The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,806 posts.
A few months ago, I decided that it’s time I started to become more responsible and to start drinking more water. Unfortunately, the tap water where I live has a very high calcium content, which makes it a lot better when filtered and cooled first. To solve both issues, I picked up a second-hand professional water…
Announcing the 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 for use cases that need more capacity, available now at $120. Plus new Raspberry Pi Carbon Removal Credits.
TinyTapeout VGA 1D Cellular Automata Simulation
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 38th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2024. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium:
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, establishing a long-running brand of high-performance processors. 1 The Pentium incl...
Imagine shrinking satellite technology that predicts the weather into a device that transmits vital information about the health of the person wearing it.
First off, no, your ANT+ devices aren’t goin...
Together with some friends, I decided earlier this year to particpate in the Carbage run 2025 Winter edition. This is a 6-day journey in winter all the way through Sweden to the polar circle, and back down to Helsinki in a group of roughly 400 cars. One small catch (you might have guessed it from the name): your car…
Just say no to LM741 and LM324 / LM358.
System76 built their first workstation-class Arm PC, the Thelio Astra, and it's marketed for streamlined autonomous vehicle development. But I'm not an automotive developer, just someone who enjoys Linux, Arm, and computing. So I was excited to spend a few weeks (which turned into a few months) testing the latest…
USB, the Universal Serial Bus, was first released in 1996. It did not achieve widespread adoption until some years later; for most of the '90s RS-232-ish serial and its awkward sibling the parallel port were the norm for external peripheral. It's sort of surprising that USB didn't take off faster, considering the…
Apparently shlx is a “medium latency” (3 cycles) instruction on Alder Lake. My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.
Some broadcast engineering tasks are a bit too daunting for me to consider. Climbing the massive towers that power radio and TV stations is one of them! Your browser does not support the video tag. Recently, local engineer Aaron Cox had the perfect set of conditions for a drone flight to capture some of that risk, as…
The making of a simple analog synth
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvement...
Tae Kim's terrific new book on the story of Nvidia and Jensen Huang
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.
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.
Grab your biggest mug of coffee and learn how the open-source programming language Rust supercharges our development time of the breakthrough Sonair 3D ultrasonic sensor. Claim to fame: Sonair is on track to be among the first to deploy a safety-certified Rust implementation.
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…
Use ESP32 to build a budget-friendly drone from scratch.
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…
Why we use our own hardware and what the tradeoffs and costs look like
Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition is the best way to get started with our open and privacy-focused voice assistant.
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…
