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Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
Our software feels less refined as our hardware achieves platonic ideals
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 383 posts.
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Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)
From home temperature monitoring to a Kubernetes cluster hosting a live Drupal website, I have a lot of experience running Raspberry Pis. I've used every model through the years, and am currently using a mix of A+, 2 model B, and 4 model B Pis. The 3 model B+ was the first generation that had me concerned more about…
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Receiving images of Earth from satellites with software defined radio
FM radio headphones were given out at the door. Each set was tuned beforehand to receive a broadcast from my programmed station. Visitors were then invited to walk around the room, contemplating the artifacts of the exhibit.
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Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s
I spent my childhood in France, playing a lot of soccer and watching way too much TV. In the 80s, there were three channels available. Two of them, Antenne 2 and FR3, were state funded and boring while TF1 was privatized and offered plenty of Japanese cartoons. My generation grew up with Captain Tsubasa, Saint Seiya…
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What is Electricity? (1996)
What is electricity? This question is impossible to answer because the word " Electricity " has several contradictory meanings. These different meanings are incompatible, and the contradictions confuse everyone. If you don't understand electricity, you're not alone. Even teachers, engineers, and scientists have a hard…
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The Dyson Battery Electric Vehicle
In his own words, James Dyson reveals the Dyson electric vehicle.
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Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it
This article is part of a series: This article How I moved my setup from a Mac to a Linux laptop Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop. The grass is not greener on the other side The M1 Macbook Air, one year
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Pinebook Pro, First Impressions
After seeing it in action at FOSDEM (from afar, as the crowd was too large), I decided to buy a Pinebook Pro for personal use. From the beginning, the intention was to use it for pkgsrc development, with NetBSD as the main OS. It was finally delivered on Thursday, one day earlier than promised, so I thought I would…
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Measuring keyboard-to-photon latency with a light sensor
For a long time when I’ve wanted to test the latency of computers and UIs I’ve used the Is It Snappy app with my iPhone’s high speed camera to count frames between when I press a key and when the screen changes. However the problem with that is it takes a while to find the exact frames you want, which is annoying when…
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Detecting a 2.4 GHz transmission for under 1 EUR
As I was debugging a wireless mouse based on a 2.4 GHz proprietary protocol, I wanted to detect the transmitted signals. Note that I purposefully wrote “detect”: It was sufficient to see how often the transmission occurred (and if at all) and whether the link was unidirectional – i.e., only the mouse transmits and the…
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Die analysis of the 8087 math coprocessor's fast bit shifter
Floating-point numbers are very useful for scientific programming, but early microprocessors only supported integers directly. 1 Although...
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8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
A new 8GB RAM variant of Raspberry Pi 4 is available today, priced at just $75. Visit your favourite Raspberry Pi Approved Reseller to get yours.
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AVX-512 Mask Registers, Again
Taking a second look at the newly introduced mask registers, this time with the benefit of a SKX die shot from Fritzchens Fritz.
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Next-generation solar cells pass strict international tests
Light-weight, cheap and ultra-thin, perovskite solar cells have promised to shake-up renewable energy for some time. Research by Professor Anita Ho-Baillie from the University of Sydney means they are ready to take the next steps towards commercialisation.
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My New FreeBSD Laptop: Dell Latitude 7390
A few months ago, after my System76 Galago Pro had its second experience with a dead/swelling batery, I decided that it was time to replace it. On February 15th, I ordered a Dell Latitude 7390.
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VexRiscv is a quadcore, Linux-capable RISC-V softcore for FPGA
FPGAs can be seen as a bridge between the domains of hardware and software as their hardware operation can be reprogrammed using code, giving developers unprecedented flexibility. In advanced products that Antmicro helps its customers build, this flexibility to process parallel data often needs to be complemented with…
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Chips and Geopolitics
TSMC showed the power of modularization, and now they are core to the U.S. national security strategy.
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MMU gang wars: the TLB drive-by shootdown
T The problem Every once in a while I get involuntarily dragged into heat...
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Extracting ROM constants from the 8087 math coprocessor's die
Intel introduced the 8087 chip in 1980 to improve floating-point performance on the 8086 and 8088 processors, and it was used with the ori...
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DIY Particle Detector
Discover how to create a DIY particle detector using silicon photodiodes, the same technology employed in professional particle and nuclear physics experiments.
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May Update: PineTab Pre-Orders, PinePhone Qi Charging and More
With the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro production well under way and shipping in just a few days time, we’ll now be turning our attention to the other projects we have in the pipeline. There is a fair bit of material to cover this month - the main piece of news, however, is that we’ll be taking pre-orders for the PineTab…
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Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound chip from die photos (2017)
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
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Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU
NVIDIA Corporate Blog Post Archive
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My New Old Apple IIe Computer
How I found a vintage Apple IIe computer on the sidewalk and brought it back to life
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