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Attacking My Landlord's Boiler
How it took several months for me to get warm...
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
422
TV Backlight Compensation
Watching TV makes me see red! I mean it in the literal sense: my Panasonic's backlight is slightly broken causing an uneven pink color when it should be white:
423
The motor turns too much
This instalment is about the "Bench Kona" I've built in the shed. Behold its questionable integrity:
424
6 Raspberry Pis, 6 SSDs on a Mini ITX Motherboard
A few months ago someone told me about a new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 cluster board, the DeskPi Super6c. You may have heard of another Pi CM4 cluster board, the Turing Pi 2, but that board is not yet shipping. It had a very successful Kickstarter campaign, but production has been delayed due to parts shortages…
425
What happens when you touch a pickle to an AM radio tower
A few months ago, our AM radio hot dog experiment went mildly viral. That was a result of me asking my Dad 'what would happen if you ground a hot dog to one of your AM radio towers?' He didn't know, so one night on the way to my son's volleyball practice, we tested it. And it was awesome. There's a video and some…
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Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget
As everyone is well aware, the world is still going nuts trying to develop more, newer and better AI tools. Mostly by throwing absurd amounts of money at the problem. Many of those billions go towards building cheap or free services that operate at a significant loss. The tech giants that run them all are hoping to…
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How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine
Reverse engineering the kernel-mode authenticity check, and how Microsoft knows about your hacked/custom hard-drive.
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Cosmos Keyboard: Scan your hand, build a keyboard
Cosmos is the easiest way to design a keyboard around your one-of-a-kind hands. Scan your hand using just your phone camera, then fit a keyboard to the scan. The key positions align to your fingers' lengths and movement.
432
My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii
So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired…
433
1/25-scale Cray C90 wristwatch
Welcome to the latest edition of my on-going series in Cray-related computational necromancy. This was another just-for-fun project. Over the many years Andras and I have been working on our Cray revival efforts, there has always been a big lag between our available software (and Andras’ amazing simulator ) and my…
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The RAM shortage comes for us all
Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you're not affected yet, just wait. I was building a new PC last month using some parts I had bought earlier this year. The 64 Gigabyte T-Create DDR5 memory kit I used cost $209 then. Today? The same kit costs $650! Just in the past week, we found out Raspberry Pi's…
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Not Only Is the Mac Mini Outdated, It's No Longer Mini
Link to: https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/03/its-not-quite-a-mac-mini-but-its-my-server/
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I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
How trying out new laptops and messing with my personal computing setup motivated me to go back to a laptop that some would call ancient.
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Apple iPhone charger teardown: quality in a tiny expensive package (2012)
This article is now available in Vietnamese Bộ sạc iPhone của Apple . Disassembling Apple's diminutive inch-cube iPhone charger reveals ...
439
The state of external retina displays
The monitor story for Apple computers in [nearly] 2022 is basically would you like garbage, or would you like to take out a home equity loan?
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How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one
Today, pretty much everyone has a CPU, a DSP and a GPU, buried somewhere in their PC, phone, car, etc. Most don't know or care that they bought any of these, but they did.
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, Part IV
After beginning a compiler for the Apple M1 GPU , the next step is to develop a graphics driver exercising the compiler. Since the last post two weeks ago, I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run…
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The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)
Ok it’s not exactly $60 but you can get the board itself for that amount of money on eBay if you’re lucky, but on average the price is around $70-$100 (as of November 2025) which is still very cheap considering you can play Cyberpunk 2077 on this.
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High-speed 10Gbps full-mesh network based on USB4 for just $47.98
Fang-Pen Lin's blog about programming
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Intel's $475M error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvement...
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Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480
In which you probably wonder, but ...why?
446
iPhone 11 Pro Camera Review
Testing the iPhone 11 Pro as I continue on-going work photographing The Bach Project w/ Yo-Yo Ma, a world tour where Yo-Yo is performing Bach in unconventional places around the globe. It’s been a privilege to photograph this amazing journey.
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x86 finds its way into the iPhone
Personal page where to dump sparse knowledge
448
I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)
I love networking, a lot. So much so that I've run my own ISP since 2024, complete with its own ASN, IPv4/6 address space, fiber optics, etc. However, do this and you quickly realize how reliant you still remain on central service providers. The internet is a mesh,
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Intel Honesty
The best way to both save Intel and have leading edge manufacturing in the U.S. is to split the company, and for the U.S. government to pick up the bill via purchase guarantees.
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Inside the M4 Apple Neural Engine, Part 1: Reverse Engineering
How we bypassed CoreML and talked directly to the hardware