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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,045 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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The Apple IIGS Megahertz Myth
I love the Apple IIGS. It’s a great computer, but could it have been greater? The legend goes that Apple purposefully underclocked its CPU during development to avoid competing with the Macintosh. But is this actually true? Join me for a deep dive into the IIGS architecture, the life the 65816 CPU,
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First stage POWER9 Firefox JIT passes tests
Yeah, so about that OpenPOWER Minimum Viable Product JavaScript JIT for Firefox. This happened (all timings from an unoptimized debug build ...
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USB On-The-Go
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…
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Hands-on with the PocketBeagle: a $25 Linux computer with lots of I/O pins
The PocketBeagle is a tiny but powerful inexpensive key-fob-sized open source Linux computer. It has 44 digital I/O pins, 8 analog input...
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A Mini Monitor for a Pi
This post outlines how I used a small 2 inch display as a monitor for my pi. Where it can display tty terminals and X desktops and applications as if it was a normal screen connected over hdmi. My overall goal is to have a sort of handheld “console” that I can connect a keyboard to and use as a normal computer. This…
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Freeing my tablet: Android hacking, software and hardware
Freeing my tablet (Android hacking, SW and HW)
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Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
A short review and troubleshooting guide.
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My Snapdragon Dev Kit was healthy and working fine until a Windows update failed
My personal website and blog
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Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound effect chip from die photos
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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A Summary of Electronics
A summary of electronics that explains in a basic but comprehensive way the specialties of electronics and the most employed terms.
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Fast line-following robots
Since February 2016, I have been participating in DIYRobocars meetups here in the SF Bay Area, wherein a bunch of amateur roboticists compete in autonomous time trials with RC cars. I had been doing very well in the competition with essentially just a glorified line-following robot, but have lately upgraded to a full…
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My Favourite Laptop
I’m not a big owner of things, but the best laptop I’ve ever owned is a roughed-up 2015 Thinkpad X250.
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Turing Pi 2: 4 Raspberry Pi nodes on a mini ITX board
Last year I spent a bit of time building a Kubernetes cluster with the original Turing Pi. It was fun, and interesting, but ultimately the performance of the Compute Module 3+ it was designed around led me to running my homelab off some newer Pi 4 model B computers, which are at least twice as fast for almost…
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Bought myself an Ampere Altra system
There are tools and there are toys. I bought myself a tool.
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First Impressions with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W has just been released, it's now got three more cores just like the RPi 3, but what is it good for and should you get one?
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Need a USB Cable? Build One
Personal homepage of Josef Adamcik
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Getting started with Raspberry Pi – Building a Digital Photo Frame
What you can do with a tiny $35 computer and how I built a digital photo frame
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I made a 10¢ MCU Talk
I taught a 10¢ CH32V003 RISC‑V MCU to talk. By bit-banging PWM as a DAC and using a tiny 2‑bit ADPCM decoder, I squeezed ~6–7 seconds of recognizable audio into 16 KB of flash. Then I went full ret...
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Inside the vintage Xerox Alto's display, a tiny lightbulb keeps it working
In this Alto restoration episode, we repaired a second CRT display, exercising our TV repair skills and discovering a tiny mysterious lightb...
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Build your own Dial-up ISP with a Raspberry Pi
Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs1. It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11…
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The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)
Sometime in 2024, the IEEE will unveil a new 802.11 standard that will bring new capabilities to everyone’s favorite wireless communication standard. But the upcoming 802.11bf standard isn’t for communication — it’s for sensing. The newest version of Wi-Fi layers on the ability to sense people or objects by using math…
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Storage for Photographers, Part 2
How a 12TB Synology DS415+ NAS changed my digital life: Data is eating me alive. Every gadget these days can shoot photos and record video. I captured 275GB of photos and videos on my last trip. Just one trip! And I'm just a hobbyist photographer with a mere 12MP camera. If you shoot with any regularity and a 20MP+…
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Stopping the smart TV from being used against you
Smart TVs are everywhere! But who is the master? Amid the electronics boom driven by A.I., one piece of electronics has remained almost unchanged financially. That is the digital display or flat-panel monitor. With good reason! The entire entertainment and streaming industry wants one of these devi
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Potential Issues of Using a USB Powerbank as a UPS (2021)
On my recent review of the Blitzwolf BW-P12 10000mAh Power Bank, a reader commented asking whether that particular power bank could be used as a makeshift uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for USB…
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Building a 24-bit arcade CRT display adapter from scratch
In November, my friend and fellow Recurser, Frank , picked up an arcade machine for the Recurse Center . We call it the RCade. He wanted to leave the original CRT in - which I think is a great choice! - and drove it off of a Raspberry Pi. Eventually we wanted to move to a more powerful computer, but we needed a way to…