After seeing it in action at FOSDEM (from afar, as the crowd was too large), I decided to buy a Pinebook Pro for personal use. From the beginning, the intention was to use it for pkgsrc development, with NetBSD as the main OS. It was finally delivered on Thursday, one day earlier than promised, so I thought I would…
Z80 Explorer is a Z80 netlist-level simulator capable of running Z80 machine code and also an educational tool with features that help reverse engineer and understand this chip better.
Mike Kohn's music, software, and electronics projects.
[Edit] This post sparked a conversation on Ycombinator ! I am concerned about Apple's move to its own home-grown processors. It's not because I'm worried about the new silicon, or Apple's ability to make high-performance CPUs, or even because I am worried about changing architectures. I survived…
From home temperature monitoring to a Kubernetes cluster hosting a live Drupal website, I have a lot of experience running Raspberry Pis. I've used every model through the years, and am currently using a mix of A+, 2 model B, and 4 model B Pis. The 3 model B+ was the first generation that had me concerned more about…
Update 2022: Web MiniDisc Pro can access NetMD devices through the browser and can also download protected files! If you have music on a collection of MiniDisc media and want to finally copy the data off onto modern media (or the cloud!), here are simple instructions for some different solutions:
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
The Nanoprocessor is a mostly-forgotten processor developed by Hewlett-Packard in 1974 1 as a microcontroller 2 for their products. Stra...
Scott Mabin's blog
Introduced in 1978, the revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor led to the x86 processors used in most desktop and server computing today....
Following these steps, you will add hardware acceleration decoding capabilities to the Chromium web browser. This is an extension to the tutorial about DRM for Chromium on the Raspberry Pi. Videos from Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, Youtube, etc. can be decoded using the Raspberry Pi GPU.
A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can implement arbitrary digital logic, anything from a microprocessor to a video generator or crypt...
Extreme refurbishing of a Commodore SX-64 keyboard. Lots of putty, epoxy resin and spray painting with original color and more :)
All this work was done in November last year. I haven’t worked on it since, but others have shown interest in picking this up, so it’s about time this gets thrown out in the open.
Back in April of last year, the speedometer failed in my ‘94 Explorer. Rather than hunting down a replacement cable and tearing apart the dash just to restore an old analog needle, I opted to build a digital replacement using a Raspberry Pi and GPS.
Examining the extent of AVX related downclocking on Intel’s Ice Lake CPU
Investigating some details of SIMD related frequency transitions on Intel CPUs.
Recent studies have suggested various side-channel attacks for eavesdropping sound by analyzing the side effects of sound waves on nearby objects (e.g., a bag of chips and window) and devices (e.g., motion sensors). These methods pose a great threat to privacy, however they are limited in one of the
Today Raspberry Pi Trading announced the Raspberry Pi 400, the latest in the series of small education-focused computers that started with the original Raspberry Pi in 2012. For years, people have come up with creative ways to hack a Pi into keyboards, like the Original Pi in an old Mitsumi keyboard, or the Pi 3 A+ in…
Recently, I’ve started to explore RISC-V. I experienced the journey as pretty refreshing, particularly because I’ve been working on x86 low-level software almost exclusively for about 10 years.
Looking to build a DIY bike for spin classes at home? I have you covered with my build and review of the Sunny bike and accessories for under $400
Blog about vintage computers and homebrewing computers.
Floating-point numbers are very useful for scientific programming, but early microprocessors only supported integers directly. 1 Although...
x86 is back in the general programmer discourse, in part thanks to Apple’s M1 and Rosetta 2 . As such, I figured I’d do yet another x86-64 post.
The revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month so I've been studying its die. 1 I came across two 8...
