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NSA's Backdoor of the PX1000-Cr
In 1983, the PX-1000 pocket telex used DES encryption. But with help of Philips, the NSA managed to replace DES with an alternative (weaker) algorithm that they could break. That NSA algorithm is now broken.
Topics /
Hardware & Electronics
The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 421 posts.
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No, you can’t save £30 per year by switching off your “standby” devices
Every few years, a dodgy stat does the rounds claiming you can save £££ if you switch off all your gadgets at the wall. The standby mode of your TV is bleeding you dry!!! Energy Saving Trust@EnergySvgTrustA quick way to #saveenergy at home is to turn off tablets, laptops and consoles as soon as you stop using them…
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Great AA Alkaline Battery Test (2016)
Regular readers would probably know that I have a love of batteries, and their associated test equipment. Maybe it was the fact that they were expensive, but pervasive, and my enjoyment as a child …
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Down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole
I’m writing this to share my experience adapting to weird keyboards and layouts.
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Life at 800 MHz
We’ve been using a Sony Vaio VGN-P588E for the past few months as our primary personal laptop. This thing’s great; it’s got a small but not uncomfortable keyboard. It’s got a trackpoint, which we absolutely need to keep our hands healthy. Crucially, it’s only 1.5 pounds. We’re disabled in a way that means we’ve got to…
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Clap: The New Audio Plug-In Standard
The communtiy section for u-he. Makers of creative software synthesizers and effects.
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FPGA Interchange format to enable interoperable FPGA tooling
FPGA toolchains are not trivial, but roughly speaking, you can divide the process of “compiling” FPGA-targeted code in a Hardware Description Language
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Why don't more people use throat mics?
Yes, *that* kind of microphone -- the kind that are most commonly known to be used by employees of the military industrial complex.
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mmWave radar, you won't see it coming
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Shimano Forces Hammerhead to Remove All Di2 Related Functionality From Karoo
Effective next Thursday,...
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Continuous glucose monitoring on the Apple Watch
Coding diabetic technology
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Making a Stainless Steel Rubik's Cube
I wasn't entirely satisfied with the aluminum cube , so after thinking about the design for a while, I decided to make another one out of stainless steel. Just for fun, I thought I would make all the pieces using only manual machines. How hard could it be?
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A Christmas tree bauble that plays Doom
Christmas is coming again, and generally that means christmas trees and everything in it: lights, streamers, and ofcourse baubles. The holiday is all very jolly and everything, so I decided it was lacking some doom... errm, I mean Doom. So I 3d-printed a small Christmas bauble modeled on an IBM PC, stuffed it with the…
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Repurposing an old Android phone as a web server
A programmer's blog with posts about Ruby, web development, algorithms and data structure.
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Apple’s Universal Control
Apple’s “Universal Control” is holy-shit good
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Why are McDonald’s Self Service Kiosks so hackable?
McDonalds in Australia do a decent cup of coffee. It’s not great but it’s consistently decent so I often start my day with a cup. Due to my travels around Australia in a decked out van I have seen how many McDonalds operate and just how many of
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Home Assistant OS Release 8
Now using GRUB2 for UEFI-based systems, Home Assistant Yellow support, and support for UEFI-based AArch64 systems!
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Analysis of Magic Leap 2 at SPIE AR/VR/Mr 2022
Magic Leap 2 Presentation Was the Hit of the Conference Kevin Curtis (Curtis), Magic Leap’s VP of Optical Engineering, presentation “Unveiling Magic Leap 2’s Advanced AR Platform and Re…
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Home lab beginners guide (2021)
My home lab in a 12U rack as of March 2026. What is a Home Lab? Think of a home lab as a place where you can fail in the privacy of your own home. As
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Reviving the Pakon film scanner
Introduction
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How the 8086 processor's microcode engine works
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
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The Hidden Worlds of the Klein Tools TI250 Thermal Imager
A deep dive into hidden data encoded in the BMP files saved by the Klein Tools TI250 thermal imager.
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Hardware-accelerated Linux virtual machines on jailbroken iPhone 12 / iOS 14.1
I unlocked Hypervisor.framework on my jailbroken phone and modified UTM, a popular QEMU port for iOS, to run arm64 Linux in a VM at full native speed. …for the clickbait - and to show iPhone’s untapped potential.
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Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol
Summary : Steve Jobs's NeXT computer company made a keyboard in 1988. With no prior electronics experience, I tried to get it to work over USB. To do so, I had to go way deeper than I ever expected - all the way back over 100 years to broadcast radio standards from the 1920s. I learned tons and tons, and had a lot of…
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My Mega65 has arrived
This week I returned from a business trip overseas for the past few weeks. This is why I haven't been able to blog this month until now. But...
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An M1 for Curl
A generous member of the wider curl community stepped up and donated an unused Mac mini m1 model to me to be used for curl development. Today it arrived at my home. An 8C CPU/16GB/1TB/8C GPU/1GbE model as per the sticker on the box. The m1 mac mini, still wrapped in plastic. Apple is not … Continue reading An m1 for…