The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 460 posts.
I built a scriptable 3D game engine for the Nintendo DS so you can write and run games directly on the console itself. Written in C using libnds , it compiles to a 100KB .nds ROM that runs at 60 FPS . Features a touch-based code editor on the bottom screen and real-time 3D rendering on the top screen. Ships with a…
We look back at our records for 2025 to highlight specific brands and models of workstation computer components that we found to be exceptionally reliable.
Recently this post from @Merocle caught my eye: I'm fixing my iFixit soldering station. I haven't used it for a long time and the battery has gone overdischarge. I hope it will come back to life. Unfortunately, there are no replacements available for sale at the moment. Devices with built-in rechargeable batteries…
I keep designing physical parts for our robots. Motor mounts, sensor brackets, wheel hubs. Every time, the workflow is the same: open a GUI CAD program, click a
For April First, a guide to replace everything with 555 ICs.
Apple today unveiled the new AirTag, now with an expanded finding range and a louder speaker.
If hyperscalers and chip companies don’t build up a TSMC competitor they are set to forego billions of dollars in revenue and stunt the AI revolution.
Let's look at this little gizmo Sony produced in the early 1990s.
Chronicles of a bad idea. Or how I designed a systolic array with in-silicon debug infrastructure from scratch in under two weeks, and taped it out on Global Foundry 180 nm though a Tiny Tapeout experimental shuttle.
That cheapo cable you bought online? Probably a counterfeit. We x-rayed a suspicious cable to show you exactly what that means, and why counterfeits work worse and wear out faster.
Today we're comparing one of each generation of Pi from the Pi 1 to the Pi 5 to see how their performance and specifications have improved.
Disclaimer: None of this is written by AI, I’m still a real person writing my own blog like its 1999 I finally figured out how to do Gigabit Ethernet over my existing phone wires. Powerline adapter…
When Intel released the 80386 in October 1985, it marked a watershed moment for personal computing. The 386 was the first 32-bit x86 processor, increasing the register width from 16 to 32 bits and vastly expanding the address space compared to its predecessors. This wasn't just an incremental upgrade—it was the…
In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors,...
This is a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts who want to experiment with audio, networking, and expansion on vintage laptops and mobile devices. While ISA users have enjoyed projects like PicoGUS and PicoMEM, PCMCIA users have long been limited to scarce legacy cards with narrow functionality …
Apparently, one of my hobbies is making updates to my ergonomic setup, then blogging about it from an Amtrak train. I've gone and done it again.
2024 Nano Texture Macbook Pro on the left; 2021 Glossy Macbook Pro on the right TLDR: the Nano Texture performs wonderfully anywhere where light used to be a factor and used to force me to shade my screen or avoid the place entirely. I’m less concerned with where I sit indoors. Coffee shops / offices with skylights or…
If you'd asked me a few years back if I thought I'd buy a 3D printer, I would have said no. My experience of 3D printers back when I was in college was that they were very slow, expensive, frequently failed mid-print, and needed constant calibration...
Desoldering a drone's flash chip and reconstructing the firmware from broken data.
In keeping with my passion (?) for displaying local news articles in unexpected places , I figured it would be a fun project to try and see what it would take to display current local news on the Nintendo Wii console’s News Channel .
In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor ...
Today Raspberry Pi launched their new $130 AI HAT+ 2 which includes a Hailo 10H and 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM. With that, the Hailo 10H is capable of running LLMs entirely standalone, freeing the Pi's CPU and system RAM for other tasks. The chip runs at a maximum of 3W, with 40 TOPS of INT8 NPU inference performance in…
Meet the RNGD Server, delivering scalable, energy-efficient AI inference at data center scale with FuriosaAI’s Renegade accelerator platform.
Emulating the unknown: Controlling Sewing Machines with a Game Boy
So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's emp...
Modern TVs are very poorly suited for kids. They require using complicated remotes or mobile phones, and navigating apps that continually try to lure you into watching something else than you intended to. The usual scenario ends up with the kid feeling disempowered and asking an adult to put something on. That…
The microcomputer is an incredible, revolutionary invention. Like the electric light, the printing press, and the wheel, it has changed the world. Without microcomputers, the internet, and perhaps even "life as we know it" would not be possible!
It turns out, you can attach an external GPU to a Raspberry Pi 5. So my natural first question is, can I game on it? Let’s try it out and compare it with some similar computers. Just a quick FTC required note: When you buy through my links, I may earn a commission. For the showdown of crappy gaming computers, we’ll…
Last time I wrote about profiling in Zig on Apple Silicon, I touched on PMU counter profiling. This time I decided to go further and create my own tool to fetch all available counters for Apple Silicon processors (M1, M2, and later). Brief explanation of PMU counters PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) counters are…
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