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64bit computing on a budget
With all that Dec Alpha talk , and how hard it is to get hardware, and how seemingly exclusionary it is, I thought I would try to touch on a more available 64bit ‘risc’ platform, for the masses!
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Apple fucked us on right to repair (again)
Right to repair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than Apple, a company whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage electronics repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of e-waste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through.
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Reverse-engineering the multiplication algorithm in the Intel 8086 processor
While programmers today take multiplication for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — multiplication r...
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The Odd Story of Factory-Downgraded 486s (2020)
Counterfeits CPU were very common in the mid-90s. The worst period was between 1993 (just after the launch of the Intel 486 DX2) and 1998 (when the Pentium II started to be multiplier-locked). It was extremely easy for tricksters to remove the original marking and reprint another one with a higher f
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Imaging a Hard Drive with Non-ECC Memory – What Could Go Wrong?
I recently came home to visit with family, but right now as I write this, it's 1:00am and I'm running memtest86+ by myself in the basement.
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Building a Networked Key-Value-Store on an FPGA
This post is about building an FPGA based networked key-value-store in the functional hardware description language Clash. I’ll describe my FPGA-tailored hashtable design, the testing framework I built for it, and its performance and resource usage.
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Looking into the Stadia Controller Bluetooth Mode Website
With the end of Google's Stadia platform on January 18, 2023, Google published a website allowing people to "Switch the Stadia Controller ...
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Reverse-engineering the Globus INK, a Soviet spaceflight navigation computer
One of the most interesting navigation instruments onboard Soyuz spacecraft was the Globus INK, 1 which used a rotating globe to indicate...
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More fun with Apple's internal tools: creating a PDS card
In my last post , I figured out how to use Apple’s leaked Flasher utility from the 1990s to reflash a ROM SIMM inside of my Performa 630. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of a BIOS update, but only for Apple’s developers. The research involved in that post was quite a journey of reverse engineering from both a…
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Benchmarking Cheap SSDs for Fun, No Profit
The price of Solid-state drives (SSDs) has dropped significantly over the last few years. It's now possible to buy a 1TB solid-state drive for less than €60. However, at such low price points, there is a catch.
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Fedora Asahi Remix first impressions
My personal website and blog
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My deep learning rig (2022)
A lot of people have asked about the computers I used to train TorToiSe. I’ve been meaning to snap some pictures, but it’s never “convenient” to turn these servers off so I keep procrastinating. We had some severe thunderstorms today here i
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The microcode and hardware in the 8086 processor that perform string operations
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978. This processor ended up being hugely influential, setting the path for the x86 architec...
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AMD Killed the Itanium (2005)
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
166
Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive?
Two systems I know pretty well, Apache BookKeeper and Apache Kafka, were designed in the era of the spinning disk, the hard-drive or HDD. Hard-drives are good at sequential IO but not so good at random IO because of the relatively high seek times. No wonder then that both Kafka and BookKeeper were d
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Yet another keyboard post, or, introducing ErgoNICE
I made a custom split mechanical keyboard! Because it's me, this involved things like contributing to a PCB design tool and discovering a ridiculously optimized way to read a keyboard matrix.
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Modeling my Grandpa with 3D Photogrammetry (2021)
Today I released a video about how—and why—I 3D Printed my Grandpa and put him on my bottle of ketchup. Watch it here. I sculpted a bust of my Grandpa in high school, gave it to my grandparents, got it back after he died and my Grandma moved out of her house (I wrote a tribute to my 'Grandpa Charlie'), and I kept on…
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Exway doesn't care about USB-C conformity
Eric Park's website
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My 2023 all-flash ZFS NAS (Network Storage) build
For over 10 years now, I run two self-built NAS (Network Storage) devices which serve media (currently via Jellyfin) and run daily backups of all my PCs and servers. In this article, I describe my goals, which hardware I picked for my new build (and why) and how I set it up.
172
Reverse-engineering the electronics in the Globus analog navigational computer
In the Soyuz space missions, cosmonauts tracked their position above the Earth with a remarkable electromechanical device with a rotating ...
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Everything I've learned building the fastest Arm desktop
This is the fastest Arm desktop in the world, yes, even faster than the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. And today, I made it even faster. I upgraded everything: Faster RAM, 128 core CPU, 40 series GPU, I did it all, and we'll see how much we can obliterate the M2 Mac Pro. 128 cores—that's five times more cores, I'm also going to…
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8086 Processor's microcode pipeline from die analysis
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978, and its influence still remains through the popular x86 architecture. The 8086 was a fai...
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How MOS 6502 illegal opcodes work
The original NMOS version of the MOS 6502, used in computers like the Commodore 64, the Apple II and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), is well-known for its illegal opcodes: Out of 256 possible opcodes, 151 are defined by the architecture, but many of the remaining 105 undefined opcodes do…
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Thermochromic Breadboard
A breadboard with visual indication of overheating of the parts.
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Ottopot, a sophisticated DIY MIDI controller
This is the ottopot. It's a MIDI controller I made with nothing but 8 dials. However, the dials I made in the highest quality that I possibly could. There are 2 things in particular that I haven't seen in any other similar devices: High resolution with 14bit MIDI CCs (12bit effective resolution) and a quasi-1:1…
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Rust on Espressif chips
Scott Mabin's blog
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How many AMD RX 7900 XTX's are defective?
I'm working on a project—a very dumb project, mind you—and I was trying to acquire the two current-gen flagship GPUs: an Nvidia RTX 4090, and an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. In some weird stroke of luck (it has been difficult to find either in stock), I was able to get one of each this week. (lol at the size difference...)
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I built a special PCIe card to test GPUs on the Pi
I partnered up with Mirek (of Mirkotronics / @Mirko_DIY on Twitter) to build the Pi4GPU (or 'PiG' for short): This journey started almost three years ago: almost immediately after the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was launched, I started testing graphics cards on it. First I tried some low-spec cards like the Zotac…