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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
In this installment: some strange things I discovered when purchasing a FreeDOS laptop from Hewlett Packard. I suspect that the audience for this will be somewhat limited but I had fun exploring this. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find a chuckle in here too.
When you are a child, everything seems fascinating, almost everything is magical because you don't know the boundaries of what you have to discover yet.
Making sure I don’t forget what I read.
How fast is my Whisper Benchmark with the MLX Framework from Apple? Nvidia 4090 / M1 Pro / M2 Ultra / M3
CRC32 is a checksum first proposed in 1961, and now used in a wide variety of performance sensitive contexts, from file formats (zip, png, gzip) to filesystems (ext4, btrfs) and protocols (like eth…
I made a graphical IRC client that runs in UEFI. It’s written in Rust and leverages the GUI toolkit and TrueType renderer that I wrote for axle’s userspace. I was able to develop it thanks to the vmnet network backend that I implemented for QEMU. You can connect to an IRC server, chat and read messages, all from the…
I wanted to replace my old trusty 'router' (with an attached HDD)--that was not working as a router, but as a network drive after flashing OpenWRT onto it--I wanter to replace it with an SBC+HDD combo.
A month ago I managed to break my laptop, by reversing the polarity of a universal power supply. The repair shop diagnosed the problem as a failed motherboard, and asked for €659 to replace it. I found the price preposterous and the notion of throwing away a motherboard for a single failed component ecologically…
I made a Game Boy Color game that renders images in real time. The player controls an orbiting light and spins an object.
My daughter found my Psion 3a the other day, tucked at the back of a cupboard she was clearing out for me. It looked fine and is still in excellent aesthetic condition, and fortunately I had left n…
A security blog focusing on Android, the Linux Kernel and everything nice.
This is a write-up of the wInd3x bootrom exploit affecting iPod Nanos from 3rd gen to 5th gen. A ready-made tool to use this exploit is available at github.com/freemyipod/wInd3x .
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans,...
Todays candles have been optimized for millenia not to flicker. But it turns out when we bundle three of them together, we can undo all of these optimizations and the resulting triplet will start t…
or: reverse-engineering a custom, unknown CPU from a single programtl;dr: We reverse-engineered a program written for a completely custom, unknown CPU architecture, without any documentation for th…
A simple and free fix for those annoying over bright blue standby lights on home electronics (TV, Stereo, Set top box, etc.)
Or: How the AI Bubble, Panic, and Unpreparedness Stole ChristmasWritten by Tom of Moore’s Law Is DeadSpecial Assistance by KarbinCry & kari-no-sugataBased on this Video: https://youtu.be/BORRBce5TGwIntroduction — The Day the RAM Market SnappedAt the beginning of November, I ordered a 32GB DDR5 kit for pairing with a…
I’ve been using FreeBSD as my primary server OS for quite a long time. But, for unknown reasons, I have never seriously used it on client workstations. Maybe it’s partly because I’m a CUI-oriented person who loves doing things on text terminals as much as possible. Actually, I have been pretty happy with any client OS…
MacBook Neo processor: Apple's A18 Pro, the iPhone 16 Pro chip. Geekbench 6: 3,569 single-core, between M3 and M4. Full CPU benchmarks, thermals, and $699.
It turns out that you can't trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec.
Nothing says ‘80s pop’ like a DX7.
I run a local LLM server on my M4 Pro Mac mini with 48 GB of RAM.
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
Let me start by saying that the reMarkable 2 is a great device. I’ve wanted something like this for a long time: a relatively open device that runs Linux with an eInk screen and the ability to write on that screen with a pen. The reMarkable 2 delivers: I can ssh into it, and there’s a whole bunch of people writing…
I'm telling you: we're at a special moment here. The labor savings of open source, the composability, the fun: all of it has come to hardware. You can build things that solve real problems for yourself.
My personal website.
