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What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic one?
This blog post shows how to create a reliable and realistic-looking malicious USB key that can be used in a drop attack.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,046 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
2492
Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 9: tracing a crash through software and hardware
Last week, after months of restoration, we finally got the vintage Xerox Alto computer to boot ( details ) and run programs. However, so...
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How I built a keyboard by hand
I had spare mechanical keyboard switches and keycaps from other keyboard projects, and I wanted to see if it would be feasible to build a keyboard using only hand tools.
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FreeRTOS meets Rust
The Rust ecosystem has made some cool progress on the embedded development front since my last article . Let’s take a look how we can build a much more ergonomical and safe API to one of the more popular real time operating systems - FreeRTOS - with a full testing and continous integration setup.
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 8: it boots
We've been restoring a Xerox Alto from the 1970s for several months, and we finally got it to boot and run some programs! There's still so...
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How to run C programs on the BeagleBone's PRU microcontroller
This article describes how to write C programs for the BeagleBone's microcontrollers. The BeagleBone Black is an inexpensive, credit-card...
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data
In the previous Xerox Alto restoration session , we got the disk working, but the system didn't boot. After much investigation, I discove...
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Weirdly broken Wi-Fi access points
And how to work around one kind on Mac OSX
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto, Day 6: Fixed a chip, data read from disk
In today's Xerox Alto restoration session we investigated why the disk drive isn't working and found a failed chip. With this chip repaire...
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One-bit Computing at 60 Hertz
an extremely simple processor design
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Tiny Lisp Computer
This article describes a self-contained computer with its own display and keyboard interface, based on an ATmega328, that you can program in Lisp. You can use it to run programs that interface to components such as LEDs and push-buttons via the I/O pins, read the analogue inputs, and operate external devices via the…
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3D Printed Camera
The design of the camera body evolved from a simplified massing of functional elements to refinements based on ergonomics and scale, as I learned more about the strength of the material.
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Getting started with Raspberry Pi – Building a Digital Photo Frame
What you can do with a tiny $35 computer and how I built a digital photo frame
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NESPi – Mini NES Classic Raspberry Pi Games Console
My blog about making and modding, 3D printing, electronics and other experiments.
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How many x86 instructions are there?
It’s surprisingly hard to give a good answer (the question was raised in this article). It depends on how you count, and the details are interesting (to me anyway). To not leave you hanging: …
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Why do CPUs have multiple cache levels?
This is a reader question from “jlforrest” that seems worth answering in more detail than just a single sentence: I understand the need for a cache but I don’t understand why there are …
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Macbook charger teardown: Complexity inside Apple's power adapter (2015)
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 4: What's running on the system
This post describes our continuing efforts to restore a Xerox Alto. We checked that the low-level microcode tasks are running correctly a...
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Lumen: Auto brightness based on screen contents
Lumen is a menu bar application for macOS that magically sets the screen brightness based on your screen contents.
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Building a software-defined radio from scratch
The FreeSRP is an affordable software-defined radio (SDR) I decided to design because there were no existing options that filled the gap between the $300 and relatively narrow bandwidth and low resolution HackRF and the better performing USRP s you can get for about $700. Of course it will be fully open source, but…
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Verifying ARM processors against the official ARM specification
Researcher at Intel
2519
64-bit ARM desktop hardware?
Soon there will be four years since I started working on AArch64 architecture. Lot of software things changed during that time. Lot in a hardware too. But machines availability still sucks badly. In 2012 all we had was software model. It was slow, terribly slow. Common joke was AArch64 developers …
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The Raspberry Pi Has Revolutionized Emulation
Every geek goes through a phase where they discover emulation. It’s practically a rite of passage. I think I spent most of my childhood – and a large part of my life as a young adult – desperately wishing I was in a video game arcade. When I finally obtained my