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Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling (2025)
How to switch inputs between desktop and laptop on one monitor using built-in KVM and DDC
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.
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Understanding the design of the the Super Nintendo video system
Last time, I explored the inside of the Super Nintendo cartridges . Today I am going through its video system.
813
An ESP32 based plane radar for my desk
Plane radar is a neat little project that pulls nearby ADS-B traffic, plots each aircraft by distance and bearing, and shows the details directly on a cute little screen.
814
DOOM maps to SVG to laser cutter
I’ve heard a lot about classic Doom’s data format and decided to write some Rust code to extract its maps and convert that to vector graphics I could laser cut.
815
Ambient bus arrival monitor from hacked Linksys WRT54GL
London's Transport for London has a wonderful service called Countdown that can give live bus arrival times. For example, here's a page s...
816
I turned the Lego Game Boy into a working Game Boy
Sharing my thoughts and current projects.
817
M1 Thunderbolt ports don’t fully support USB 3.1 Gen 2
It’s limited to 5 Gb/s, giving read rates of about 400 MB/s and writes at about 430 MB/s. Fine for Time Machine backups, but bad with NVMe drives.
818
Building a Lightroom PC
Why I switched to Windows 10 from macOS and built a water-cooled and overclocked 5.2GHz 6-core PC for photo editing with Adobe Lightroom Classic CC.
819
The guidance system and computer of the Minuteman III nuclear missile
The Minuteman missile was introduced in 1962 as a key part of America's nuclear deterrent. The Minuteman III missile is currently the only U...
820
Cooling off your Raspberry Pi 4
Read up about how you can cool off your Raspberry Pi 4 and drop a few degrees. I compare several cooling solutions including firmware updates.
821
The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
76/300 Pocket Dobson: a tiny yet real telescope that comes with you everywhere
822
Oxide on My Wrist: Hubris on PineTime was the best worst idea
In my last Oxide-related post I got Oxide’s Propolis software running and said I might try and get their sled agent up and running next. Anyways that didn’t happen. Instead I ended up reading datasheets, writing rust codegen, spending 16 gigs of ram for an hour to build docs for a crate that’s just a glorified bundle…
823
Why E cores make Apple silicon fast
Apple silicon architecture is designed to get background processes out of the way of our apps running in the foreground, by using the E cores.
824
A home made PCB stepper motor
The first idea is interesting because it means cheap, precision-manufactured PCBs can be easily transformed into cheap, precise tiny motors.
825
The Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's clever exponential circuit, reverse-engineered
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became extremely popular, defining the sound of 1980s pop music. Because micro...
826
HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin
HDMI is a relatively modern video connector we take for granted on modern PCs and monitors. Now vintage PCs can join in the fun too with a native connection to modern HDMI monitors without any additional adapter. (A production run has been made for this board. You can contact explit[at]mailbox[dot]org if you wish to…
827
Lisp Badge LE
This is a self-contained low-power computer with its own display and keyboard that you can program in uLisp, a version of the high-level language Lisp for microcontrollers:
828
CPU Backdoors
It's generally accepted that any piece of software could be compromised with a backdoor. Prominent examples include the Sony/BMG installer , which had a backdoor built-in to allow Sony to keep users from copying the CD, which also allowed malicious third-parties to take over any machine with the software installed…
829
It is worth it to buy the fast CPU
In the past few years, CPUs have gotten really fast. Shockingly fast! Yet most people are stuck on previous generation mobile chips (whether by choice, or by their companies choice), at a huge detriment to their productivity. Meanwhile, AI coding subscriptions like Cursor are all the rage these days. I'll skip the…
830
Running Stable Diffusion on Your GPU with Less Than 10Gb of VRAM
Constant Meiring - Technology Product Builder
831
Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison
Back in 2015, I wrote a popular post comparing the performance of a number of microSD cards when used with the Raspberry Pi. In the intervening three years, the marketplace hasn't changed a ton, but there have been two new revisions to the Raspberry Pi (the model 3 B and just-released model 3 B+). In that article, I…
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A secret Apple Silicon extension to accommodate an Intel 8080 artifact
Lately I’ve been spending time on Mastodon for … reasons. Here’s my link: https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot. In my recently active time on the platform, I have found quite a few excellent retrocomputing-related posts by creative members of the community. One such post, … Continue reading →
836
Self hosting 10TB in S3 on a framework laptop and disks
About 5 months ago I made the decision to start self hosting my own S3 . I was working on AppGoblin’s SDK tracking of the top 100k Android and iOS apps so was wanting a lot of space, but for cheap.
837
We don't know why lithium batteries work
If you are a scientist, you confront ignorance as soon as you open your eyes. For example -- I am typing this post on a laptop computer that is powered by a lithium battery. No one has the slightest idea how and why it works. Metallic lithium can intercalate between the graphene sheets in graphite…
838
Using e-ink tablet as monitor for Linux
We will explore how we can use an Android E-ink tablet (or any tablet) as a monitor for Linux computer
839
How a CPU works: Bare metal C on my RISC-V toy CPU
I always wanted to understand how a CPU works, how it transitions from one instruction to the next and makes a computer work. So I thought: let's implement one and run a C program on it.
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