The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 144 posts.
A multidisciplinary engineering team at the University of California, San Diego developed a new nanoparticle-based material for concentrating solar power plants designed to absorb and convert to heat more than 90 percent of the sunlight it captures. The new material can also withstand temperatures greater than 700…
A summary of some problems I faced when tinkering with Quake to get it play nicely on an oscilloscope.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a $12 “Gongkai” cell phone (pictured above) that I stumbled across in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping…
Turning a mouse house into a musical marvel.
Let’s end this debate once and for all. Humans can see frame rates greater than 24fps (although plenty of people will argue that they can’t on the internet). I’ll explain more in a future post if necessary, but let’s take that as read.
M&M sorting machine using electro magnets to send the M&Ms down the correct chutes. Uses an Arduino with a Bluetooth module to control the magnets.
Solar engineers from UNSW's Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics have set a new world-record in solar energy efficiency, achieving an electricity conversion rate of over 40%.
Backblaze is transitioning from using 4 TB hard drives to using 6 TB hard drives in the Storage Pods we will be deploying over the coming months...
A blog for audiophiles about more objective topics. Measurements of audio gear. Reasonable, realistic, no snakeoil assessment of sound, and equipment.
The story behind Zusie begins in May 2008, when I went on vacation to Berlin for a few days with a friend. As is my habit, I looked for interesting technical or scientific sites to visit, and the main thing to visit was the Technische Museum. I think I spent a full day day there, to the expressed dismay of my friend…
Making a cheap and simple radar with a range of about 100 meters.
Check out Animagraffs on youtube > .
Apart from this article, I also gave a talk at OHM2013 about this subject. The video of that talk (minus the first few minutes) is now online .
While I'm a hacker of all kinds of electronics things by night, my day job is being a software developer. That mostly means sitting in front of a computer all day, entering code, debugging, etcetera. You probably can imagine my main weapon of choice to tame all that code is my keyboard: I'm usually happily tapping…
An experiment to understand how the discrepancy between logical and native screen dimensions on the iPhone 6 Plus affects rendering quality.
What does it take to build a little 68000-based protoboard computer, and get it running Linux? In my case, about three weeks of spare time, plenty of coffee, and a strong dose of stubborness. After banging my head against the wall with problems ranging from the inductance of pushbutton switches to memory leaks in the…
What does a recycled (heavily used) go kart tire, an action-packed three-phase servo drive and a gyro/accelerometer have in common?
(Update 2014-10-30: Due to some interest in this project, I added schematics for the GALs)
I am making a brain for my model plane so that it can fly by itself. I could have bought an off-the-shelf kit but I wanted to build it myself to understand how everything works from the ground up.
The latest version of the Intel manual has a couple of new instructions for non-volatile storage, like SSDs . What's that about?
There was a recent thread about the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply on Applefritter , so I asked Woz the following:
To get the latest updates and information on ALL of the Storage Pod versions: Click Here. When we started Backblaze, our goal was to provide unlimited
Please forgive me for the lack of new content over the last five or so months. After my most recent post about neural networks and quadcopte...
This led to some general discussion that this particular device really is in a class of devices, now called the "killers", which need to be made.
