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Completely Silent Computer
I’ve been trying to make my computers quieter for nearly three decades. Custom liquid cooling loops, magnetically-stabilised fluid-dynamic bearings, acoustic dampeners, silicone shock absorb…
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 141 posts.
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Dumber phone
Less is exponentially more – Rob Pike Smart phones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive, and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever-increasing percentage of our minds. If a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do. For the…
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Mmm, Pi-hole
I have a love-hate relationship with ad blockers. On the one hand, I despise the obnoxious ads that are forced down our throats at what seems like every turn. On the other hand, I appreciate the need for publishers to earn a living so that I can consume their
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NASA’s IMAGE satellite, lost since 2005, is alive
Over the past week the station has been dedicated to an S-band scan looking for new targets and refreshing the frequency list, triggered by the recent launch of the mysterious ZUMA mission. This t…
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A home-made lithographically-fabricated integrated circuit
I am very excited to announce details of the first homemade integrated circuit and share the journey that this project has taken me on over the past year. I hope that my success will inspire others and help start a revolution in home chip fabrication. When I set out on this project I had no idea of what I had gotten…
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Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
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Why does a spray bottle work?
Exploring a simple machine I took apart a simple spray bottle to see how it kept fluid flowing only in one direction from the reservoir to the nozzle. It does so with simple check valves made of two pieces of plastic, a spring, and a small sphere. It’s a simple way to solve a tricky problem. A simple spray bottle One…
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Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
2015 was a pretty good year for Intel. Their quarterly earnings reports exceeded expectations every quarter. They continue to be the only game in town for the serious server market, which continues to grow exponentially; from the earnings reports of the two largest cloud vendors, we can see that AWS and Azure grew by…
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We're in a Golden Age for Amateur Radio
When I started my ham life as KK6VSI in August of 2015, I wish I could have had the information I'm about to lay out here. Of course, most of the equipment didn't yet exist. So another way of looking at it is that my entry into amateur radio was perfectly timed for my generation's Golden Age of Ham Radio.
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Why Skylake CPUs Are Sometimes 50% Slower
I got a call that on newer hardware some performance regression tests have become slower. Not a big deal. Usually it is a bad configuration somewhere in Windows or some BIOS settings were set to no…
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2018 Mac Mini Review
I hardly ever think about my Mac Mini, but it serves a vital role for my family as our home-theater mixer , Plex server, ScanSnap server, Apple Photos backup, and Backblaze host for our NAS . 1 Almost every port on the back is in use, and it runs 24/7, reliably, in total silence.
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The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
I've had a long history playing around with Raspberry Pis and other Single Board Computers (SBCs); from building a cluster of Raspberry Pis to run Drupal, to building a distributed home temperature monitoring system with Raspberry Pis, I've spent a good deal of time testing the limits of an SBC, and also finding ways…
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Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?
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Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
So I had this idea that it would be nice to listen to music when I get home from work everyday, so I put all my ripped music onto my phone, and I bought some good quality over-ear headphones.
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The Internet of Unprofitable Things
Gather 'round children. Uncle Andrew wants to tell you a festive story. The NTPmare shortly after Christmas
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Extracting the private key from a TREZOR with an oscilloscope (2015)
Homepage of Jochen Hoenicke
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Not Only Is the Mac Mini Outdated, It's No Longer Mini
Link to: https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/03/its-not-quite-a-mac-mini-but-its-my-server/
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x86 finds its way into the iPhone
Personal page where to dump sparse knowledge
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Embedded in Rust: Brave new I/O
A blog about Rust and embedded stuff
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How Many Computers Are in Your Computer?
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
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Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Google Home (in)Security
TL;DR: An undocumented API in Google home devices is easily exploitable. This command will reboot any on your local network: nmap –open -p 8008 192.168.1.0/24 | awk ‘/is up/ {print up};…
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UPDuino: a $9.99 FPGA
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The Rubik's Contraption
A collaboration with Jared . Before any build log, here's a video: That was a Rubik's cube being solved in 0.38 seconds. The t...