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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 292 posts.
Ever since moving from NYC to SF to work at Anthropic I’ve been visiting NYC and working remotely quite often. So I designed myself a travel workstation that lets me get the best of ergonomics and packability.
So Oxide is making some cool stuff huh? Big metal boxes with lots of computer in them. Servers as they should be! Too bad I can’t afford to buy one for myself… but wait, they’re open-sourcing the software they’re writing to do it. Mom said we can have Oxide at Home!
“ Secure Element ” (SE) chips have traditionally taken a very closed-source, NDA-heavy approach. Thus, it piqued my interest when an early-stage SE chip startup, Cramium (still in stealth mode), approached me to advise on open source strategy. This blog post explains my reasoning for agreeing to advise Cramium, and…
So-called "filter bubbles" aren't necessary; it's enough that some people just tweet more.
Consider a strided incrementing loop over an array of size $N=2^{21}$ with a fixed step size of 256:
The life of an SSD should be more predictable than a hard disk. All you need is its TBW, and the total amount of data written to it so far.
The iPhone 14 Pro's 48-megapixel camera in the Scottish Highlands — hiking, biking, and boating around the Dunton Kilchoan Estate.
Audio CD ripping - optical drive accuracy listing
Sometime in 2024, the IEEE will unveil a new 802.11 standard that will bring new capabilities to everyone’s favorite wireless communication standard. But the upcoming 802.11bf standard isn’t for communication — it’s for sensing. The newest version of Wi-Fi layers on the ability to sense people or objects by using math…
On my recent review of the Blitzwolf BW-P12 10000mAh Power Bank, a reader commented asking whether that particular power bank could be used as a makeshift uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for USB…
Over at MacRumors, Hartley Charlton pointed out something that hadn’t crossed my mind: Historically, Apple released at least one new Mac model every year in the fourth quarter that runs between October and December, starting in 2001 with the launch of the iBook G3. This means that there has been a new Mac toward the…
I’m not really one to brag publicly about expensive toys, but a few weeks ago I managed to get one that’s really something special. It is a Curta Type II , a mechanical digital 1 calculator manufactured in Liechtenstein between the 50s and 70s, before solid-state calculators killed them and the likes of slide-rules.
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.
A while ago a came across an old Compaq LTE 286 laptop. When they were first released around 1989, these PCs were somewhat groundbreaking because they were the first to be compact enough to resemble the “notebook” form factor that we take for granted today. Unfortunately this particular unit was pretty much beyond…
From the 8 cores of the original M1 chip to the M1 Ultra’s 20, this is how macOS manages threads from apps, services and other code.
I don't really have much experience with microcontrollers. I've played around with some arduinos before and the main entry point for my home network is a Raspberry Pi, but that's about it for recent experience. I did take a single course on microcontrollers a few years back though. I am fascinated by them - they're…
digital build guide
Welcome to Exploring FPGA Graphics. In this series, we learn about graphics at the hardware level and get a feel for the power of FPGAs. We’ll learn how screens work, play Pong, create starfields and sprites, paint Michelangelo’s David, draw lines and triangles, and animate characters and shapes. Along the way, you’ll…
I got curious about an ExpressCard to NVMe M.2 NGFF adapter I saw on Reddit, so I got one to try out myself, ending up with a total of 4 SSD-s on my ThinkPad T430. Yes, four.
This article discusses different types of rocket engine cycles, from pressure-fed through gas generator, to full-flow staged combustion.
Put your pocket-sized silicon to work as the world's smallest API-driven cloud - to run automation scripts, scheduled tasks, functions and to host web sites
This research demonstrates a model-free approach to optimize the energy produced by a dual-axis solar panel using reinforcement learning. Specifically, a softmax actor-critic agent optimizes energy production in a simulated, dynamic lighting environment which is generated from real power data. All s
At the end of Part One , I found myself staring at this BMW F20 GWS ( Gangwahlschalter - gear selector switch - thanks to everyone who helped dig up the German name) that I wanted to adapt into an Electric Vehicle conversion.
Scott Mabin's blog
A look into the hardware design of Starfish
