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This TRS-80
A first-hand story about the TRS-80 Model 100 and journalism
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Build an Air Quality Monitor with InfluxDB, Grafana and Docker on a Raspberry Pi
balenaSense reads temperature- humidity- barometric pressure- and air quality- and provides a dashboard that you can access from anywhere.
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TROS: IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers
I recently came across a Transformer Read-Only Storage (TROS) module that stored microcode in an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. This unu...
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Librem 5 Shipping Announcement
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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New Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+
Compute Module 3+, the latest iteration of our flexible board for industrial applications, offers better performance and more Flash at competitive prices.
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Home 3D metal printing: first results
A couple of weeks ago I learnt about an interesting 3d metal printing process , from a company selling it for $100k USD, and speculated that it might be DIY-able for much less. Well I now have some promising first results.
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Librem 5 Hardware Update
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
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The BeagleBone AI is Available
BeagleBoard.org Foundation is a Michigan, USA-based 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation existing to provide education in and collaboration around the design and use of open-source software and hardware in embedded computing.
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How to Track Your Kids (and Other People's Kids) with the TicTocTrack Watch
Do you ever hear those stories from your parents along the lines of "when I was young..." and then there's a tale of how risky life was back then compared to today. You know, stuff like having to walk themselves to school without adult supervision, crazy stuff like that
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CPU Introspection: Intel Load Port Snooping
I blog about random things security, everything is broken, nothing scales, shared memory models are flawed.
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Why the Amazon Basics Keyboard Is My Favorite Keyboard
I've been typing for 20+ years and this is one of my favorite general purpose / programming keyboards when factoring in a few things.
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Green Material for Refrigeration Identified
Researchers from the UK and Spain have identified an eco-friendly solid that could replace the inefficient and polluting gases used in most refrigerators and air conditioners.
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A DIY Cruise Missile (2004)
I'd like to thank all those who have emailed me with their opinions, condemnations and support. The fact that I get so many emails obviously means that my goal of raising public awareness is working. Instead of answering the same questions and restating my perspectives repeatedly, I've been talked into writing a book…
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Unsung Beauty of Analog Devices Datasheets
Engineers build stuff. They need to put together complex systems, most often from pieces that others have built. I jokingly talk to my colleagues that software engineering is similar to plumbing - take various pieces of software and link them through an interface (API or in case of real plumbing - connectors,
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Adventures Building a Self-Driving RC Car
Having read some amazing books on Machine Learning, I had been looking for opportunities to apply ML from first principles in the real world. That was what got me curious about the wonderful Donkey Car project. The project is essentially a how-to guide to building your own RC car which can drive itself around a track…
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LoRaWAN distance world record broken twice: 766km using 25mW power
After almost 2 years, the world record of 702 km (436 miles) has been broken. Not once but twice. For a long time this record which was set on 26th of August 20
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New chips for machine intelligence
This note summarises details of some of the new silicon chips for machine intelligence. Its aim is to distil the most important implementation and architectural details (at least those that are currently available), to highlight the main differences between them. I’m focusing on chips designed for training since they…
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Slimbook collaborates with the PowerPC laptop
We are pleased to announce our collaboration with Power Progress Community (PPC), the association behind the creation of a ordenador portátil con procesador PowerPC , in this case the NXP T2080. The PowerPC instruction set has been recently released by IBM as open source and given to the Linux Foundation.
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Pine64 November Update – ANSI Pinebook Pro and PinePhone Preorder
Our core focus for the past month was on getting the manufacturing process and shipping of the Pinebook Pro, PinePhone and PineTime development kits back on track. I will not reiterate the events that led to the delays of those devices in this post, but if you’re interested then read the detailed account of what…
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Solving the Rubik’s cube with a robot hand
We’ve trained a pair of neural networks to solve the Rubik’s Cube with a human-like robot hand. The neural networks are trained entirely in simulation, using the same reinforcement learning code as OpenAI Five paired with a new technique called Automatic Domain Randomization (ADR). The system can handle situations it…
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Making a Menger sponge in stained glass
Over the course of six weeks in January and February 2019, I took an introduction to stained glass course from Olivia Vavroch at Vavroch Glass Studio in north Portland, OR.
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FreeBSD on the Lenovo Thinkpad
Compatibility of FreeBSD on a Lenovo Thinkpad T480, notes and fixes (HiDPI, Trackpad, camera, etc).
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RISC-V from scratch 2: Hardware layouts, linker scripts, and C runtimes
A post describing how C programs get to the main function. Devicetree layouts, linker scripts, minimal C runtimes, GDB and QEMU, basic RISC-V assembly, and other topics are reviewed along the way.
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Travels with a Pi (2018)
Pete's Random Notes Blog - I have opinions on lots of things...
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Adventures in reverse engineering Broadcom NIC firmware
For some time now, I've been reverse engineering the firmware of the Broadcom BCM5719 Ethernet NIC chip, so that open source firmware can be produced for it. The BCM5719 is a PCIe chip which provides up to four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and is mainly intended for use in server applications. It can be used with the Linux…