1201
My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
This article was written by a human, for humans. Phantomdrive is now available from the Rootkit Labs shop. Many places don’t respect privacy …
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
1202
OpenWRT One Released: First Router Designed Specifically for OpenWrt
Today, we at SFC, along with our OpenWrt member project, announce the production release of the OpenWrt One. This is the first wireless Internet router designed and built with your software freedom and right to repair in mind. The OpenWrt One will never be locked down and is forever unbrickable. This device services…
1203
1204
The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the…
1205
Hacking the T2S+ Out of Fear: Get Lock-In Thermography for Free
Hacking the T2S+ v2 to work on computers, tear it down for the first time online, and play with lock-in thermography as a bonus!
1206
Patching an embedded synthesiser OS from 1996 with Ghidra
For reasons I won't get into, I've been working on a tricky reverse engineering puzzle recently: how to patch the operating system of a 26-year-old synthesizer. To be specific, the Kurzweil K2500, a...
1207
Home Assistant 2023.11
Introducing a brand new to-do entity type and use it locally with Todoist or Google Tasks. Matter 1.2 is here! New conditions for the conditional card to tailor your dashboards, select custom date ...
1208
Apple iPod Engraver (2019)
Making the iPod engraver page for Apple’s online store
1209
Simple circuits can create complex behaviors
How simple circuits can create complex behaviors
1210
1211
Apple Watch Series 12
Apple today introduced Apple Watch Series 12, engineered to deliver the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable.
1212
You can't buy a Raspberry Pi right now
...or at least, not without a lot of patience or a fat wallet. But why? And are there any signs Raspberry Pis will become available to the general public again soon? To be clear, I'm speaking of the mainstream SBC Raspberry Pis, like the Pi 4 model B, the Compute Module 4, the Pi Zero 2 W, and even in many cases the…
1213
Gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives
As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I…
1214
I have come to bury the BIOS, not to open it [video]
Historically, proprietary systems created the need for binary machine interfaces. This extended to the deepest layers of the system, where the PC BIOS was…
1215
Reverse-engineering my speakers' API to get reasonable volume control
I got some fancy new speakers last week. They’re powered speakers and they have streaming service integrations built in, unlike the 35-year-old passive speakers I’m upgrading from. Overall they’re great! But they’re so loud that it’s difficult to make small volume adjustments within the range of safe volume levels for…
1216
Yamaha DX7 Technical Analysis
An introductory technical analysis of the Yamaha DX7, detailing some of the known information about the synthesiser’s engineering.
1217
CT scans of 1k lithium-ion batteries show quality risks in inexpensive cells
Lumafield’s Battery Quality Report exposes hidden risks in 18650 cells; 1 in 13 low-cost units have dangerous defects. See how CT helps enforce safety.
1218
My Own Car System, Rear Camera, Offline Maps and Routing with Go
This is my journey building an open source car system with Go & Qt, rear camera, live OpenGL map … Cross compilation In Part I, I had to patch qtmultimedia for the camera to work, but Qt compilation is resource hungry, same goes for the osrm compilation, the memory of the Raspberry Pi is too small. I had to to set up…
1219
1220
Goodbye non-KISS appliances
<p>Yesterday, we gave away our ~6-year-old GE French-door refrigerator after a never-ending slog of repairs. At least the guy and his mother who came to pick it up have a side-hustle of repairing and reselling appliances. There's hope it won't end up in a landfill. He offered to sell me a 4-door Samsung. No Thanks!…
1221
1222
CNC lasers for cutting and engraving
Laser cutters can injure or blind you permanently if you do not follow safety procedures! This post is an attempt to collect all of the information that I’ve gathered over the last year or so regarding budget laser cutters. There are no affiliate links on this page, I have no ties to any of the companies mentioned…
1223
Designing Electronics That Work
I’ve put together a 300+ page book with basically everything I learned the hard way over the last 10 years founding and working at several hardware startups. It started out as a self published work, but No Starch Press picked it up and it went through a very extensive editing process to make it even better.
1224
Boxie – an always offline audio player for my 3 year old
How I built a simple portable audio player for my boy, summoning the spirit of the Gameboy
1225
1226
I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C
Look, I'm an idiot. I know that, you know that, and the man on the moon knows that. Let's not get into why I'm an idiot; let's just accept that I have my peculiarities and you have yours. My idiocy is a quest to make sure all my portable electronics can recharge using USB-C. Modern smartwatches are tiny and they do a…
1227
1228
The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC
When I placed the last screw on the DB4 chassis of the Beautiful Silent PC [1] , I thought I would not have to open it up again for years. Perhaps, I hypothesized, it would be a decade before an upgrade. The beautiful silent PC. The imperative of working from home proved me wrong when the seemingly easy problem of…
1229
Fake chips, I got stung
Unfortunately, in the tech sector, just like many other sectors, there are scammers around. When you are dealing with electronics this is typically in the form of chips that have had their markings…
1230
I made my own PCBs with a 3D printer
Listen, anyone can make a PCB at home, it’s easy. PCBs (printed circuit boards) are those flat things with all the components that are inside all electronic devices, you’ve seen them. All you need is a laser printer, some glossy magazine pages, print your circuit onto the page, use a clothes iron to transfer the toner…