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Challenges Building an Open-Source E Ink Laptop
In a previous article, I discussed my intention of Building an E-Ink Laptop . In this article, I want to introduce EI2030 and how we are building an open-source eink laptop and its challenges.
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The Confusing World of USB
For decades, my perception of USB was that of a technology both simple and reliable. You plug it and it works. The two first iterations [1] [2] freed PCs from a badly fragmented connector world made of RJ-45 (Ethernet), DA-15 (Joystick), DE-9 (Serial), DIN (PS/2), SCSI, and DB-25 (Parallel). When USB-3.0 came out…
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Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?
It wasn't my intent to have this next post be about locating a source of a transmitter - but the temptation proved irresistible. Over the pa...
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Making an old USB printer support Apple AirPrint using a Raspberry Pi
There are longer tutorials on how to connect a USB printer to a Raspberry Pi and make it accessible via AirPrint but here's the minimal one ...
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Apple Silicon M1 supports “billion of colors” a.k.a. HDR 10-bit output
When most people hear Apple in a sentence, their next thought is likely the color. Does Apple Silicon M1 output “billion colors”?
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Fixing a Tiny Corner of the Supply Chain
No product gets built without at least one good supply chain war story – especially true in these strange times. Before we get into the details of the story, I feel it’s worth understanding a bit more about the part that caused me so much trouble: what it does, and why it’s so special.
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Teaching a cheap ethernet switch new tricks (2019)
Ethernet rules everything around us, a large proportion of our systems communicate to each other with ethernet somewhere in the line. And the fast pace race to the bottom for embedded systems means that almost all network equipment is smart to some degree these days.
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Apple’s M1 processor and the full 128-bit integer product
If I multiply two 64-bit integers (having values in [0, 264)), the product requires 128 bits. Intel and AMD processors (x64) can compute the full (128-bit) product of two 64-bit integers using a single instruction (mul). ARM processors, such as those found in your mobile phone, require two instructions to achieve the…
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Rust on Espressif chips
Scott Mabin's blog
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The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
I started a new job recently so I had the opportunity to get one of the new M1 MacBooks, I decided to go with the Air. The reviews have been very positive and I’m here to tell you: it is indeed an amazing device. The performance feels a lot better than my MacBook Pro 16”, which is only a year old and about 3x the…
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2021 GPS Accuracy Issue Impacting Some Garmin, Suunto, other GPS Devices
Update: As of Sunday morn...
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Mezzano on Librebooted ThinkPads
I decided to try running Mezzano on real hardware. I figured my Librebooted ThinkPads would be good targets, since, thanks to Coreboot and the Linux kernel, I have reference source code for all the hardware.
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Building a Curve25519 Hardware Accelerator
Note: this post uses a $\LaTeX$ plugin to render math symbols. It may require a desktop browser for the full experience…
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Why did bar ends go away from mountain bikes?
For a little over a decade, they enjoyed strong popularity among mountain bikers, but then the feelings got cold.
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Hacking a $200 Under Desk Exercise Bike
Due to COVID, I haven’t been getting my usual amount of exercise this year. To help with that, I decided to take a chance and order an under-desk exercise bike to get some extra cardio. The bike I bought is decent: it has good tension, stays in place, operates quietly, and offers Bluetooth connectivity for tracking…
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How strong would a magnetic field have to be to kill you?
There’s a great joke in Futurama, the cartoon comedy show, about a horror movie for robots. In the movie, a planet of robots is terrorized by a giant “non-metallic being” (a mons…
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The chip shortage could lead to an era of hardware innovation
It’s bad out there for customers of electronic parts and components. The semiconductor shortage is so severe it’s being covered by mainstream media; meanwhile, various politicians have tasked their aides with looking at the global supply chain. Indeed, in the short term, the dearth of chips is already leading to…
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Ultra fast Thunderbolt NAS with Apple M1 and Linux
In this post I discuss how you can upgrade a NAS Server by adding Thunderbolt 3 for lightning fast connectivity at 20 or 40Gbps. This particular implementation is specific to an Apple Mac Mini M1 and
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M1 Pro First Impressions: Core Management and CPU Performance
The P cores in the M1 Pro/Max CPU are managed in two groups of four, sparing load on the second group, and distributing it unevenly within each group. Its two E cores outperform the four in the M1 …
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The sixtyforgan: Commodore 64 equipped with a spring reverb
The sixtyforgan is a Commodore 64 equipped with a spring reverb, featuring the keyboard layout of a chromatic button accordion.
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Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
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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First stage POWER9 Firefox JIT passes tests
Yeah, so about that OpenPOWER Minimum Viable Product JavaScript JIT for Firefox. This happened (all timings from an unoptimized debug build ...
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A Summary of Electronics
A summary of electronics that explains in a basic but comprehensive way the specialties of electronics and the most employed terms.
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Turing Pi 2: 4 Raspberry Pi nodes on a mini ITX board
Last year I spent a bit of time building a Kubernetes cluster with the original Turing Pi. It was fun, and interesting, but ultimately the performance of the Compute Module 3+ it was designed around led me to running my homelab off some newer Pi 4 model B computers, which are at least twice as fast for almost…