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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 294 posts.
You made me create a wooden Game Boy shell. Yes, you made me do it. After I got myself a CNC machine a while back I just made a wooden Game Boy cartridge to get to know the machine, but social media wanted more. So, I made a Game Boy out of walnut wood. Click the image to see the video on youtube.com. You can see the…
An not-for-profit roundup of affordable PCB manufacturers. Originally published in 2023 and last updated January 2026.
I like Thunderbolt a lot. Mostly because USB's land of optional features is a mess which makes choosing a cable/peripheral difficult. With thunderbolt you have a single number to get right. And then you are supposed to be golden. However the idyll with Intel's interface took a hit when I tried to make sense of Apple's…
This post is an exploration of the supply and demand of GPUs, particularly Nvidia H100s.
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…
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.
A look at some of the factors determining the performance of new M3 chips compared to the M1 and M2 versions, and how not to compare them.
It is not often I am blown away by a piece of hardware. My Hall of Fame features the 1991 Super Nintendo, the 1995 3dfx1, and the 2010 Intel's Serie 520 SSD [1] . This past month my 2021 MacBook Pro M1 [2] joined the club.
This week I finally moved my gaming/Linux PC into my little office rack—it's that 2U box above the UPS at the bottom: I remembered seeing Linus Tech Tips' 4U build in a video a couple years ago—but he has a full 42U rack in his basement. I don't have that much space—just 2U (technically 3U if I wanted) in my little…
I’m beginning to think that the Windows PC that I built in 2015 is ready for retirement (though if Joe Biden can be president at 78, maybe this […]
A simple spectrometer can be built from a CD and a box. Cut a slit on one side of the box. Place the CD on the other side with about 60 degree angle. Look down into the openning on the box. The slit should not be too wide, otherwise the spectrum lines will be blurred. It should not be too narrow either, otherwise the…
A puzzle with dodgy video recordings, funky spectrograms and deprecated APK's
A bipartisan group of 18 lawmakers in the US Congress have recently amplified a request to the White House and the Secretary of Commerce to place restrictions on Americans working with RISC-V (see also the initial request from the Senate ) in order to prevent China from gaining dominance in CPU technology.
In short, after a Linux kernel update (6.5.8-200.fc.x86_64 on Fedora KDE), I can't use the top button of my pen on my tablet. This is really affecting my digital painting workflow!
If you take someone with intermediate knowledge of computing in the right areas, and ask them how an x86 machine boots, they'll probably start telling you about how the CPU first comes up in real mode and starts executing code from the 8086 reset vector of FFFF:FFF0. This understanding of how an x86 machine boots has…
Little seems to have changed in CPU cores in M3 chips, if you read reviews. Dig a bit deeper and there are major changes, as explained here.
I am now a staunch advocate for ECC RAM, after the events of last week. You see, over the last several weeks my main desktop workstation has been misbehaving, with occasional freezing and crashing. After some diagnostics I began to suspect a faulty RAM module, and sure enough, upon performing a quick run of memtest86…
Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic "floppy disks" and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there's a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I've learned so far.
This article has been revised with recollections and corrections from former Apple employee Al Kossow, some good folks on Hacker News and t...
Tinkering with relay-based logic just for the fun of it.
This post covers my experience training image classification models with Intel’s PyTorch extension on the Arc A770 GPU.
I’d like to share with you my latest project: Decktility!
I am writing this memo to explain what happened to the case our NeXTCube Computer, Serial Number AA001032.
After I wrote about the possibility of programmable Mac ROM SIMMs in Quadras a couple of months ago, I suspected that there had been a way for developers at Apple in the 68k Mac era to reflash the ROM in their Macs during development, just like BIOS updates on PCs. The reason I believed this is because the ROM SIMM…
Introduced in 1973, Ethernet is the predominant way of wiring computers together. Chips were soon introduced to handle the low-level aspects...
...that was the question I asked my Dad, a radio engineer for many decades, who worked at the biggest AM station in St. Louis, KMOX. The station is approaching its centennial in 2025, as are—some YouTube commenters argue—its primary audience! I recorded that video during my convalescence at my parents' house (I am…
Hello and welcome back to The Cool Blog. I've been meaning to write more but I had these things called finals and then I had to move home for the summer and then I got addicted to Satisfactory again and yeah. Anyway I'm back and time for me to share a project of mine that I've been working on since like March.
This is the first in (maybe) a series of “Tales From Tech Support”, which are true stories from my point of view. I’ll probably only post these on a Friday. In the 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm. We’d often buy new equipment and unpack it at the helpdesk, throw away all…
