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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 474 posts.
The Nano ESP32
The Nano ESP32 introduces a new microcontroller architecture to the Nano family. The Nano ESP32 embraces one of the favorite IoT standards.
My broken ThinkPad plays music upon booting
A puzzle with dodgy video recordings, funky spectrograms and deprecated APK's
Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode
What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will gener...
Speeding up the Super Game Boy
The Super Game Boy allows you to play Game Boy games on your Super Nintendo. This is an impressive feat, when you consider that the two consoles share basica...
Unauthenticated RCE on a RIGOL oscilloscope
I work in a company that uses custom electronic boards, so there are plenty of instruments floating around that electrical engineers employ to debug faulty connections and solderings. One kind of tools used are the oscilloscopes, tools that measure signals and plot them in a graphically understandable way. We have a…
The Perfect Laptop
Personal preference is an interesting thing. People can have a particular preference for something until they are able to experience something else. As we gain experience, our personal preference gets more finely tuned.
Commercial interests petition FCC for high power allocation on shortwave
The ad hoc group “Shortwave Modernization Coalition” petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow data communications on multiple bands within the HF 2 – 25 MHz range with up to 20 KW, including in bands immediately adjacent to spectrum allocated to the Amateur Radio Service.
Hilbert Transform
Concise summary of the Hilbert transform: mathematics, effects on signals, and applications in telecommunications.
Reverse-engineering the 8086 processor's address and data pin circuits
The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) started the x86 architecture that continues to this day. In this blog post, I'm focusing on a small p...
Thermochromic Breadboard
A breadboard with visual indication of overheating of the parts.
The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
The ARM powered Thinkpad x13s is the first truly premium Windows on ARM laptop. Let's see how that actually stacks up as a software engineer!
Imagination GPUs now support OpenGL 4.6
Since its launch in 1992 OpenGL® has been used extensively by software developers for PCs and workstations to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics applications.
Can Dell’s 6K monitor beat their 8K monitor?
For the last 10 years, I have been interested in hi-DPI monitors, and recently I read about an interesting new monitor: Dell’s 32-inch 6K monitor (U3224KBA), a productivity monitor that offers plenty of modern connectivity options like DisplayPort 2, HDMI 2 and Thunderbolt 4.
64bit computing on a budget
With all that Dec Alpha talk , and how hard it is to get hardware, and how seemingly exclusionary it is, I thought I would try to touch on a more available 64bit ‘risc’ platform, for the masses!
The complex history of the Intel i960 RISC processor
The Intel i960 was a remarkable 32-bit processor of the 1990s with a confusing set of versions. Although it is now mostly forgotten (outs...
Rust on Espressif chips
Scott Mabin's blog
The Liberty Phone
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
Microsoft opens MIDI 2.0 repo
The updated MIDI 2.0 specifications have been released, so we're opening the repo to the public.
The hidden cost of air quality monitoring
The hidden costs of air quality monitoring, including subscriptions, locked data, proprietary modules, and the long-term price of closed ecosystems.
H100 GPUs Set Standard for Gen AI in Debut MLPerf Benchmark
In a new industry-standard benchmark, a cluster of 3,584 H100 GPUs at cloud service provider CoreWeave completed a massive GPT-3-based benchmark in just 11 minutes.
The quest for a simple smartwatch
My trusty old smartwatch recently stopped working. It was a Garmin Vivomove HR, a minimal hybrid watch with regular watch hands and a tiny hidden screen that showed notifications and messages. It served me well for quite some time but unfortunately the hidden screen has stopped working and it would cost me as much to…
New bioinspired robot flies, rolls, walks, and more
Developed at Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies, a new robot can autonomously choose from a variety of motions to move through a complex environment.
ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance
The instructions below set up Time Machine using the Apple File Protocol (AFP). After publishing this blog post, I’ve been told that this is now deprecated and that Samba should be used instead. I’ll update this blog post in the near future.
Breadbee: Build your own (tiny) single board computer (2020)
Background Back in April, the hardware news site cnx-software featured a very nice new small Linux board called Breadbee , that was design...
Apple Vision Pro – Why It May Be Lousy for Watching Movies on a Plane
Introduction Part 1 and Part 2 of this series on the Apple Vision Pro (AVP) primarily covered the hardware. Over the next several articles, I plan to discuss the applications Apple (and others) sug…
RoboCat – A Self-Improving Robotic Agent
Robots are quickly becoming part of our everyday lives, but they’re often only programmed to perform specific tasks well. While harnessing recent advances in AI could lead to robots that could help in many more ways, progress in building general-purpose robots is slower in part because of the time needed to collect…