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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 474 posts.
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AMD Killed the Itanium (2005)
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Update on Samsung SSD Reliability
We have been very public about how reliable Samsung SSDs have been in the past, so we wanted to explain why we are now moving part of our line to Sabrent.
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WiFi: “beamforming” only begins to describe it (2014)
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
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Discovery could extend battery life by replacing tape that causes self‑discharge
Thanks to a discovery in a Dal lab, manufacturers of laptops and other tech devices now have an explanation for why the batteries that power their gadgets tend to lose some of their charge over time and a path forward to fixing the problem..
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Is AM radio dead?
...that was the question I asked my Dad, a radio engineer for many decades, who worked at the biggest AM station in St. Louis, KMOX. The station is approaching its centennial in 2025, as are—some YouTube commenters argue—its primary audience! I recorded that video during my convalescence at my parents' house (I am…
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Burning a NeXTCube (1993)
I am writing this memo to explain what happened to the case our NeXTCube Computer, Serial Number AA001032.
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The Parallel Port
A few days ago, on a certain orange website, I came across an article about an improvised parallel printer capture device . This contains the line:
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Calculators now emulated at Internet Archive
It's time to add another family of emulated older technology to the Internet Archive.The vast majority of platforms within what we call The Emularity happens because of the work of MAME Team, which has spent over 25 years adding support for tens of thousands of machines, platforms, and tools to their breathtaking…
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Inside the 1040ST
1MB and more
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ThinkPad as a Server: The Follow-Up
The ThinkPad as a server is back, this time with a couple of adjustments.
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How a CPU works: Bare metal C on my RISC-V toy CPU
I always wanted to understand how a CPU works, how it transitions from one instruction to the next and makes a computer work. So I thought: let's implement one and run a C program on it.
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Designing my own ASIC with tiny tapeout
First, what is an ASIC? An ASIC is an Application Specific Integrated Circuit which basically means that it is an Integrated Circuit on a single piece of silicon and its use is limited to a particu…
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How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine
Reverse engineering the kernel-mode authenticity check, and how Microsoft knows about your hacked/custom hard-drive.
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Hyperscale in your Homelab: The Compute Blade arrives
This is the Compute Blade, and I'm test driving it in a four-node cluster: I'm testing the Dev version, and @Merocle from Uptime Lab sent four Blades, a 3D-printed 4-bay case (a metal 1U rackmount enclosure is in the works), and two fan modules. He's been testing 40 of these in a rack at Jetbrains for months, and…
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A dozen USB chargers in the lab: Apple is good, but not quite the best (2012)
When you buy a USB charger, how do you know if you're getting a safe, high-quality charger for your money? You can't tell from the outside...
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Reverse-engineering the conditional jump circuitry in the 8086 processor
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978 and it had a huge influence on computing. I'm reverse-engineering the 8086 by examining t...
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Pwning the all Google phone with a non-Google bug
It turns out that the first “all Google” phone includes a non-Google bug. Learn about the details of CVE-2022-38181, a vulnerability in the Arm Mali GPU. Join me on my journey through reporting the vulnerability to the Android security team, and the exploit that used this vulnerability to gain arbitrary kernel code…
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ECC RAM should be a human right
I am now a staunch advocate for ECC RAM, after the events of last week. You see, over the last several weeks my main desktop workstation has been misbehaving, with occasional freezing and crashing. After some diagnostics I began to suspect a faulty RAM module, and sure enough, upon performing a quick run of memtest86…
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From Zero to main(): Bare metal C (2019)
A community and blog for embedded software makers
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Which GPU(s) to get for deep learning
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
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IBM Quantum System Two
IBM kicked off the IBM Quantum Summit 2022, announcing new breakthrough advancements in quantum hardware and software and outlining its pioneering vision for quantum-centric supercomputing.
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Hyundai Head Unit Hacking
Standard-class Gen5 navigation
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Glitching a microcontroller to unlock the bootloader
Back in the summer I was lucky enough to finagle my boss into letting me take Dmitry Nedospasov ( @nedos )’s hardware hacking training . In it I cut my teeth on using an FPGA to interface with target hardware. After implementing a UART we implemented a module that could parse part of Apple’s OneWire, used to negotiate…
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MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
Apple today announced the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max, Apple’s next-generation pro silicon.
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Homelab analog telephone exchange
An introduction to my MCU based fully featured analog telephone exchange, how I mounted it in my home lab powered with batteries for months of use
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Counting the transistors in the 8086 processor: it's harder than you might think
How many transistors are in Intel's 8086 processor? This seems like a straightforward question, but it doesn't have a straightforward answ...
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WInd3x, the iPod Bootrom exploit 10 years too late
This is a write-up of the wInd3x bootrom exploit affecting iPod Nanos from 3rd gen to 5th gen. A ready-made tool to use this exploit is available at github.com/freemyipod/wInd3x .