721
A kernel developer made my styluses work again on newer kernels
Both styluses of my XPPen Artist 24 Pro and XPPen Artist 16 Pro Gen2 styluses are now usable again on newer Linux kernels.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,044 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
722
Why I don't like smartphones
They are unequal devices. Smartphones are unapologetically devices for consumption. In this regard they differ critically from PCs, because PCs are equal devices in the sense that the same device is used for creation and consumption. This means that anyone with a PC can create as well as consume, if they so wish. This…
723
DB-19: Resurrecting an Obsolete Connector
Oh man, this is good! You’re looking at the first DB-19 connector to be made in the 21st century:
724
My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
This article was written by a human, for humans. Phantomdrive is now available from the Rootkit Labs shop. Many places don’t respect privacy …
725
The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the…
726
Hacking the T2S+ Out of Fear: Get Lock-In Thermography for Free
Hacking the T2S+ v2 to work on computers, tear it down for the first time online, and play with lock-in thermography as a bonus!
727
Patching an embedded synthesiser OS from 1996 with Ghidra
For reasons I won't get into, I've been working on a tricky reverse engineering puzzle recently: how to patch the operating system of a 26-year-old synthesizer. To be specific, the Kurzweil K2500, a...
728
Apple iPod Engraver (2019)
Making the iPod engraver page for Apple’s online store
729
Simple circuits can create complex behaviors
How simple circuits can create complex behaviors
730
You can't buy a Raspberry Pi right now
...or at least, not without a lot of patience or a fat wallet. But why? And are there any signs Raspberry Pis will become available to the general public again soon? To be clear, I'm speaking of the mainstream SBC Raspberry Pis, like the Pi 4 model B, the Compute Module 4, the Pi Zero 2 W, and even in many cases the…
731
Gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives
As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I…
732
Reverse-engineering my speakers' API to get reasonable volume control
I got some fancy new speakers last week. They’re powered speakers and they have streaming service integrations built in, unlike the 35-year-old passive speakers I’m upgrading from. Overall they’re great! But they’re so loud that it’s difficult to make small volume adjustments within the range of safe volume levels for…
733
Yamaha DX7 Technical Analysis
An introductory technical analysis of the Yamaha DX7, detailing some of the known information about the synthesiser’s engineering.
734
My Own Car System, Rear Camera, Offline Maps and Routing with Go
This is my journey building an open source car system with Go & Qt, rear camera, live OpenGL map … Cross compilation In Part I, I had to patch qtmultimedia for the camera to work, but Qt compilation is resource hungry, same goes for the osrm compilation, the memory of the Raspberry Pi is too small. I had to to set up…
735
Goodbye non-KISS appliances
<p>Yesterday, we gave away our ~6-year-old GE French-door refrigerator after a never-ending slog of repairs. At least the guy and his mother who came to pick it up have a side-hustle of repairing and reselling appliances. There's hope it won't end up in a landfill. He offered to sell me a 4-door Samsung. No Thanks!…
736
737
CNC lasers for cutting and engraving
Laser cutters can injure or blind you permanently if you do not follow safety procedures! This post is an attempt to collect all of the information that I’ve gathered over the last year or so regarding budget laser cutters. There are no affiliate links on this page, I have no ties to any of the companies mentioned…
738
Designing Electronics That Work
I’ve put together a 300+ page book with basically everything I learned the hard way over the last 10 years founding and working at several hardware startups. It started out as a self published work, but No Starch Press picked it up and it went through a very extensive editing process to make it even better.
739
Boxie – an always offline audio player for my 3 year old
How I built a simple portable audio player for my boy, summoning the spirit of the Gameboy
740
I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C
Look, I'm an idiot. I know that, you know that, and the man on the moon knows that. Let's not get into why I'm an idiot; let's just accept that I have my peculiarities and you have yours. My idiocy is a quest to make sure all my portable electronics can recharge using USB-C. Modern smartwatches are tiny and they do a…
741
742
The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC
When I placed the last screw on the DB4 chassis of the Beautiful Silent PC [1] , I thought I would not have to open it up again for years. Perhaps, I hypothesized, it would be a decade before an upgrade. The beautiful silent PC. The imperative of working from home proved me wrong when the seemingly easy problem of…
743
Fake chips, I got stung
Unfortunately, in the tech sector, just like many other sectors, there are scammers around. When you are dealing with electronics this is typically in the form of chips that have had their markings…
744
I made my own PCBs with a 3D printer
Listen, anyone can make a PCB at home, it’s easy. PCBs (printed circuit boards) are those flat things with all the components that are inside all electronic devices, you’ve seen them. All you need is a laser printer, some glossy magazine pages, print your circuit onto the page, use a clothes iron to transfer the toner…
745
Big GPUs don't need big PCs
Ever since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What's the point? The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much. Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of…
746
A Better Light Source for Scanning Color Negative Film
Narrowband trichromatic (RGB) light sources are superior to broadband (white) light for scanning color negative film; there are very good reasons why all commercial film scanners use RGB. ( film scanners were using blue LEDs at least a decade before they would be widely used in consumer products! ) Scanning film with…
747
Bottle Plotter
Bottle Plotter BottlePlotter.cz I have noticed that, it is quite common in group of small wine producers, that they don't use bottle la...
748
Nvidia announces Jetson Nano 2GB, a single board computer
Using Python 3.6, OpenCV, Dlib and the face_recognition module
749
RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
Oscar's thoughts too large for a tweet
750
Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
The best platform for cycle-accurate retro PC emulation may just be the Mac. The M6 achieved a stable 600MHz clock using a 6.0 derived 86Box build.