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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,805 posts.
Hardware & Electronics
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How encryption for Cinema Movies works
The Cinema Industry is using its own standards for creating and distributing movies in a secure way. The DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives) specification defines everything from file formats and encryption to the projection systems itself.
Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more. I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.
Rust on Espressif chips
Scott Mabin's blog
New two-factor authenticator: Commodore 64
Multi-factor authentication is ripe for disruption. SMS 2FA is inherently defective. Phone authenticators get stolen. Security tokens get lo...
A new day for Insteon
We are a small group of passionate Insteon users that have successfully acquired Insteon. Like many of you, our homes are powered by Insteon’s amazing dual-mesh technology and highly configurable products. Most of you discovered that the Insteon Hubs began coming back online. Our first priority was getting the hubs on
Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
I own a very old ‘flat’ screen television from 2009. One of the reason this TV is still kicking around is because I have a strange sentimental affection for it. Another is that I have written automation for it that works really well and it would be a pain to migrate away from it.
Our LLM-controlled office robot can't pass butter
Can LLMs control robots? We answer this by testing how good models are at passing the butter – or more generally, do delivery tasks in a household setting. State of the art models struggle, with the best model scoring 40% at Butter-Bench, compared to 95% for humans.
Beating Jeff's 3.14 Ghz Raspberry Pi 5
Jeff came up against a 1V limit in his video " Overclocking Raspberry Pi 5 to 3.14 GHz on Pi Day " after firmware was released to remove the 3Ghz limit.
Reverse-engineering the Intel 8086's instruction register
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop an...
Building a panel out of e-ink electronic shelf labels
A blog post on building a panel with multiple electronic shelf labels (ESL).
Learning about PCI-e: Driver and DMA
Creating a simple driver for a simple PCI-e device (in QEMU)
Making a smart bike dumb so it works again
My smart bike company went bankrupt, so I added a physical button to turn the light on/off
Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
Device tree files point to a Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W with the Pi 4’s BCM2711 chip and a cut-down Pi 4 Model A.
I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone
I built a small tool that turns my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper, so I can read my favorite blogs on a pocket e-reader instead of my phone.
Homebrew Cray-1A
As part two ( see previous attempt ) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking…
Building a TB-303 from Scratch
Code music in the browser.
The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
I started a new job recently so I had the opportunity to get one of the new M1 MacBooks, I decided to go with the Air. The reviews have been very positive and I’m here to tell you: it is indeed an amazing device. The performance feels a lot better than my MacBook Pro 16”, which is only a year old and about 3x the…
AirPods get stuck in low-quality 16 kHz audio mode when starting a VM
I always love when I find a really dumb solution that works reliably to fix a problem that should never really be a problem in the first place. But having worked with audio devices before—though nothing nearly as complex as the AirPods—I am willing to cut Apple some slack in building a seamless aural experience with…
Nvidia H100 GPUs: Supply and Demand
This post is an exploration of the supply and demand of GPUs, particularly Nvidia H100s.
Linux on a 486SX
Linux on a 486SX A year or two ago, I came into posession of a 1993 Compaq Presario 425. It's a Mac-ish all-in-one with a 14" color (S?)VGA screen capable of 800x600 in full 256-color glory. On the inside it features a 25MHz i486SX (the sort without a floating-point unit), paired with 20MB of RAM - a significant…
How to pick a microcontroller
Revisiting some opinions on how to pick a microcontroller - as a followup to SnapEDA's post on the Top 10 Microcontrollers on their site.
DIY Amps: A Roadmap for Beginners (2017)
So you have decided to take the DIY dive and start building your own headphone amplifiers! If you stick with it, you are going to learn a lot about audio and electronics theory and develop several …
Low Cost CO2 Sensors Comparison: Photo-Acoustic vs. NDIR
A comparison of low-cost CO2 sensor technologies, explaining photo-acoustic versus NDIR designs and the tradeoffs behind each approach.