based Pre…
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Inside the 74181 ALU chip
What's inside a TTL chip? To find out, I opened up a 74181 ALU chip, took high-resolution die photos, and reverse-engineered the chip. 1 In...
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Cheap and Painless eGPU Thrills on a 2013 MacBook Pro
Alexei's pile o'stuff, featuring writing on software development, travel, photography, and more.
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Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development
After several years with my Dell Latitude E6400 I was searching for a new, more powerful Linux machine for my coding and performance tweaking tasks. And although the Dell XPS line sounded interesti…
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33C3 talk on dissecting cellular modems
Yesterday, together with Holger 'zecke' Freyther, I co-presented at 33C3 about Dissectiong modern (3G/4G) cellular modems. This presentation covers some of our recent explorations into a specific type
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μWWVB: A Tiny WWVB Station
μWWVB is a watch stand that automatically sets the time on atomic wristwatches where regular WWVB signal isn't available.
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Die photos and analysis of the revolutionary 8008 microprocessor, 45 years old
Intel's groundbreaking 8008 microprocessor was first produced 45 years ago. 1 This chip, Intel's first 8-bit microprocessor, is the ancesto...
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Amazon Dash Button's Wireless Audio Configuration
Update: I’ve learned a bit more and as such, see the bottom of the post for an update. I’ve been slow to update this but now that it’s seeming to be gaining a lot of traffic (lead…
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Cat-proofing a cat feeding machine
Furiosa’s Cat Feeder
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Wolfenstein 3D – Gameboy cartridge with co-processor
Source code and hardware schematics are available on Github: https://github.com/agranlund/wolf
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Practical Reverse Engineering Part 5 – Digging Through the Firmware
Fifth post in the series, covering how to obtain GPL source code, disassemble MIPS binaries with tools like IDA, and search the firmware for a default WiFi p...
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Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
I'm increasingly of the view that both my time and my sanity are worth more and more as the years progress. Particularly in my independent life, it really can be that black and white - if I can't work, it costs me money. Plus, I want to be happy
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Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has transistors
Microprocessors have become immensely more complex thanks to Moore's Law, but one thing that has been lost is the ability to fully understan...