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Shmøergh Hog – The making of a simple analog synth
The making of a simple analog synth
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 313 posts.
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Intel's $475M error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvement...
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The Nvidia Way
Tae Kim's terrific new book on the story of Nvidia and Jensen Huang
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Homebrew Batteries
I am a simple enthusiast attempting to convey my love and enjoyment of radio, electronics, and computing and perhaps to inspire YOU to build something too.
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Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+
Sniffing USB HID traffic from the Stream Deck Plus to map its dial encoder and touchscreen events, building on the original Stream Deck reverse engineering.
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VPR: Nordic's First RISC-V Processor
VPR (pronounced “Viper”) is Nordic Semiconductor’s first RISC-V processor, landing in the new nRF54H and nRF54L lines of SoCs after their initial announcements in April and October of 2023 respectively. Readers of this blog are familiar with my long-running obsession interest in RISC-V (see my RISC-V Tips and RISC-V…
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Will that hub or dock slow your SSDs, or even make them faster?
How to connect a USB4 SSD to get better performance from an Intel Mac. Should you buy a Thunderbolt 4 hub, or a Thunderbolt 5 dock? Do any of these live ‘up to’ their claimed performanc…
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The RAM Myth
The RAM myth is a belief that modern computer memory resembles perfect random-access memory. Cache is seen as an optimization for small data: if it fits in L2, it’s going to be processed faster; if it doesn’t, there’s nothing we can do. Most likely, you believe that code like this is the fastest way to shard data (I’m…
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The Power Mac 4400
In November 1996, Apple released the Power Macintosh 4400 with a starting price of $1,725. Also sold as the Power Macintosh 7220, it’d be easy to write this machine off as just another grain of sand on the beige beach that was Apple’s product line in the 1990s. I mean, just look at this thing, pictured here with an…
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Apple Watch with Android
Making Apple Watch functional with Android.
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Nokia 5110 – Back from the Dead (2022)
I loved my Nokia 5110 and I wonder if it was possible to breathe new life into this long-shelved and still-memed mobile phone. As it turns out, not only is it possible, but it's going to be a lot easier than I anticipated.
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Tenstorrent and the State of AI Hardware Startups
Semi-custom silicon is a bigger problem than Nvidia.
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I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper
How I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper
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Energy-Harvesting Electronic Holiday Card 2024
We're delighted to share our electronic creation with you this holiday season, six long years after the previous one. The theme this time around is "powered by the holiday spirit", and it's an exercise in energy harvesting.
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Evolving my ergonomic setup (or, my laptop with extra steps)
My computer setup attracts attention when I'm out and about. This has two effects: engineers [1] ask me about it, and everyone else ignores me. These effects are not undesirable, but further testing is required.
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Replace Philips Hue Automation with Home Assistant's
This is the 3rd post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series. I’m the happy owner of a couple of Philips Hue connected lights for a some years. Some of them are colored, some of them regular. In addition, I bought a sensor to go along with the light I installed in my toilets: it turns on automatically when…
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Librebooting the ThinkPad T480
Muh freedumbs on muh hardware!
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The marvelous disappearing capacitor
The performance of photodiode amplifiers can be improved in a clever way.
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AmpereOne: Cores Are the New MHz
Cores are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket! Amazon built Graviton 4, Google built Axiom, but if you want your own massive Arm server, Ampere's the only game in town. And fastest Arm CPU in the world is…
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They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard
Nothing says ‘80s pop’ like a DX7.
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My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
Photography is arguably my oldest hobby. I’ve loved taking photos for as long as I can remember. I reflected on my first encounter with digital photography in 2003 in a recent post, but I’m old enough…
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Raspberry Pi boosts Pi 5 performance with SDRAM tuning
tl;dr Raspberry Pi engineers tweaked SDRAM timings and other memory settings on the Pi, resulting in a 10-20% speed boost at the default 2.4 GHz clock. I of course had to test overclocking, which got me a 32% speedup at 3.2 GHz! Changes may roll out in a firmware update for all Pi 5 and Pi 4 users soon. My quest for…
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Programming the C64 with Visual Studio Code
How to program the Commodore 64 in BASIC, Assembly or C using Microsoft Visual Studio Code on Mac, Windows and Linux!
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Accessing a DRM Framebuffer to display an image
To test if a display interface works we often don't want to use a huge framework like GTK or Qt. This article shows an easy way on how we can use a framebuffer directly on a DRM graphics driver under Linux.
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Making Screenshots of Test Equipment Old and New
Last year, I created Fake Parallel Printer , a tool to capture the output of the parallel printer port of old-ish test equipment so that it can be converted into screenshots for blog posts etc.
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Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US
Seemingly, at the drop of a hat the morning of Friday, Nov 15th, Deye-branded inverters across the US were intentionally bricked.
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MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project 1974 (2016)
1974 MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project, we describe some of Marc’s design, the frames he and Harriet built in Shawn Buckleys IAP course, and how these played a role in the Klein vs. Cannondale patent litigation in the mid-1980s.