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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
So it looks like Samsung is offline this morning . This shouldn't bother me - I don't work for them and their network isn't my problem. However it turns out that my Samsung Smart TV thinks there's no internet if there's no www.samsung.com :( - using tcpdump I started looking at what the TV was trying to contact when I…
The little annoyances that alerted us developers of performance problems
The Casio F-91W is one of the most iconic watches of the past few decades. It’s notoriously cheap, reliable, and retro; in fact, it’s probably the only watch that was worn by both Obama and Osama . At just under $10, it’s the perfect daily beater watch. And in the age where you need to charge your Apple Watch every…
A few months ago I moved to a few acres in the country, and needed somewhere to work - so I built myself a solar powered off grid office out of a Tuff-Shed Pro Studio! On one side, I’ve built a great desk corner with plenty of power and more than enough AC to keep me cool when it’s over 100F out.
Computer code that I’m writing usually doens’t keep me up at night. After all, it’s only bits & bites and if something doesn’t work properly you can always fix it, that’s the beauty of software.
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.
How to use a bare ESP-12F module as a standalone IoT/MQTT node — powered directly from a USB charger with just a handful of passive componen...
A while ago, a friend of mine turned 25 and held a fairly big birthday party. One of the things he wanted to serve were jello shots: basically little shot glasses of jello with alcohol mixed in. The consistency and sweetness makes for a pretty interesting drink, and he wanted to make 70 or so shots, at least one for…
An assessment of 16 laptops.
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 is smaller than a credit card, and I already have it gaming in 4K with an eGPU, running a Kubernetes cluster, and I even upgraded my NEC Commercial display from a CM4 to CM5, just swapping the Compute Modules! The Compute Module 4 was hard to get for years. It launched right after the…
Ever since I upgraded to Windows 10 it’s felt like my battery life is worse. My suspicion was various scanning tasks that were springing to life more frequently, but it was just a hunch. So, …
HEVC is among us. On January 25, 2013, the ITU announced the completion of the first stage approval of the H.265 video codec standard and in the last 1 year several vendors/entities have started to…
Ethical Hacking and Cybersecurity Blog
I build stuff. Virtual and physical. For both business and pleasure. Join me in my development, design and electronics journey.
We're delighted to share our electronic creation with you this holiday season, six long years after the previous one. The theme this time around is "powered by the holiday spirit", and it's an exercise in energy harvesting.
This article has been published 6 years ago . If you're into internet archeology, read it — but at your own risk. Honza doesn't have to necessarily agree with the content by now.
Reader Brendon Cromwell (among many others) writes in to ask about my MacBook Air: >How is it holding up for you in your daily routine? What’s your feel for how long you think it will hold…
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…
The RAM myth is a belief that modern computer memory resembles perfect random-access memory. Cache is seen as an optimization for small data: if it fits in L2, it’s going to be processed faster; if it doesn’t, there’s nothing we can do. Most likely, you believe that code like this is the fastest way to shard data (I’m…
I expected the Kindle Fire to be good for books, great for magazines and newspapers, great for video, and good for apps and games.
My home lab in a 12U rack as of March 2026. What is a Home Lab? Think of a home lab as a place where you can fail in the privacy of your own home. As
How can you tell when software uses the Neural Engine in an M1 series Mac? How much power does it use, and what is Espresso? Mysteries unravelled.
[Note to the impatient: to try out my beamforming simulation, which produced the above image, visit my beamlab test page - ideally in a brow...
We recently obtained a clock that flew on a Soyuz space mission. 1 The clock, manufactured in 1984, is much more complex inside than you'd ...
I made one of those e-ink weather displays that you see on tech blogs and hacker news sometimes. It can display the current weather, the temperature and precipitation forecast for the rest of the week, and my current and upcoming tasks from Todoist. It's powered by a couple NiMH AA …
My blog about my project cars and other contraptions
