Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
I'm increasingly of the view that both my time and my sanity are worth more and more as the years progress. Particularly in my independent life, it really can be that black and white - if I can't work, it costs me money. Plus, I want to be happy
555 timer teardown: inside the world's most popular IC
This article is translated into Vietnamese at: Bên trong chíp định thời 555 . If you've played around with electronic circuits, you prob...
Why do CPUs have multiple cache levels?
This is a reader question from “jlforrest” that seems worth answering in more detail than just a single sentence: I understand the need for a cache but I don’t understand why there are …
Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has transistors
Microprocessors have become immensely more complex thanks to Moore's Law, but one thing that has been lost is the ability to fully understan...
Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
Alan Kay recently gave his 1970's Xerox Alto to Y Combinator and I'm helping with the restoration of this legendary system. The Alto was t...
Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 8: it boots
We've been restoring a Xerox Alto from the 1970s for several months, and we finally got it to boot and run some programs! There's still so...
ECDSA smartphone key extraction using $2 magnetic probe
We show that modern cryptographic software on mobile phones, implementing the ECDSA digital signature algorithm, may inadvertently expose its secret keys through physical side channels: electromagnetic radiation and power consumption which fluctuate in a way that depends on secret information during the cryptographic…
Why I don't like smartphones
They are unequal devices. Smartphones are unapologetically devices for consumption. In this regard they differ critically from PCs, because PCs are equal devices in the sense that the same device is used for creation and consumption. This means that anyone with a PC can create as well as consume, if they so wish. This…
DB-19: Resurrecting an Obsolete Connector
Oh man, this is good! You’re looking at the first DB-19 connector to be made in the 21st century:
Building a software-defined radio from scratch
The FreeSRP is an affordable software-defined radio (SDR) I decided to design because there were no existing options that filled the gap between the $300 and relatively narrow bandwidth and low resolution HackRF and the better performing USRP s you can get for about $700. Of course it will be fully open source, but…
Why the MacBook Pro Is Limited to 16GB of RAM
A 2016 technical analysis of the 16GB RAM limit in Intel MacBook Pro models, including Phil Schiller’s direct response and two corrections.
New XPS 13 Developer Edition Lands in Europe, United States and Canada
Today, on the 59th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite, the 6th generation XPS 13 developer edition makes its debut in both the US, Canada and Europe. This Kaby Lake-based system co…
Die photos and analysis of the revolutionary 8008 microprocessor, 45 years old
Intel's groundbreaking 8008 microprocessor was first produced 45 years ago. 1 This chip, Intel's first 8-bit microprocessor, is the ancesto...
Benjamin Button Reviews the New MacBook Pro
The new MacBook Pro shows that Apple is finally becoming serious about developers.
Counterfeit Macbook charger teardown: convincing outside but dangerous inside
What's inside a counterfeit Macbook charger? After my Macbook charger teardown , a reader sent me a charger he suspected was counterfeit. ...
μWWVB: A Tiny WWVB Station
μWWVB is a watch stand that automatically sets the time on atomic wristwatches where regular WWVB signal isn't available.
64-bit ARM desktop hardware?
Soon there will be four years since I started working on AArch64 architecture. Lot of software things changed during that time. Lot in a hardware too. But machines availability still sucks badly. In 2012 all we had was software model. It was slow, terribly slow. Common joke was AArch64 developers …