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Hardware & Electronics

The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 391 posts.

2021
244

GPU Architecture Types Explained

The behavior of the graphics pipeline is practically standard across platforms and APIs, yet GPU vendors come up with unique solutions to accelerate it, the two major architecture types being tile-based and immediate-mode rendering GPUs. In this article we explore how they work, present their strengths/weaknesses, and…

247

Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard

Yesterday while surfing the ASCII highways of IRC (yes, IRC) a URL linking to a MacOS application scrolled by my screen. Unclack is a small MacOS utility which silences the microphone of the user when they’re typing. The purpose is to prevent the noise of typing being passed through to other participants when on a…

250

A USB Fan Controller that now works under Linux

Relying on the built-in motherboard headers on server grade motherboards to reliably control fans with Linux has been a crapshoot since forever. I'm pleased to report that last summer the Corsair Commander Pro received native Linux kernel driver support in the 5.9 release.

251

IoT Nixie Tubes

Every day I make a cup of coffee, organize a list of the things I want to do that day, and try to work through it. Every time I finish one of the tasks, I mark it as complete. By the end of the day, ideally there are no things left on the list, but if there are, I’ll move them into a backlog and start fresh the next…

262

OK Lenovo, we need to talk

I’ve been wanting to publicly comment on Lenovo’s statement on Linux support for a while, as there’s much to say about it, and my failing attempt at finding a suitable replacement for my venerable T510 gave me an excuse to document …

269

Pentium on a 386 Motherboard

I was wondering what would be the ultimate upgrade for my 386 motherboard. It has a soldered-in 386 CPU, an unpopulated 386 PGA socket, and a socket for either a 387 FPU or a 486 PGA. It might even be compatible with a Weitek processor, though I’m not entirely certain. There’s also a possibility that it has a…

270

Tilt-5 Was Magical

Introduction It was nice to get out and actually look through AR and VR displays at AWE 2021. I started to write about everything I saw at AWE, but to me Tilt-5 was such a standout that I decided t…