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I put a real-time 3D shader on the Game Boy Color
I made a Game Boy Color game that renders images in real time. The player controls an orbiting light and spins an object.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 296 posts.
62
MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
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.
63
My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini
I run a local LLM server on my M4 Pro Mac mini with 48 GB of RAM.
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I put a datacenter GPU in my gaming PC
I bought a datacenter GPU that doesn't fit in a normal motherboard, macgyvered the fan with jumper wires, and now I'm running a model that ties with Claude Sonnet 4.6 on benchmarks, all for £200.
66
My audio interface has SSH enabled by default
I bought a Rodecaster Duo to solve some audio woes, and found that it has ssh enabled by default. I captured the firmware update process and created custom firmware to enable password authentication for ssh.
67
Every GPU That Mattered
49 graphics cards. 30 years. From Quake to Cyberpunk.
68
The Secret Life of Circuits
Some pics, endorsements, and the reason the book exists in the first place.
69
Framework's 10G Ethernet module exposes USB-C's complexity
I've been following WisdPi's development of various 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps Ethernet adapters for the past couple years. They use newer Realtek Ethernet chips, which sometimes have performance quirks—most frequently encountered under Linux. In today's video, I tested the new WisdPi 10G Ethernet Expansion Card for Framework…
70
MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be
iPads should be radically touch only, and MacBooks should be keyboard-first
71
RISC-V Is Sloooow
143 vs 36 minutes is far too big difference
72
New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays
A regression in external display support on Apple Silicon M4/M5 generation chips prevents full HiDPI modes on 4K monitors, limiting users to either blurry non-HiDPI or reduced workspace HiDPI.
73
The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader
I’ve had the Xteink X4 for a couple of months now, a £40 e-ink reader small enough to stick to the back of a phone. I’d seen a few posts about it (Khairul Se...
74
A nearly perfect USB cable tester
Your USB cables may lie to your PC. Let me show you how to catch those.
75
I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
76
What happens when you run a CUDA kernel?
Tracing one vector-add kernel from nvcc all the way down to the warps that execute it.
77
RTX 5080 and RTX 3090 Setup: 80 Tok/s on Qwen 3.6 27B Q8
Dual GPU setup: run Qwen 3.6 27B at a Q8 quantization at 80+ tokens/sec with 39GB total VRAM
78
Home Assistant waters my plants
Some readers will know, but most will not, that I am a bit of a self-confessed foodie. I enjoy cooking, but especially so when others get enjoyment from it. Be it friends, family, or neighbours, and sometimes all three, I’m always up for putting something together.
79
My USB Drive Has a Hidden Encrypted Vault
This article was written by a human, for humans. Phantomdrive is now available from the Rootkit Labs shop. Many places don’t respect privacy …
80
The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the…
81
Apple iPod Engraver (2019)
Making the iPod engraver page for Apple’s online store
82
Simple circuits can create complex behaviors
How simple circuits can create complex behaviors
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RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon
Oscar's thoughts too large for a tweet
84
Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
The best platform for cycle-accurate retro PC emulation may just be the Mac. The M6 achieved a stable 600MHz clock using a 6.0 derived 86Box build.
85
California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business
A plain-language guide to AB2047 you can share with your school board, PTA, or neighbor. Learn what's at stake and how to take action.
86
RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?
It turns out, you can attach an external GPU to a Raspberry Pi 5. So my natural first question is, can I game on it? Let’s try it out and compare it with some similar computers. Just a quick FTC required note: When you buy through my links, I may earn a commission. For the showdown of crappy gaming computers, we’ll…
87
Box of Secrets: Discreetly modding an apartment intercom to work with Apple Home
Discreetly modding my friend’s apartment intercom to work with Apple Home.
88
Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
This post is a high-level explainer for my Master’s thesis, which involves designing hardware architectures for ultrafast inference and online learning using the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) architecture. I’ll assume familiarity with standard machine learning concepts, as well as some understanding of hardware and…
89
80386 microcode disassembled
After I posted 8086 microcode disassembled , Ken Shirriff sent me a high-resolution image of the microcode ROM from the 80386. I didn’t expect I would ever do anything with it for a couple of reasons: one is that it’s absolutely huge (94720 bits) compared to the 8086 one (10752 bits) so (even with bitract or similar)…
90
The Forgetful CPU (Linux on M4)
This blog post goes into quite some detail about how I first booted Linux on my M4 Mac mini. I encourage you to look up terms and concepts you don’t know, since I cannot explain all the background in this post ;)