Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,046 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
I chose the ThinkPad Z13 Gen1 as my Linux laptop
Blog, Podcasts, Live Streams and Videos about Linux and Open Source with a focus on Ubuntu, Debian and NixOS.
macOS 27 does not support CoreStorage volumes
macOS 15 Sequoia had a hard time with CoreStorage – and thus encrypted HFS+ volumes – since it deprecated both technologies and callously crippled some important tools for working with them, but nonetheless it mostly still worked. While I’d often – but not always – have to manually unlock one of my HFS+ volumes – but…
Pinebook Pro, First Impressions
After seeing it in action at FOSDEM (from afar, as the crowd was too large), I decided to buy a Pinebook Pro for personal use. From the beginning, the intention was to use it for pkgsrc development, with NetBSD as the main OS. It was finally delivered on Thursday, one day earlier than promised, so I thought I would…
Typing with pleasure, and low latency
In this article I examine human- and machine aspects of typing latency (“typing lag”) and present experimental data on latency of popular text / code editors. The article is inspired by my work on implementing “zero-latency typing” in IntelliJ IDEA.
How cheap digital verniers work (2017)
Ever wondered how cheap digital verniers are able to produce good precision at very low prices? I did, so I took one apart.
ESP32 WiFi Superstitions
The ESP32 is a popular microcontroller to use for do-it-yourself home automation, sensors, and a variety of other bits and bobs that you might want to take care of around the house. It’s the successor to the venerable ESP8266 which has found its way into many of our WiFi connected devices (seriously, open up a device…
The Web MiniDisc App (2020)
Get control of your MiniDisc device thanks to WebUSB and WASM
Inside a Ferroelectric RAM Chip
Ferroelectric memory (FRAM) is an interesting storage technique that stores bits in a special "ferroelectric" material. Ferroelectric memory...
The stack circuitry of the Intel 8087 floating point chip, reverse-engineered
Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point copro...
Benchmarking 15 “E-Waste” GPUs with Modern Workloads
Decommissioned enterprise tesla GPUs are widely available and extremely cheap. In this post, I benchmark tesla GPUs to see if they are useful
Designing and building a keyboard
Some years ago, I wanted to make a Nixie Tube clock from scratch. PCB manufacture was so expensive that I ended up just making the PCBs by hand. I figured I would give the market another look, and dang has custom PCB manufacture become cheap! The best/easiest service that I found was OSH Park. I'd never had PCBs made…
ESP32 and Termux
Documenting my journey in trying to use my ESP32 on my phone through Termux
How to Train Your Robot
The enormous advance in AI capabilities over the last several years has in large part been driven by the availability of vast amounts of training data.
Global Kernel Locks in APFS
Over the past several months, a handful of people had been complaining that Mercurial's test harness was executing much slower on Macs. But this slowdown seemingly wasn't occurring on Linux or Windows. And not every Mac user experienced the slowness!
1956 Philips 353A Bakelite Vacuum Tube Radio Repair and Restoration
A few months ago I bought my first ever vacuum tube radio, a 1956 Philips 353A bakelite AM/FM set, which is (currently) the oldest item in my collection. I’ve been wanting to get into vintage radio…
DIY puller RC flying wing airplane with Kline–Fogleman modified airfoil
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Homebrew Batteries
I am a simple enthusiast attempting to convey my love and enjoyment of radio, electronics, and computing and perhaps to inspire YOU to build something too.
Memory-Level Parallelism: Intel Skylake versus Apple A12/A12X
Modern processors execute instructions in parallel in many different ways: multi-core parallelism is just one of them. In particular, processor cores can have several outstanding memory access requests "in flight". This is often described as "memory-level parallelism". You can measure the level of memory-level…
NESPi – Mini NES Classic Raspberry Pi Games Console
My blog about making and modding, 3D printing, electronics and other experiments.
I finally found a use case for my Raspberry Pi Model B+
I take a severely underpowered computer and make it do something useful.
Run Qwen3.8 27B locally: real numbers from my Mac Studio
Qwen3.8 27B benchmarked on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra: Ollama and llama.cpp numbers, the 1-bit quant tested, RAM math, and the hardware that actually fits.
BMW F Series Gear Selector, Part One: Failures
I'm overdue to write up some of my vague electric vehicle conversion project, so here's a small part of it.
All GB/s without FLOPS – Nvidia CMP 170HX Review
This article contains a basic Nvidia CMP 170HX performance overview, a performance lockdown workaround, a hardware teardown, a watercooling installation guide, and a repair log.
Repairing the card reader for a 1960s mainframe: cams, relays and a clutch
I recently helped repair the card reader for the Computer History Museum's vintage IBM 1401 mainframe. In the process, I learned a lot abou...
How a Handgun Works: 1911 .45
Check out Animagraffs on youtube > .
HP plans to release first memristor, alternative to flash and SSDs in 18 months
HP intends to have an alternative technology to flash on the market in eighteen months, an alternative to DRAM in three to four years and, following DRAM, a replacement for SRAM, Stan Williams, Senior Fellow at HP, told the IEF2011 meeting in Seville this morning.