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Designing a guitar with hot-swappable pickups
I made a custom guitar with hot-swappable pickups
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Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
Yesterday while surfing the ASCII highways of IRC (yes, IRC) a URL linking to a MacOS application scrolled by my screen. Unclack is a small MacOS utility which silences the microphone of the user when they’re typing. The purpose is to prevent the noise of typing being passed through to other participants when on a…
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Cheap and simple way to mount a smartphone directly above a laptop display
with David Santiano, Deyin Mia Zhang, Xinran Azena Fan, and Yunru Casey Pan, NYU Shanghai; Barak Chamo, New York; Paolo Salvagione…
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A USB Fan Controller that now works under Linux
Relying on the built-in motherboard headers on server grade motherboards to reliably control fans with Linux has been a crapshoot since forever. I'm pleased to report that last summer the Corsair Commander Pro received native Linux kernel driver support in the 5.9 release.
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IoT Nixie Tubes
Every day I make a cup of coffee, organize a list of the things I want to do that day, and try to work through it. Every time I finish one of the tasks, I mark it as complete. By the end of the day, ideally there are no things left on the list, but if there are, I’ll move them into a backlog and start fresh the next…
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The World's current and next Innovations depend on a single country, Taiwan
The world’s current and next innovations depend on a single country: Taiwan. It’s probably one country you might never hear about, or perhaps confuse with its neighbor, Thailand, or even think it’s a part of China. I’ve been living in Taiwan for 3+ years, and am baffled that I never pay attention to semiconductors…
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Hacking a PC sound card to read temperature and liquid level sensors
Measure with Music: How to Read Analog Sensors Using a PC Sound Card
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Turning an iPad Pro into a classic Macintosh
I’ve started work on the next in my 1-bit Woodblocks series: “Tekagami” (Ito Shinsui’s “Hand Mirror”). So it’s a good time to talk about how I turned an iPad...
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286 vs. 386SX
The 386sx wasn't much of an upgrade from the 286, but was popular for a time. Let's take a look at the 286 vs 386sx, and what the SX offered.
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The “Ultimate” ThinkPad (2020)
A comprehensive guide to upgrading the Lenovo Thinkpad X230 with a better keyboard, a better screen and a custom coreboot BIOS.
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Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU
I’ve had my M1 MacBook Air for a bit of time now, and I also recently started mining Ethereum. I can’t help asking myself: What’s Ethereum mining performance like on a M1 Mac?
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Pentium on a 386 Motherboard
I was wondering what would be the ultimate upgrade for my 386 motherboard. It has a soldered-in 386 CPU, an unpopulated 386 PGA socket, and a socket for either a 387 FPU or a 486 PGA. It might even be compatible with a Weitek processor, though I’m not entirely certain. There’s also a possibility that it has a…
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Tilt-5 Was Magical
Introduction It was nice to get out and actually look through AR and VR displays at AWE 2021. I started to write about everything I saw at AWE, but to me Tilt-5 was such a standout that I decided t…
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Uptime Lab's CM4 Blade Adds NVMe, TPM 2.0 to Raspberry Pi
A few weeks ago, I received two early copies of Uptime.Lab's CM4 Blade. The Blade is built for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, which has the same processor as the Pi 4 and Pi 400, but without any of the built-in IO ports. You plug the CM4 into the Blade, then the Blade breaks out the connections to add some…
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How I built the world's first 3D ultrasonic scanner
Here's how I built an ultrasonic 3d scanner that works in the air, using off-the-shelf components.
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“Space age electronics”: Inside a GE thin-film paperweight from the 1960s
In the early 1960s, General Electric developed a technology called thin-film electronics. 1 These circuits were built from thin films of ...
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DIY microscope lenses on BMD pocket 6K camera
I was having fun lately with some normal macro photography and was curious if I somehow can use my fathers microscope lenses on my photo and film cameras. The idea is not new, a quick google search showed that it was indeed possible but you need a special adapter for these microscope lenses. The adapter is called “RMS…
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Can My Water Cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster Beat My MacBook?
It's time to put my water cooled Raspberry Pi Cluster to the test. I put it up against my MacBook and a Windows PC to see which performed best
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Librem 5 Evergreen vs. PinePhone (Part 2)
It’s been about half a year since I wrote my original post comparing the Librem 5 and Pinephone. The original post saw some controversy as well as quite a bit of attention on Hacker News . Surprisingly, for a market dominated by new tech every year, there remains quite a bit of interest in these two devices.
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M1 Icestorm cores can still perform well
What are the penalties in real-world use for running your code on Icestorm cores, using around 10% of the power used by Firestorms?
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Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller
IBM used some unusual techniques in its integrated circuits, and one of the most visible is packaging them in square metal cans. I've been...
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Rapid Prototyping with a $100 Inkjet Printer
Why just print forms and airline tickets from an inkjet printer when you can print electronics! All you need to do is to replace the…
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Inside a 20-Watt Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier from Apollo
How did the Apollo astronauts communicate on their trip to the Moon, 240,000 miles back to Earth? They used a 32-pound amplifier, built ar...
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A one-bit processor explained: reverse-engineering the vintage MC14500B
The Motorola MC14500B 1 is a 1-bit processor introduced in 1976. While a 1-bit processor might seem almost useless, 2 it was marketed as...
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Nicole gets a real computer – the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard (2020)
So there I was, very happy with my Apple ][plus. But then I saw someone on the internet post, and it seems that my Apple is an overpriced box with a toy micr...