1591
Google Fi bricked my iPhone 11 Pro Max (2020)
When I discovered Google Fi six months ago, I thought to myself, “Finally, a phone service that accomplishes everything I need at a…
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Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,045 posts.
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1593
Pinebook Pro – First Impressions and Setup Tips
The Pinebook Pro is a 14" laptop built for developers and Linux end-users. It weighs less than 3lbs, which, in my case, replaces a two times heavier
1594
Using an $8 smart outlet to avoid brainrot
I wrote a small script that runs in the background, polling for the state of an $8 smart plug .
1595
COAP endpoints on IKEA Trådfri
Hi, great work, I was just about to get down to trying to work this out. I’d got as far noticing it was CoAP and DTLS but no further yet ( https://gist.github.com/hardillb/4ce9fc493b792806e39f7fae4b7c28a7 ). CoAP is new to me so finding out it’s somewhat self describing is really useful.
1596
Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan
As it turns out, “thrift shopping” in Japan via the internet can be both very enjoyable as well as very dangerous. In this series of posts, I’ve been examining various optical med…
1597
Guessing smart phone PINs by monitoring the accelerometer
“Practicality of Accelerometer Side Channels on Smartphones,” by Adam J. Aviv. Benjamin Sapp, Matt Blaze, and Jonathan M. Smith. Abstract: Modern smartphones are equipped with a plethora of sensors that enable a wide range of interactions, but some of these sensors can be employed as a side channel to surreptitiously…
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1599
Apple EFI firmware passwords and the SCBO myth
My original goal when I started poking around Apple’s EFI implementation was to find a way to reset a MacBook’s firmware password. My preliminary research found references to a “magical” SCBO file that could be loaded onto a USB flash drive and booted to remove the password. The normal process workflow is to first…
1600
Counting Bees on a Raspberry Pi with a ConvNet
the first thing i thought when we setup our bee hive was "i wonder how you could count the number of bees coming and going?"
1601
1602
Librem 5 Evergreen vs. Pinephone
Huzzah! I recently received my Librem 5 (Evergreen) from Purism . The Librem 5 is a smartphone that runs an otherwise standard linux kernel. However, unlike Android which also relies on the linux kernel under the hood, the Librem 5 uses a GNU userspace, adapted for mobile. This makes it more akin to your typical…
1603
Logic Lab
The Logic Lab provides a selection of 12 logic gates that you can interconnect with patch cables to make a variety of different logic circuits, for experimenting with and learning about logic:
1604
Arduino FIDO2 Authenticator
Introducing URU Card: an open-source, wallet-sized FIDO2 BLE authenticator based on ESP32, ATECC508A, OLED screen, and MPR121 touch keyboard. Join the project and start building your own secure authenticator.
1605
Clocking a 6502 simulator to 15GHz
6-5-0-who? The 6502 is an iconic processor that dominated home computing in the late 70s and early to mid 80s. It was used in machines ra...
1606
1607
It's School time: Adventures in hacking an old Kindle
Jailbreaking an old Kindle and turning it into a school dashboard using Cloudflare Workers, Puppeteer, and image processing.
1608
How To Train Your Robot
Last Sunday, I taught six kids of ages 5 to 7 how to program. “In what programming language?” you may ask. Well…I didn’t use a programming language, at least none that you know of. In fact, I…
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1610
Why every microwave sucks these days
if you're lucky, you haven't. you're still using a microwave from the 1990's or something like that, and it still works just fine. after all, how can a microwave be made any better? you put stuff in, and the water in the stuff heats up. there really isn't much innovation to be done that wasn't already done half a…
1611
More than you cared to know about PC fans
Fans, an active cooling element, move air in a system. Heat must be removed from the site of its production, and from the system as a whole. A fan increases heat convection with surrounding air via airflow. Air is at its highest pressure immediately in front of the fan, and at lowest pressure immediately behind it.
1612
1613
A M.2 HDMI capture card
Have you ever looked at an NVMe drive and thought to yourself, 'Hey, this would be 31.7% cooler with HDMI ports?'
1614
How do transistors work, anyway?
The internet is littered with explanations of how transistors work. Most of them don't really explain anything.
1615
Using RP2040 PIO to drive a poorly-designed displa
Dmitry.GR: Driving a poorly-designed display and touch board using no CPU at all
1616
Counting the transistors in the 8086 processor: it's harder than you might think
How many transistors are in Intel's 8086 processor? This seems like a straightforward question, but it doesn't have a straightforward answ...
1617
The Grind a Day: thousands of Apple II floppy disks archived
4am doesn’t suffer fools, or repetition. Or mysteries. Focused out of nowhere on tinkering with an Apple II a number of years back, they re-learned the whole of how the unique floppy disk sys…
1618
Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+
Sniffing USB HID traffic from the Stream Deck Plus to map its dial encoder and touchscreen events, building on the original Stream Deck reverse engineering.
1619
Zen, CUDA, and Tensor Cores, Part I: The Silicon
Given the complexity of today's computing hardware, it’s easy to get confused about what is meant by the word “core”.
1620
The Transistor, Part 1: Groping in the Dark
The road to a solid-state switch was a long and complex one. It began with the discovery that certain materials behaved oddly with respect to electricity – differently than any existing theor…