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Mysteries of the Griffin iMate and the Apple Extended Keyboard II
A vintage keyboard, a mysterious battery, and some questionable 1990s engineering choices...
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 313 posts.
272
Leaving Arizona – the Story of the Motorola 6800 part 2 and creation of the 6502
Part 2 of The Story of the Motorola 6800
273
Upgrading my Chumby 8 kernel part 10: RTC
I’m going to start this post off with the obligatory list of links to the previous parts in the series if you’re new here and are interested in seeing the full story: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , and 9 . This is the tale of how I upgraded my Chumby 8 to run a modern Linux kernel.
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ST Book, the Notebook Atari ST
A surprisingly innovative portable ST
276
Wireless Amiga Tank Mouse
Taking a look at a Wireless Tank Mouse that I picked up from Sordan.ie and seeing how well it works with my Commodore computers.
277
With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er
Telemedicine (and mobile health generally) accumulated a hunk of public mindshare during the pandemic emergency, but speaking as someone wit...
278
Building a USB to Mac ADB keyboard adapter
Write-only blogging
279
Why good external SSDs are faster with Apple Silicon
Why an Intel Mac’s up to 40 Gb/s from Thunderbolt 3 is less than an Apple silicon Mac’s up to 40 Gb/s from USB4, and how you can benefit from it.
280
ARM64EC (and ARM64X) Explained
ARM64EC (and ARM64X) Explained Probably the most confused looks I get from other developers when I discuss Windows and ARM64 is when I used the term " ARM64EC ". They ask is the same thing as ARM64? Is it a different instruction set than ARM64? How can you tell if an application is or ARM64 ARM64EC?
281
Decoding DME aircraft radio navigation system with the LimeSDR
DME (distance measuring equipment) is an aircraft radio navigation system that is used to measure the distance between an aircraft and a DME station on ground. DME is often colocated with a VOR station, in which case the VOR provides the bearing information. DME works by measuring the two-way time of flight of pulse…
282
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.
283
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…
284
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…
285
Deep dive: the instability of op-amps
A closer look at op-amp feedback loops and the stability criteria for circuits that use them.
286
The Power Mac 4400
In November 1996, Apple released the Power Macintosh 4400 with a starting price of $1,725. Also sold as the Power Macintosh 7220, it’d be easy to write this machine off as just another grain of sand on the beige beach that was Apple’s product line in the 1990s. I mean, just look at this thing, pictured here with an…
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Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)
This is, so far, the only article of mine that's been completely deleted from Wikipedia. I've salvaged a copy of it from Search.com , since it's gone from the site's history now, and am putting it here until I decide what else to do with it. Non-PC compatible x86 computers For much of the time that…
289
Review of Linux on Minisforum V3 AMD Ryzen Tablet
Update: I have created an awesome-minisforum-v3 GitHub repository to list information for Minisforum V3 users, including some workarounds for the issues mentioned in this review. Quest for the Ideal
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Amiga 2000 – Codename: Tesseract (2021)
Amiga 2000 - codename Tesseract - the first part of a series of posts about building an Amiga 2000 from scratch and adding mods to it.
291
Replacing Liquid Metal on an Asus Zephyrus G15's CPU
I’ve been using the Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 as my daily driver for a few years now. Laptops (gaming laptops especially) pack a lot of heat-generating components in a small and thin space, where the only airflow comes from the small blower fans in the system. In the case of the Zephyrus G15, there’s approximately 120…
292
Sound Lab – A Simple Analogue Synthesiser
Sound Lab is an analogue synthesiser, consisting of six modules that can be combined in a variety of ways. It uses a single printed circuit board that doubles as the front panel and wiring, with surface-mount components and PCB-mounted controls to make the construction as easy as possible:
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Accessing a DRM Framebuffer to display an image
To test if a display interface works we often don't want to use a huge framework like GTK or Qt. This article shows an easy way on how we can use a framebuffer directly on a DRM graphics driver under Linux.
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RISC-V is currently slow compared to modern CPUs
RISC-V is currently quite slow compared to modern CPUs in 2024.
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Teletext on a BBC Computer in 2024
Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext. It is a low-bandwidth text standard that used to be sent via the hidden black border on TV signals.
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FaSTer: Atari ST Digital Magazine
A magazine on a floppy from 1986.
297
Looking into the Nintendo Alarmo
While everyone was waiting on news for the successor of the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo released the Alarmo. A small plastic alarm clock that ...
298
Building a Galaksija
Note: this is the first part of three articles about my experience building a 1980s Yugoslav 8-bit computer called the Galaksija. This part is mostly focused on the technical aspects of building this…
299
Talking to memory: Inside the Intel 8088 processor's bus interface state machine
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor. IBM's decision to use the 8088 processor in the I...
300
Preserving a floppy disk with a logic analyzer and a serial cable
Being involved with retro computers, I have a few floppy disks (of the 3.5-inch variety) that I would like to preserve as faithfully as possible. Of course, I know there are dedicated devices for doing that, such as the Kryoflux or the SuperCard Pro . But it occurred to me that I already own the required hardware to…