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Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
Just recently, there was a surge in traffic to my old legacy dial-up sounds pages. While I did my best with the equipment I had at the time to capture the sound of dial-up modems, I always knew tha…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 243 posts.
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The state of external retina displays
The monitor story for Apple computers in [nearly] 2022 is basically would you like garbage, or would you like to take out a home equity loan?
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Quick and dirty way to rip an eBook from Android
I recently purchased a book for my MSC which was only available via a crappy Android app. There was no obvious way to decrypt it to read on a more sensible device, so I resorted to the ancient art of screenscraping. This is a quick-and-dirty way to grab images of the pages and convert them to a standard PDF using…
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Reverse-engineering a tiny 1980s chip that plays Christmas tunes
For the holidays, I decapped a chip that plays three Christmas melodies. The UM66T melody chip from the 1980s was designed for application...
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Practical Transformer Winding (2010)
Instructions on how to design, calculate and build power transformers.
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Raspberry Pi holds its own against low-cost ARM NAS
Earlier this year, I pitted the $549 ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 NAS against a homebrew $350 Raspberry Pi CM4 NAS, and came to the (rather obvious) conclusion that the Lockerstor was better in almost every regard. Well, ASUSTOR introduced a new lower-cost NAS, the $329 Drivestor 4 Pro (model AS3304T—pictured above), and sent…
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Upgrading a motherboard’s BIOS/UEFI (the hard way)
A couple of weeks ago I found a really good deal on a Socket AM4 motherboard that supports the newest AMD Ryzen CPUs. The motherboard is an ASRock A520M/ac . It’s a very basic motherboard which doesn’t appear to be sold by any of the usual retailers anymore, but I couldn’t pass up on the deal, especially with the…
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There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
It took a while, but I finally managed to create my own Game Boy cartridge. With WiFi! At this point, it can only demo a simple telnet-style communication and access Wikipedia articles, but I am confident that I will showcase more in the future. For now, the interesting and surprisingly tricky part is how the thing…
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Pine64 and Radxa's new Pi CM4-compatible boards
Since the Raspberry Pi was introduced, hundreds of clones have adopted the Pi's form factor (from the diminutive Zero to the 'full size' model B). Often they have better hardware specs, and yet they remain a more obscure also-ran in that generation of Single Board Computer (SBC). So when I saw Radxa's CM3 and Pine64's…
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Fixing a Tiny Corner of the Supply Chain
No product gets built without at least one good supply chain war story – especially true in these strange times. Before we get into the details of the story, I feel it’s worth understanding a bit more about the part that caused me so much trouble: what it does, and why it’s so special.
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Apple’s Newest OLED Supplier
BOE Technology
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Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 4: how algorithms are implemented
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses two custom digital chips to generate sou...
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Yamaha DX7 reverse-engineering, part III: Inside the log-sine ROM
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer for 1980s pop music. It used two custom digital chips to generate so...
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Miniature 3456 LED Cube
For some reason, I’m intrigued by LEDs. Indeed, they can be found in pretty much all of my projects. I was recently inspired by one of Greg Davill’s projects, a miniature LED cube boasting a total of 3456 LEDs . After pondering about it for a while, I decided I’d attempt building one myself. This post describes the…
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Graviton2 and Graviton3
What do modern cloud workloads look like? And what does that have to do with new chip designs? I found these gems in Peter DeSantis's ReInve...
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ADSL works over wet string (2017)
Broadband services are a wonderful innovation of our time, using multiple frequency bands (hence the name) to carry signals over wires (us...
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Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags
Complex software is, to put it mildly, hard to get right (for details, see almost any other posting on this or any other security blog). Especially for gadgets that are rich with microphones, cameras, location and environmental sensors, and communication links (such as, you know, smartphones), errors and security…
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Turing Pi 2: 4 Raspberry Pi nodes on a mini ITX board
Last year I spent a bit of time building a Kubernetes cluster with the original Turing Pi. It was fun, and interesting, but ultimately the performance of the Compute Module 3+ it was designed around led me to running my homelab off some newer Pi 4 model B computers, which are at least twice as fast for almost…
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The Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's clever exponential circuit, reverse-engineered
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became extremely popular, defining the sound of 1980s pop music. Because micro...
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The Secret History of ATAPI
The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much less desirable, one might expect that there would have been some press…
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Mini-ITX Seaberry Adds 11 PCIe Slots to a Raspberry Pi
Since the Compute Module 4 came along last year, there have been a few projects that use it that make me do a double-take: They did what with a Pi? Alftel's Seaberry is a carrier board for the CM4 in the Mini ITX form factor that adds on eleven PCI Express slots: 1 x16 slot (with x1 lane) in the standard ITX location…
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The unbearable fussiness of the smart home
As we head into another gifting season and more and more connected devices make their way onto gift guides, I want to offer a cautionary note. The smart home is like a cat — mostly self-sufficient and nice to have, but also possessing a mind of its own that can lead to frustration and confusion […]
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Tilt-5 Was Magical
Introduction It was nice to get out and actually look through AR and VR displays at AWE 2021. I started to write about everything I saw at AWE, but to me Tilt-5 was such a standout that I decided t…
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Benchmarking the Apple M1 Max
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First stage POWER9 Firefox JIT passes tests
Yeah, so about that OpenPOWER Minimum Viable Product JavaScript JIT for Firefox. This happened (all timings from an unoptimized debug build ...
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Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop
I’d recently bought a new XPS13 7390 (non 2-in-1) laptop. I had bought the 8GB variant, how hard could it be to upgrade?