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Mezzano on Librebooted ThinkPads
I decided to try running Mezzano on real hardware. I figured my Librebooted ThinkPads would be good targets, since, thanks to Coreboot and the Linux kernel, I have reference source code for all the hardware.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
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Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels Apple’s quality is degrading. I spend 10 hours a day on my laptop and would spend any amount of money within reason for a better one. However, everything comes with tradeoffs.
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The death of the PCIe expansion card
With the AM5 platform from AMD on the horizon, five major motherboard manufacturers have annonced their flagship motherboards with the X670E chipset. Some of them are having fun with this generation’s multi-faceted step into “five”: AM5, PCIe Gen 5.0, DDR5, 5nm process, boost clocks over 5GHz, you catch the drift. But…
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Intel and the Danger of Integration
Intel is in an increasingly bad position in part because it has been captive to its integrated model. Or, you could simply say they were disrupted.
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My DIY FPGA board can run Quake II
kind of a blog
1119
Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools
This frame of Screamer 2 was rendered not by an original 3dfx card and not by an emulator, but by an FPGA reimplementation of the Voodoo 1 that I wrote in SpinalHDL. Available on GitHub .
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Recreating sci-fi terminals using VHS
I heard about VHS recently. It’s a tool for creating recordings of command-line tools, so you can create little demos and tutorials about how to use them. You can write a script to run comman…
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Tenstorrent and the State of AI Hardware Startups
Semi-custom silicon is a bigger problem than Nvidia.
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Which GPUs to get for deep learning
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
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Ghost in the ethernet optic
A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of SFP optic that claimed to be smart, made by a Russian company Plumspace . After going through their Smart SFP product listings I was on-board and decided I needed to have some of them.
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Mo RAM, Mo Problems (2025)
As a retro-computer enthusiast, it seems that parts are either insanely expensive or dirt cheap. If the first case has obvious problems, the second can also lead to issues.
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Which GPU(s) to Get for Deep Learning
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
1128
Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb
Some broadcast engineering tasks are a bit too daunting for me to consider. Climbing the massive towers that power radio and TV stations is one of them! Your browser does not support the video tag. Recently, local engineer Aaron Cox had the perfect set of conditions for a drone flight to capture some of that risk, as…
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Woz’s take on the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply
There was a recent thread about the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply on Applefritter , so I asked Woz the following:
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Neutrinos Faster Than Light, or FPGA artifacts?
I spent my week-end reading comments from theoretical physicists,geodesists, and other scientists, speculating on the news of the OPERA experiment that appe...
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Building a Curve25519 Hardware Accelerator
Note: this post uses a $\LaTeX$ plugin to render math symbols. It may require a desktop browser for the full experience…
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Creating aerial imagery with a bike helmet camera (GoPro) and OpenDroneMap
This technical guide details how you can create your own orthorectified (aka satellite view/bird mode) imagery, point clouds and 3D models of streets with nothing but a 360 degree camera mounted on bicycle helmet, and the open source photogrammetry software OpenDroneMap.
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Why did bar ends go away from mountain bikes?
For a little over a decade, they enjoyed strong popularity among mountain bikers, but then the feelings got cold.
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They make USB-C cables with displays now
How to turn something as ordinary as an USB-C cable into something that a lot of nerds will want to buy.
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Hacking a $200 Under Desk Exercise Bike
Due to COVID, I haven’t been getting my usual amount of exercise this year. To help with that, I decided to take a chance and order an under-desk exercise bike to get some extra cardio. The bike I bought is decent: it has good tension, stays in place, operates quietly, and offers Bluetooth connectivity for tracking…
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Milwaukee M18 Battery Reverse Engineering
2023-01-01: This project has been ongoing for a while... now its time to post some of this info and see what comes of it. I have access to several junk Milwaukee M18 batteries. Age varies a little. I thought it would be 'fun' to reverse engineer a battery just to see how it functions... That is until I actually opened
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Tokyo mechanical keyboard meetup photos
Last sunny Saturday, there was the biggest keyboard mee…
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Unlocking my Lenovo laptop battery
Introduction Two months ago, I bought a new battery for my Lenovo laptop (a ThinkPad X230T). I was about to go away on holidays and wanted a battery that could last me through a plane flight; the original battery was by then barely lasting ten minutes. Little did I know that I was about to be i