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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto, day 1: Power supplies and disk interface
A few days ago, I wrote about how I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto for Y Combinator. This new post describes the first day of restoration...
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
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Cursed circuits #5: capacitance multiplier
Capacitor vendors don't want you to know this! Save money on capacitors by spending more on other components
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Converting from the Game Gear to the Master System
Sometimes people ask me: “Nicole, how do you convert a Master System game to the NES?”, or some other combination of game consoles. And the answer is invaria...
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A True Telnet BBS on a Casio Calculator
About a eight weeks ago I had virtually no interest in calculators. Blank, dull, tedious-looking objects that remind me of long, arduous rainy afternoons in 1980’s/1990’s school maths classes.
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Pinebook Pro longer term usage report
I bought a Pinebook Pro in the first batch, and have been using it on and off for several months now. Some people I know wanted to know if ...
2616
Building a fast all-SSD NAS on a budget
I edit videos non-stop nowadays. In a former life, I had a 2 TB backup volume and that stored my entire digital life—all my photos, family video clips, and every bit of code and text I'd ever written. Video is a different beast, entirely. Every minute of 4K ProRes LT footage (which is a very lightweight format…
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YouTube audio quality – How good does it get? (2022)
You Tube is clearly used by a very large number of people. In general, they will be interested in watching videos of various types of content. One specific purpose is that it gets used to distribute, and make people aware of, audio recordings. A conversation on the “Pink Fish” webforum devoted to music and audio set…
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Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
What offers the convenience of a cassette tape, and the sound quality of a CD? Digital Audio Tape (DAT) does. So why wasn’t it more successful?
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The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC
The Arduino Uno Q is... a weird board. It's the first product born out of Qualcomm's buyout of Arduino. It's like if you married an Intel CPU, and a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller—oh wait, Radxa's X4 did that. Arduino even tried it before with their old Yún board, which had Linux running on a MIPS CPU, married to…
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A Year with the Surface Go
AndreGarzia.com website
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Firefox 80 and my confusion over its hardware accelerated video on Linux
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi
The PiDP-11 is a modern replica of Digital Equipment Corporation’s influential PDP-11 minicomputer. Before, we had a computer on every desk and in every home–and long before they were in every pocket–computers were large, intimidating, and locked in special rooms at universities and corporations. The PDP series paved…
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Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS
Have you ever wanted to get more out of your home network, like adding a NAS, without ponying up for expensive hard drives with Ethernet built-in, Time Capsules, Drobos or the like? While some newer routers come with a USB port allowing users to add a hard drive or printer on the network, they are c
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Conditions in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip's microcode
In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor ...
2626
Spending an afternoon in the Sizewell control-room simulator
I was recently lucky enough to be invited along on a trip to Sizewell Bs operations training centre to see and try their control room simulator.
2627
I made a cheap home motion sensor and controller
After designing my first PCB , I went on a designing spree. It turns out that making PCBs (printed circuit boards, basically a piece of plastic that includes all the connections of your components in it. It helps make your project smaller and cut down on the amount of wires floating around) is so enjoyable, I’m PCBing…
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PicoPCMCIA – a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts
This is a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts who want to experiment with audio, networking, and expansion on vintage laptops and mobile devices. While ISA users have enjoyed projects like PicoGUS and PicoMEM, PCMCIA users have long been limited to scarce legacy cards with narrow functionality …
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 9: tracing a crash through software and hardware
Last week, after months of restoration, we finally got the vintage Xerox Alto computer to boot ( details ) and run programs. However, so...
2630
Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR
How to move fast when building for the physical world
2631
Bit-banging a BASIC Birthday
I spent this summer building a new app, for a machine that hasn’t been on the market since 1980 and wasn’t built to support graphics, sound, connectivity or even lowercase letters, sold by a company that went bankrupt a decade ago, tailor-made for an audience of one: my dad, who celebrated his 70th birthday this past…
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I’ve been reading a whole lot about tomatoes
Hello there, I'm betting that you need a break from curve flattening, and disinfectants, and Twitter, and Slack, and Zoom, and asking if people can see your...
2636
Meta RayBan AR glasses shows Lumus waveguide structures in leaked video
Introduction Just a short note today. I’m in the middle of my trip, which will end in Eindhoven next week (see notice at the end of this article), when I heard that Meta had leaked a video on…
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Lily Drone Files for Bankruptcy
Lily, whom despite raising millions in dollars to build their highly anticipated consumer drone, have just filed for bankrupcy. Throughout 2015 and 2016, Lily raised over $35 million in pre-sales and even secured $15 million in investment via equity organisations. Their downfall, predicted by DroningON three days…
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Options for genuine ECC RAM on the desktop in (early) 2024
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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