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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,041 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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I toured Unitree's factory. I'm more bullish on the West
Everyone thinks China's robot factories are automated. They aren't. The robots are Chinese; the robots that make robots will be Western.
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The Hackintosh Reborn
Almost a decade ago, I released a hackintosh guide on running macOS 10.14 through a VM with an x86 host. A "Hackintosh" is the feat of running macOS on non-Apple hardware, and has a history dating back to the late 1980s. At the time KVM and PCI
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Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 3: Bad Update Improvements
Improving the Xbox 360 Bad Update exploit to trigger nearly instantaneously with near 100% success rate.
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Porting Android 16 to my blind mother's keypad phone
two school nights, a pile of bootloops and one homemade rom later, my mother's phone is still e-waste. just faster
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macOS 27 does not support CoreStorage volumes
macOS 15 Sequoia had a hard time with CoreStorage – and thus encrypted HFS+ volumes – since it deprecated both technologies and callously crippled some important tools for working with them, but nonetheless it mostly still worked. While I’d often – but not always – have to manually unlock one of my HFS+ volumes – but…
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My Favourite Laptop
I’m not a big owner of things, but the best laptop I’ve ever owned is a roughed-up 2015 Thinkpad X250.
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Jailbreaking my car's navigation system just so I can change the time
I shouldn't have to be doing any of this, but at least it's fun.
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My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii
So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired…
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Qwenputer: A functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5
I compiled a RISC-V CPU into Qwen 3.5 4B's weights, using its Gated DeltaNet layers as RAM. It runs C and MicroPython inside the forward passes, and Qwen uses it for exact arithmetic.
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Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
Device tree files point to a Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W with the Pi 4’s BCM2711 chip and a cut-down Pi 4 Model A.
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Simple circuits can create complex behaviors
How simple circuits can create complex behaviors
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Getting debug access on a Brother printer over Telnet
As it turns out, the Brother NC-8700w Command Console is more interesting than it first appears.
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SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller
An accelerated FAST feature detector for the ESP32-S3 leveraging 128-bit SIMD instructions, achieving ~2x the performance of the reference implementation.
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The Curse of Soldered RAM
The trend for soldered on RAM in modern laptops is truely evil especially in these current trying times of shortage induced high prices. I normally run 2 laptops, one for personal stuff and one for…
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I Built a Stereo Vision Board for Hardware Hackers
This article was written entirely by a human, for humans. I tend to get excited about certain chips. This time, it was a microprocessor: The Rockchip …
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The Secret Life of Circuits is now in stock everywhere
For the past couple of weeks, you could get my latest book — The Secret Life of Circuits — directly from the publisher.
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Way to Play Super Mario 64: On Apple Vision Pro
Super Mario 64 becomes a living diorama on Apple Vision Pro. Each level sits on your real table, and you walk around it while you play with a game controller. You are the camera: lean in for a closer look, or step around the table to see Mario from any side.
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The Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 808...
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Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
Gauntlet now has a case, it's 3D printed and there's a few bits I need to adjust, but for a first go I'm really pleased…
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How to Train Your Robot
The enormous advance in AI capabilities over the last several years has in large part been driven by the availability of vast amounts of training data.
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I electrified my push scooter with a power drill
My blog about my project cars and other contraptions
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It took me nine years to hack my Xbox 360
I purchased a Matrix CoolRunner Rev D back in 2017. This little chip is called a glitcher and it’s a type of modchip. Its sole purpose, the reason it was designed, is to deliver a short pulse of energy (~ 100 nanoseconds) to an Xbox 360 Console.
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Tapo (Rust/Python library) now speaks TP-Link's TPAP protocol
tapo now logs in over the TPAP protocol, so the Third-Party Compatibility switch in the Tapo app can stay off. Also new: H200 and H500 camera hubs with recording downloads, and plug schedules and timers.
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Using Blu-ray M-Disk as backup of last resort
In my previous blog post I talked about how I bought a Blu-ray drive and a couple of M-Discs to use it for long-term archival backups.
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Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?
How I massively over-engineered a trivial problem again because I just can't help myself
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The Forgetful CPU (Linux on M4)
This blog post goes into quite some detail about how I first booted Linux on my M4 Mac mini. I encourage you to look up terms and concepts you don’t know, since I cannot explain all the background in this post ;)
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Phyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display
One of nature's beautiful patterns captured in dancing lights
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Reverse-engineering the Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC
I hope you're not tired of the 8087, because I have another article about Intel's floating-point chip. 1 In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087...