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Wacom tablets track every app you open
I have a Wacom drawing tablet. I use it to draw cover illustrations for my blog posts, such as this one.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 242 posts.
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Time to Upgrade Your Monitor
A non-comprehensive and opinionated guide to best monitor for programming
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Booting from a vinyl record
Most PCs tend to boot from a primary media storage, be it a hard disk drive, or a solid-state drive, perhaps from a network, or – if all else fails – the USB stick or the boot DVD comes to the rescue… Fun, eh? Boring! Why don’t we try to boot from a record player for a change?
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Unbricking a $2k bike with a $10 Raspberry Pi
A few years ago I splurged on an exercise bike. It’s a pretty expensive item imho, both in upfront and ongoing subscription costs. But I was able to justify it by riding it all the time so that per-ride it wasn’t that expensive. I’m happy to say this was a huge boon for my fitness and it was worth every penny.
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Intel's disruption is now complete
“Look, Clayton, I’m a busy man and I don’t have time to read drivel from academics but someone you told me you had this theory… and I’m…
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Why can’t you buy a good webcam?
Vsevolod Solovyov's blog
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A detailed look at the router provided by my ISP
I have been living in my current apartment for more than a year now and I noticed I have never inspected my router which was provided by my ISP when I moved in. The only thing I changed in router is
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Wireless Is a Trap
Over and over again, I’ve seen people fix some wireless-related problem and go “wow, I had no idea how much better this could be!" • Wireless protocols often silently operate in an extremely degraded state that makes them substantially worse than wired equivalents.
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IKEA Frekvens LED box hack
Ikea is an interesting store. Even if you go in having in mind you're only going to buy that one thing that you actually need and this time you're not going to be distracted by other crap, you tend to come out with about three times the amount of things you wanted to buy. For us hackers, especially Ikea-fare equipped…
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Pressing YubiKeys
If you work in tech, you probably have a YubiKey. I have this one, the YubiKey 5C Nano:
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The AirPods Pro “Rattlegate”
The AirPods Pro “Rattlegate” The first generation of the AirPods was generally regarded as a perfect product. “Apple at its best!” was the universally accepted opinion. I used them for a long time. No speaker issues, no battery issues. Excited for the noise cancelling feature I ordered the AirPods Pro and for the…
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I overslept because iOS 14 disabled my alarm
I’m using the iOS Bedtime feature for years now. With yesterday’s iOS 14 update the feature got moved from the Clock app to the Health app. Unfortunately the migration is done by disabling your existing alarm and showing a button to open the Health app to set it up again. I woke up late and well rested today.
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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
The M1 is up *here*, running fast and cool, and all the competing chips from Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung, and whoever else are down *there*, running hot or running slow, looking around for their recently stolen pants.
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UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster
You can view a video related to this blog post here: Does UASP make the Raspberry Pi faster?. A couple weeks ago, I did some testing with my Raspberry Pi 4 and external USB SSD drives. I found a USB 3.0 SSD was ten times faster than the fastest microSD card I tested. In the comments on the video associated with that…
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NymphCast: Casual attempt at open alternative to Chromecast
For the past half year or thereabouts I have been working on a little project of mine that I call 'NymphCast' [1]. The initial idea for it o...
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The Coming Chip Wars
A version of this article appeared in War on the Rocks. Controlling advanced chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controlling the oil supply in the 20th. The coun…
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Precursor – A mobile, open source electronics platform
Precursor (pre·cur·sor | \ pri-ˈkər-sər): 1. one that precedes or gives rise to; a predecessor; harbinger 2. a pocketable open development board
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Seven years later, I bought a new MacBook. For the first time, I don't love it
This article is part of a series: This article How I moved my setup from a Mac to a Linux laptop Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop. The grass is not greener on the other side The M1 Macbook Air, one year
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Reverse engineering a camera protocol for fun and profit
Way back in late 2019 , I dissected a Reolink B800 IP camera to demonstrate the various parts of an embedded Linux system. It’s fairly nice hardware, actually—it has a 4K video sensor, a microphone, power over Ethernet, and is nominally waterproof. And yes, it runs Linux.
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On Liberating My Smartwatch from Cloud Services
I’ve often said that if we convince ourselves that technology is magic, we risk becoming hostages to it . Just recently, I had a brush with this fate, but happily, I was saved by open source.
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How I built a keyboard/video/mouse switch for my two 4k monitors
How I built a Keyboard/Video/Mouse switch for my two 4K monitors for $30.
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Apple, ARM, and Intel
ARM Macs are imminent; why they make sense, and why the implications could be far-reaching, for not just Apple but also Intel.
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First trans-Atlantic contact made on 432 MHz
On Tuesday the 7th of April 2020 , a remarkable contact was made with the FT8 digital mode on 432 MHz between D4VHF on the Cape Verde Is...