181
The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks
This is the story of our three year long journey to turn a fleet of laptops into what can only be described as the world's most unhinged video wall.
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
182
Pixel phones are sold with bootloader unlocking disabled
Request to Google : ungrey the “OEM unlocking” toggle in the factory, before shipping store.google.com devices to customers. Do not make your customers connect the device to the Internet before they are allowed to install the operating system they want.
183
Using an 8K TV as a Monitor
TLDR: If your job is to write code all day or stare at Excel spreadsheets, buy an 8K TV instead of a multi-monitor setup. You can even use the same TV for 4K 120 Hz gaming or watching movies as a bonus!
184
Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
2015 was a pretty good year for Intel. Their quarterly earnings reports exceeded expectations every quarter. They continue to be the only game in town for the serious server market, which continues to grow exponentially; from the earnings reports of the two largest cloud vendors, we can see that AWS and Azure grew by…
185
I returned my 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar
tl;dr: After two weeks of use, I returned my 2016 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and bought one with Function Keys instead. Read on for detailed Battery stress tests, performance tests, and an exploration of how Apple's botched this year's Pro lineup. I've owned almost every generation of Mac desktop and laptop…
186
Engine cooling – why rocket engines don’t melt
Rocket engines use a multitude of cooling concepts to keep them from melting themselves. Learn more about engine cooling in this article.
187
We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio
When I started my ham life as KK6VSI in August of 2015, I wish I could have had the information I'm about to lay out here. Of course, most of the equipment didn't yet exist. So another way of looking at it is that my entry into amateur radio was perfectly timed for my generation's Golden Age of Ham Radio.
188
Extreme Pi Boot Optimization
🚀 3.5 sec to Linux userspace code
189
The microhydro plant
setting up a microhydro installation
190
Macbook charger teardown: surprising complexity inside Apple's power adapter
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
191
Wanted to spy on my dog, ended up spying on TP-Link
I recently bought a cheap Tapo indoor camera to see what my dog gets up to when I am out of the house.
192
Why Skylake CPUs Are Sometimes 50% Slower
I got a call that on newer hardware some performance regression tests have become slower. Not a big deal. Usually it is a bad configuration somewhere in Windows or some BIOS settings were set to no…
193
There oughta be a Game Boy capture cartridge
I present to you: The GB Interceptor. It is an adapter that goes between an unmodified Game Boy and the cartridge and offers a video stream of the game via USB. Click the image to see the video on youtube.com. The video above should give you a good overview of what it does, how it works and what its limitations are…
194
What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
What Chip Weinberger learned building and selling 2500 Jamcorder MIDI recorders.
195
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I
Apple’s latest line of Macs includes their in-house “M1” system-on-chip, featuring a custom GPU. This poses a problem for those of us in the Asahi Linux project who wish to run Linux on our devices, as this custom Apple GPU has neither public documentation nor open source drivers. Some speculate it might descend from…
196
I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone
Microsoft has deprecated windows 10, yet million of users still use it. They say the hardware is not supported, yet they keep pestering us with endless pings.
197
198
Hackintosh is almost dead
While I knew about and even tried various very early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple hardware, it wasn’t until early 2020 that I’ve built my first proper one. Then I built several more which are still seeing daily use.
199
Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
One of the remarkable characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. If we open and look at the PCBs, we can find inside things like the CIC copy protection chip, SRAM, and even "enhancement processors".
200
Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM
Earlier this year, I blogged about work I did to improve VRAM management for games. Now, after many months of floating around in mailing lists, the kernel patches are finally merged upstream and queued for Linux 7.3! Hooray!
201
202
Can't you just turn up the volume?
When Alex and I were pitching SoundFocus as an app that helped people with hearing loss, this was often…
203
The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
The global memory crunch and the great repricing of consumer electronics
204
US Intel
The U.S. taking an equity stake in Intel is a terrible idea; it also happens to be the least bad idea to make Intel Foundry viable.
205
There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
It took a while, but I finally managed to create my own Game Boy cartridge. With WiFi! At this point, it can only demo a simple telnet-style communication and access Wikipedia articles, but I am confident that I will showcase more in the future. For now, the interesting and surprisingly tricky part is how the thing…
206
Why is my CPU usage always 100%?
If you’re new to this series, I’ve been documenting the process I went through upgrading my old PXA166-based Chumby 8’s 2.6.28 Linux kernel to a modern 6.x version. Here are links to parts 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , and 8 . At this point in the project, all of the main hardware peripherals were working great. I…
207
The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
There have been some past rumblings on the internet about a capacitor being installed backwards in Apple’s Macintosh LC III . The LC III was a “pizza box” Mac model produced from early 1993 to early 1994, mainly targeted at the education market. It also manifested as various consumer Performa models: the 450, 460…
208
Backdoor found in a China-made US military chip
The latest news on hardware security research and achievements
209
Retrieving 1TB of data from a faulty drive with the help of woodworking tools
So, a while ago I built a gaming PC with the following specification: Case Dan A4 v4.1 Motherboard Z690I Strix Gaming Pro...
210
Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses (2020)
How the Nintendo Switch uses irreversible hardware fuses to prevent firmware downgrades.