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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
The Cinema Industry is using its own standards for creating and distributing movies in a secure way. The DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives) specification defines everything from file formats and encryption to the projection systems itself.
I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more. I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.
Multi-factor authentication is ripe for disruption. SMS 2FA is inherently defective. Phone authenticators get stolen. Security tokens get lo...
I own a very old ‘flat’ screen television from 2009. One of the reason this TV is still kicking around is because I have a strange sentimental affection for it. Another is that I have written automation for it that works really well and it would be a pain to migrate away from it.
Jeff came up against a 1V limit in his video " Overclocking Raspberry Pi 5 to 3.14 GHz on Pi Day " after firmware was released to remove the 3Ghz limit.
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop an...
A blog post on building a panel with multiple electronic shelf labels (ESL).
Creating a simple driver for a simple PCI-e device (in QEMU)
My smart bike company went bankrupt, so I added a physical button to turn the light on/off
Device tree files point to a Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W with the Pi 4’s BCM2711 chip and a cut-down Pi 4 Model A.
I built a small tool that turns my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper, so I can read my favorite blogs on a pocket e-reader instead of my phone.
As part two ( see previous attempt ) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking…
Code music in the browser.
I started a new job recently so I had the opportunity to get one of the new M1 MacBooks, I decided to go with the Air. The reviews have been very positive and I’m here to tell you: it is indeed an amazing device. The performance feels a lot better than my MacBook Pro 16”, which is only a year old and about 3x the…
I always love when I find a really dumb solution that works reliably to fix a problem that should never really be a problem in the first place. But having worked with audio devices before—though nothing nearly as complex as the AirPods—I am willing to cut Apple some slack in building a seamless aural experience with…
This post is an exploration of the supply and demand of GPUs, particularly Nvidia H100s.
Linux on a 486SX A year or two ago, I came into posession of a 1993 Compaq Presario 425. It's a Mac-ish all-in-one with a 14" color (S?)VGA screen capable of 800x600 in full 256-color glory. On the inside it features a 25MHz i486SX (the sort without a floating-point unit), paired with 20MB of RAM - a significant…
Revisiting some opinions on how to pick a microcontroller - as a followup to SnapEDA's post on the Top 10 Microcontrollers on their site.
So you have decided to take the DIY dive and start building your own headphone amplifiers! If you stick with it, you are going to learn a lot about audio and electronics theory and develop several …
Update: As of Sunday morn...
I have always liked pinout diagrams like this: Arduino Nano Pinout. Source: http://www.pighixxx.com/test/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/nano.pngThey work quite well, there is all the information and they look nice. However, they work only when you have pins on two sides of the PCB and once you squeeze too much information…
tl;dr Raspberry Pi engineers tweaked SDRAM timings and other memory settings on the Pi, resulting in a 10-20% speed boost at the default 2.4 GHz clock. I of course had to test overclocking, which got me a 32% speedup at 3.2 GHz! Changes may roll out in a firmware update for all Pi 5 and Pi 4 users soon. My quest for…
After a long time of not publishing anything and being passive about doing any writing in this blog, I am coming back for … however many articles I can. Today I want to talk about an underrat…
Ever wondered why 100nF is a go-to value for decoupling capacitors? This number has pervaded in datasheets and electronics advice going back to the 1980s, and is still widely present in the datashe…
Looking inside the Intel 8087, an early floating point chip, I noticed an interesting feature on the die: the substrate bias generation circ...
I benchmarked 15 SBCs released in 2025 across every price point. Here's what stood out, what disappointed, and what the year looked like for single board computers.
I’ve been a lifelong reader, which has proved a fragile habit in our era of endless trivial distraction. While books and e-ink readers solve the problem of competition for attention, they can’t compete with a phone for convenience. That tiny device in my pocket has made reading both easier and more vulnerable to…
