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Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 132 posts.
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Avegant “Light Field” Display
Surprised at CES 2017 – Avegant Focus Planes (“Light Field”) While at CES 2017 I was invited to Avegant’s Suite and was expecting to see a new and improved and/or a lower cost ver…
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Is the keyboard faster than the mouse?
Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people…
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OpenBSD and the modern laptop
Did you think that OpenBSD is suitable only for firewalls and high-security servers? Think again. Here are my steps to transform a modern m...
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Fearless concurrency in your microcontroller
A blog about Rust and embedded stuff
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Retina iMac owners can greatly improve graphics performance of many applications
Hmph! Not sure which one is "correct" there... hmm... If you use kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedFirst for the CGBitmapContext rather than kCGImageAlphaNoneFirst, then it looks closer to the original, maybe. ? Also other caveat: NSBitmapImageRep can't seem to deal with the ARGB format either, so if you use that you need to…
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2017 Camera News
Herewith some reportage on the most interesting cameras in the world, with opinions to provoke er entertain people who are up on this stuff, and a basic survey of the landscape for people who like pictures and wonder about cameras.
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How I discovered my left AirPod was bad
tl;dr: My left AirPod had some hardware issue. I got a new one. Now the AirPods work great. The morning Apple's AirPods went up for sale, I was boarding a plane, and had just gotten to my seat on the plane. I knew they'd be in short supply (though I didn't know just how short—my local Apple Store only gets a small…
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Repairing a 1960s mainframe: Fixing the IBM 1401's core memory and power supply
A few weeks ago, I wanted to use one of the vintage IBM 1401 mainframe computers at the Computer History Museum, but the computer wasn't wor...
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Typing with pleasure, and low latency
In this article I examine human- and machine aspects of typing latency (“typing lag”) and present experimental data on latency of popular text / code editors. The article is inspired by my work on implementing “zero-latency typing” in IntelliJ IDEA.
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Fixing the Ethernet Board from a Vintage Xerox Alto
A Xerox Alto system on the East coast had Ethernet problems, so the owner sent me the Ethernet board to diagnose. (After restoring our Alto,...
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iPhone 8 Plus Camera Review
The iPhone 8 Plus across western India — Portrait Lighting put to work on real faces, plus the quieter upgrades that matter to creative pros.
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Exploring the BBC Micro:bit Software Stack and OS
If you grew up in the UK and went to school during the 1980’s or 1990’s there’s a good chance that this picture brings back fond memories:
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A Hardware Privacy Monitor for iPhones
Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Edward Snowden have designed a hardware device that attaches to an iPhone and monitors it for malicious surveillance activities, even in instances where the phone’s operating system has been compromised. They call it an Introspection Engine, and their use model is a journalist who is…
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Zigfrid – A Passive RFID Fuzzer
Zigfrid is the end result of my RFID tinkering. Since I will most definitely forget most things described here in the (very) near future, I share this for those few who might find it interesting. P…
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Another Case of Obscure CPU Nondeterminism
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Inside the 74181 ALU chip
What's inside a TTL chip? To find out, I opened up a 74181 ALU chip, took high-resolution die photos, and reverse-engineered the chip. 1 In...
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Raspberry Pi Zero W as a headless time-lapse camera
tl;dr: There are many ways to capture time-lapse videos. But this one is cheap, completely wireless, and mine. If you want to skip the post and go straight for the glory, grab a copy of my Time-lapse app for the Raspberry Pi. Time-lapses transform subtle, slow processes into something beautiful, and often make us…
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Thunderbolting your video card
When I wrote about The Golden Age of x86 Gaming, I implied that, in the future, it might be an interesting, albeit expensive, idea to upgrade your video card via an external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. I’m here to report that the future is now. Yes, that’s right, I
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Lily Drone Files for Bankruptcy
Lily, whom despite raising millions in dollars to build their highly anticipated consumer drone, have just filed for bankrupcy. Throughout 2015 and 2016, Lily raised over $35 million in pre-sales and even secured $15 million in investment via equity organisations. Their downfall, predicted by DroningON three days…
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VHDL or Verilog?
Blog about VHDL projects for FPGA. FPGA tutorials. FPGA free books.
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One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Vintage Xerox Alto
I wrote a short program to generate the Mandelbrot set on the Xerox Alto, a groundbreaking minicomputer from the 1970s. The program, in...