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Why three prongs?
Why do AC cords need three prongs? If there is no positive or negative in AC systems, why do we have HOT and NEUTRAL? I attempt to shed light on some of these mysteries.
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Backdoor found in a China-made US military chip
The latest news on hardware security research and achievements
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The Hardware Renaissance
October 2012 One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends before most other people. And one of the most conspicuous trends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups. Out of 84 companies, 7 were making hardware. On the whole they've done better than the companies that…
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New $250 Chromebook
As a kid growing up in India, I was fascinated with computers and the endless possibilities they presented. I had to wait until college to f...
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Why I'm returning my Microsoft Surface RT
Do not buy a Microsoft Surface RT yet. I’m typing this with gritted teeth. My 24 hours with the half-baked Surface have been a frustrating challenge, a mix of love and hate. I want want want this…
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Building my Own Laptop
We are building an open laptop, with some wacky features in it for hackers like me.
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Body Hacking: Thoughts Regarding My Magnet Implant
I've had a magnet implanted in my finger for about three years. Here are some thoughts about having the implant and feeling a whole new world.
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How to build a windmill
Windmills have always fascinated me and for a long time I was dreaming of one day building my own. Where I live there are still machines from the 1600’s that are just as magnificent today as when they were first built. When you see one standing in a field rotating and converting passing air into usable energy they…
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Apple iPhone charger teardown: quality in an tiny expensive package
This article is now available in Vietnamese Bộ sạc iPhone của Apple . Disassembling Apple's diminutive inch-cube iPhone charger reveals ...
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Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”
After two years, the Mac Pro was “updated” today, sort of: now we can choose slightly faster two-year-old CPUs at the top end, and the other two-year-old CPU options are cheaper now.
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Ambient bus arrival monitor from hacked Linksys WRT54GL
London's Transport for London has a wonderful service called Countdown that can give live bus arrival times. For example, here's a page s...
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The New iPad's Screen Under the Microscope
Like any self-respecting UI designer, I have a microscope 1 sitting on my desk. 2 Here are some pictures comparing a bunch of different screens. They're all taken at approximately the same magnification. 3 At the scale that the pictures were taken, the width of this bar equals about 1mm:
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A dozen USB chargers in the lab: Apple is very good, but not quite the best
When you buy a USB charger, how do you know if you're getting a safe, high-quality charger for your money? You can't tell from the outside...
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Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
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Ghosts in the rom
While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested
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An Alternate Universe (Microsoft Surface)
On the way to the Apple Store today to buy AppleCare+ for my wife’s new iPhone 5, we passed the new Microsoft Store , coincidentally in the middle of their Surface with Windows RT launch. (That is actually the product’s name. “Surface with Windows RT”.)
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This Is Why They Call It a Weakly-Ordered CPU
On this blog, I’ve been rambling on about lock-free programming subjects such as acquire and release semantics and weakly-ordered CPUs. I’ve tried to make these …
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Illegal Engineering
ILLEGAL ENGINEERING An illustrated lecture about the history of Safes and Safe breaking. The lecture is based round a large wooden safe with a video camera inside, projecting the inside of the door mechanism on a screen. This is currently my favourite lecture to perform. There's something very satisfying about the…
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The Tesla Gun
<img decoding=”async” loading=”lazy” class=”alignright” title=”The5fists” src=”uploads/2012/05/The5fists-192x300.pngThe year was 1889. The War of the Current
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Smuggling USB Sticks
"This Is Not A Film" by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is under house arrest in his country for alleged “propaganda against the regime,” will be screened under the Free Jafar Panahi Program of the 13th Cinemanila. The film was smuggled from Iran in a Flash-Drive hidden inside a cake to Cannes for screening a few…
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