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The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 296 posts.
As you probably already know, I regularly get in contact with drawing tablet brands for reviews on my Youtube channel . I usually agree to do detailed video test of their models (see my hardware tag) but only at two condition: test the tablet on GNU/Linux, and only use Free/Libre and Open Source software for the test…
Super Mario 64 becomes a living diorama on Apple Vision Pro. Each level sits on your real table, and you walk around it while you play with a game controller. You are the camera: lean in for a closer look, or step around the table to see Mario from any side.
An accelerated FAST feature detector for the ESP32-S3 leveraging 128-bit SIMD instructions, achieving ~2x the performance of the reference implementation.
KO | EN | Discussions on HN I still have a netbook I bought back in 2009. The ASUS Eee PC 1000HE has an Intel Atom N280 and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. The Atom N series was Intel’s line of cheap, low-performance CPUs for netbooks. The chip has 56KB of L1 cache and 512KB of L2 cache, and its clock speed is 1.6...
I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more. I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.
Device tree files point to a Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W with the Pi 4’s BCM2711 chip and a cut-down Pi 4 Model A.
I built a small tool that turns my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper, so I can read my favorite blogs on a pocket e-reader instead of my phone.
Code music in the browser.
I benchmarked 15 SBCs released in 2025 across every price point. Here's what stood out, what disappointed, and what the year looked like for single board computers.
I’ve been a lifelong reader, which has proved a fragile habit in our era of endless trivial distraction. While books and e-ink readers solve the problem of competition for attention, they can’t compete with a phone for convenience. That tiny device in my pocket has made reading both easier and more vulnerable to…
kind of a blog
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 .
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.
This was a long one–I spent a fair bit of time with the Orange Pi 6 Plus over the past few months, and what I expected to be a quick look at another fast ...
Once in a while new hardware is released that makes a difference. Such a device is the Intel Optane series of high-performance SSD’s for professional use, which was released in late 2017. In this case I’m talking about the Intel Optane P4800X and P5800X and their consumer counterparts ( 900P and 905P ). All drives are…
Today we're comparing one of each generation of Pi from the Pi 1 to the Pi 5 to see how their performance and specifications have improved.
In 1993, Jurassic Park came out and revolutionized the use of CGI in films [1] . To the public the experience was magic. But for some of the people in the movie industry, it was a rude awakening.
An RTL performance erratum in the Apple M3 Neural Engine throttles DRAM weight streaming throughput down to 17–19 GB/s from the nominal 45–60 GB/s, whenever the total weight size is an integer multiple of 1 MiB, which currently affects 7 of ANEMLL ’s 15 models. Avoiding the problematic path in the kernel DMA engine's…
It turns out that a _very_ long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2 and Bazzite on a second drive was all I needed to get a comfortable couch gaming experience.
TL;DR: DIY home automation is ezpz with nothing more than a stepper motor, an esp32, and a high tolerance for Jank. My rental apartment’s AC unit can only be controlled using these retro-looking analog knob-based controls, mounted right onto the unit. No separate wall-mounted thermostat, no remote…
Our house has a box room, full of boxes that we still haven’t unpacked from our last move. A couple of weeks ago something in that room started intermittently beeping. …
My personal website and blog
I’m not a big owner of things, but the best laptop I’ve ever owned is a roughed-up 2015 Thinkpad X250.
Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs1. It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11…
Smart TVs are everywhere! But who is the master? Amid the electronics boom driven by A.I., one piece of electronics has remained almost unchanged financially. That is the digital display or flat-panel monitor. With good reason! The entire entertainment and streaming industry wants one of these devi
In November, my friend and fellow Recurser, Frank , picked up an arcade machine for the Recurse Center . We call it the RCade. He wanted to leave the original CRT in - which I think is a great choice! - and drove it off of a Raspberry Pi. Eventually we wanted to move to a more powerful computer, but we needed a way to…
Gauntlet now has a case, it's 3D printed and there's a few bits I need to adjust, but for a first go I'm really pleased…
Software is now a commodity thanks to Claude Code. So the next step is obviously hardware. I spent the last 6 months on building a hardware startup, which was fucking hard.
