Computer code that I’m writing usually doens’t keep me up at night. After all, it’s only bits & bites and if something doesn’t work properly you can always fix it, that’s the beauty of software.
How to use a bare ESP-12F module as a standalone IoT/MQTT node — powered directly from a USB charger with just a handful of passive componen...
the vent for my mind
A while back I was going through Dolphin’s issues page out of sheer boredom. I eventually came across issue 726 – Gamma setting has no effect. Out of curiosity, I clicked.
Note: This blog post from 2018 predates the Intel Ice Lake (Sunny Core) and AMD Zen 4 processors. These newer processors are not affected by the issues described in this blog post. Our processors typically do computations using small data stores called registers. On 64-bit processors, 64-bit registers are frequently…
This content was originally meant to be presented as part of my workshop on Rust and microcontrollers at the NITC FOSSMeet 2018 . As I was not able to cover it satisfactorily during the workshop, I thought of writing it down!
TL;DR: what I learned about the Bomb Jack arcade machine while writingan emulator for it.
When we switch on a computer, it goes through a series of steps before it is able to load the operating system. In this post we will see how a typical x86 processor boots. This is a very complex an…
the first thing i thought when we setup our bee hive was "i wonder how you could count the number of bees coming and going?"
The road to a solid-state switch was a long and complex one. It began with the discovery that certain materials behaved oddly with respect to electricity – differently than any existing theor…
At Recode’s Code Media conference on Feb. 13, 2018 (a few hours ago as I write this), they live streamed an interview with Ronny Abovitz, CEO of Magic Leap and NBA commissioner Adam Silver. The int…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
There have been many announcements about what would be the next generation Intel Xeon platform with integrated FPGA, also on this blog. Now Intel has finally announced that they are shipping their …
As seen on Hackaday! There’s always some electronics topic that I end up focusing all my efforts on (at least for a certain time), and that topic is now eMMC NAND Flash memory. Overview eMMC …
It’s been over a year since I created the first version of my Ambilight clone , but I finally found the time to return to it and add some new features. I was originally planning on adding colour correction (to correct for the purple wall behind my TV) and output delay (to get perfect synchronisation with the TV), but…
I have been studying the Magic Leap One (ML1) for a few weeks, taking over 1,000 photos and making many measurements. I’m bursting with things I want to talk about, so I am planning to releas…
I recently learned that in the mid 90s in Japan, the Super Nintendo had a peripheral called a Satellaview, which was a satellite modem that would receive data broadcasts from Nintendo.
Hardware Bugs can be frustrating, as they are likely the last place you would expect a bug. Unfortunately, they can and do happen. Most likely every CPU has a list of erratas. This post outlines th…
Darwin: a genomics co-processor provides up to 15,000x acceleration on long read assembly Turakhia et al., ASPLOS’18 With the slow demise of Moore’s law, hardware accelerators are needed to m…
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
It has become clear that storing secrets in computers is hard. The best demo to the world that storing secrets on “online” computers is hard and sometimes devastating, is the large amounts of cryptocurrency theft due to critical keys being in memory of systems directly or indirectly connected to the internet.
For over a hundred years the analog dog wagged the digital tail. The effort to extend the reach of our senses – sight, hearing, even (after a manner of speaking) touch, drove engineers and sc…
The Alto was a revolutionary computer designed at Xerox PARC in 1973. It introduced the GUI, high-resolution bitmapped displays, the optic...
A blog post on reverse engineering and customizing the firmware of a cheap fitness tracker bracelet.
