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Learning basic electronics by building fireflies
From missing real fireflies to learning basic electronics and building my own blinking "fireflies"
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,805 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
Any year
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Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found
In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time , I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it. It’s the tale of a tad bit of an obsession, what felt like a…
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Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
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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Piano Practice Software Progress
First an apology. I started this project because during the first 9 months of the COVID-19 pandemic business was down to a fraction of what it was before then, and I had a lot of time on my hand. But that has changed now and there is a lot of work in my ‘day job’, so I don’t have a whole lot of time to work on the…
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Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
What RISC-V will do is give our customers is an extra option when seeking to minimize power consumption in certain applications where the (many) tradeoffs of not using an Arm-based core are acceptable.
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A CT scanner reveals surprises inside the 386 processor's ceramic package
Intel released the 386 processor in 1985, the first 32-bit chip in the x86 line. This chip was packaged in a ceramic square with 132 gold-pl...
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I'm returning my Framework 16
My current laptop is an aging X1 Carbon generation 7, purchased some time in mid 2019. A few months ago a few keys of the keyboard stopped working, specifically the 5, 6, - , = and Delete keys. Sometimes I can get it working again by mashing one of them for a while, but it's not consistent. Given my past experiences…
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My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer
It began with a spark—a dormant passion reignited after many years away from motorcycling. Life had steered me in different directions, away from the saddle, but something deep inside pulled me back to the thrill and freedom that only riding offers. Returning to motorcycling after such an extended hiatus was daunting…
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The Apple M1 compiles Linux 30% faster than my Intel i9
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
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On WD Red NAS Drives
On WD Red NAS Drives - Data - Western Digital (WD) Corporate Blog
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Nintendo Switch Teardown
The Nintendo Switch system is a major evolution of the Wii platform. It’s both a home console and a handheld mobile device. We tore it down.
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New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
A regression in external display support on Apple Silicon M4/M5 generation chips prevents full HiDPI modes on 4K monitors, limiting users to either blurry non-HiDPI or reduced workspace HiDPI.
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What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?
A couple of years ago, I was heavily involved in analysing and reporting on the massive VTech hack [https://www.troyhunt.com/when-children-are-breached-inside/], the one where millions of records were exposed including kids' names, genders, ages, photos and the relationship to parents' records which included their
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How Does an FPGA Work?
Let’s start at the beginning. What is an FPGA ? Well, FPGA stands for F ield P rogrammable G ate Array , which isn’t helpful in understanding what they are or do but we had to get that out of the way.
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Disambiguating Arm, Arm ARM, ARMv9, ARM9, ARM64, AArch64, A64, A78, ...
If you’re new to the Arm ecosystem, consider this a quick primer on terms you likely have seen before but might have questions about.
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Hacking the Timex m851
Nope, I think this might be the best ultra-low power consumer digital watch ever produced!
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We Need New Motherboards Before GPUs Collapse Under Their Own Gravity
You can’t have a 4-slot GPU. You just can’t. We have finally left sanity behind, with nvidia’s 4000 series cards yielding a “clown car” of absurd GPU designs, as GamersNexus put it. These cards are so huge they need “GPU Support Sticks”, which are an actual real thing now. The fact that we insist on relegating the GPU…
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AirPods fast connect security vulnerability
tldr: There's a security vulnerability (CVE-2024-27867) in the firmware of Apple AirPods. Anyone who knows the Bluetooth MAC address (which is somewhat public) can connect to your AirPods and listen to the microphone or play music. Even while the AirPods are connected to your phone (although music would stop playing…
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Ryzen is for Programmers
Programing in Clojure and ClojureScript
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Why does the Librem 5 phone cost that much?
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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Progress update from the Librem 5 hardware department
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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WiFi 6 gets 1.34 Gbps on the Raspberry Pi CM4
January 1, 2021 Update: My 1.34 Gbps benchmark was flawed. See this GitHub issue and this updated blog post to learn more: WiFi 6 is not faster than Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi. After buying three wireless cards, a new WiFi router, optimizing my process for cross-compiling the Linux kernel for the Raspberry Pi…
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How long do disk drives last?
Get all of the latest cloud storage news and insights from Backblaze - the leading independent cloud storage provider.
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An $89 remanufactured Ubuntu workstation
This website is for sale! symplepc.com is your first and best source for information about symplepc. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!
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Calculators now emulated at Internet Archive
It's time to add another family of emulated older technology to the Internet Archive.The vast majority of platforms within what we call The Emularity happens because of the work of MAME Team, which has spent over 25 years adding support for tens of thousands of machines, platforms, and tools to their breathtaking…
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USB-C Explorer – A development board to get started working with USB Type-C
I've been quiet for a while, mostly because I've been working on a new USB-C board. Actually, the board didn't take the most time; that would be the firmware development. (Never underestimate firmware). The result is a cool piece of gear, a powerful development platform, and a stronger firmware libr