Virtualizing iOS on Apple Silicon
Nick Botticelli's personal website
Python client for the $20 Colmi R02 smart ring
Open source python client to read your data from the Colmi R02 family of Smart Rings. 100% open source, 100% offline.
Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture
Looking in more detail at Google's first Tensor Processing Unit
Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
An article studying the use of LLMs fror designing circuit boards
First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering Prof. Y. Shirley Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion has created the world’s first anode-free sodium
How to build a $20B semiconductor fab
For the last several decades, one avenue of technological progress has towered over nearly everything else: semiconductors.
An IRC client in your motherboard
I made a graphical IRC client that runs in UEFI. It’s written in Rust and leverages the GUI toolkit and TrueType renderer that I wrote for axle’s userspace. I was able to develop it thanks to the vmnet network backend that I implemented for QEMU. You can connect to an IRC server, chat and read messages, all from the…
The Cheapest NAS
I wanted to replace my old trusty 'router' (with an attached HDD)--that was not working as a router, but as a network drive after flashing OpenWRT onto it--I wanter to replace it with an SBC+HDD combo.
Reverse engineering the 59-pound printer onboard the Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans,...
Fixing annoying blue standby lights
A simple and free fix for those annoying over bright blue standby lights on home electronics (TV, Stereo, Set top box, etc.)
They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard
Nothing says ‘80s pop’ like a DX7.
How simultaneous multithreading works under the hood
Learn the microarchitecture-level details of the processor that enable to execute two threads at the same time on a CPU core
Fluorite lenses: Corrective capabilities beyond ordinary optical glass
Canon developed its own technology for forming large, high-purity artificial fluorite crystals using fluorite ore as a raw material.
ZenHammer: Rowhammer attacks on AMD Zen-based platforms
Our work shows that it is possible to trigger Rowhammer bit flips on DDR4 devices on AMD Zen 2 and Zen 3 systems despite deployed TRR mitigations. This result proves that AMD systems are equally vulnerable to Rowhammer as Intel systems , which greatly increases the attack surface, considering today’s AMD market share…
Building an e-ink picture frame that displays an iCloud photo album
For Christmas, I gave my parents this e-ink picture frame (built from an old e-reader) that cycles through photos from a shared iCloud photo album:
AVX Bitwise ternary logic instruction busted
How a modern AVX instruction shares a similar design with a 1985 blitter chip, by Arnaud Carré
Apple introduces iPad mini built for Apple Intelligence
Apple today introduced the new iPad mini, supercharged by the A17 Pro chip and Apple Intelligence.
Apple Vision Pro available in the U.S. on February 2
Apple Vision Pro will be available beginning Friday, February 2, at all U.S. Apple Store locations and the U.S. Apple Store online.
AirPods fast connect security vulnerability
tldr: There's a security vulnerability (CVE-2024-27867) in the firmware of Apple AirPods. Anyone who knows the Bluetooth MAC address (which is somewhat public) can connect to your AirPods and listen to the microphone or play music. Even while the AirPods are connected to your phone (although music would stop playing…
SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller
An accelerated FAST feature detector for the ESP32-S3 leveraging 128-bit SIMD instructions, achieving ~2x the performance of the reference implementation.
Our First Generalist Policy
Our first generalist policy, π0, a prototype model that combines large-scale multi-task and multi-robot data collection with a new network architecture to enable the most capable and dexterous generalist robot policy to date.
Building a USB SNES Controller
A few years ago on a trip to Tokyo, we took a day to explore Akihabara. We found a shop that was selling retro gaming stuff and when I saw an old SNES controller for sale I had to buy it.
How AlphaChip transformed computer chip design
Our AI method has accelerated and optimized chip design, and its superhuman chip layouts are used in hardware around the world. AlphaChip was one of the first reinforcement learning approaches used to solve a real-world engineering problem. It generates superhuman or comparable chip layouts in hours, rather than weeks…