About a couple months ago I purchased an Arduino Nano ESP32 dev board. I had this sudden itch and I wanted to play around with hardware. I don't really have much experience in this space, besides working on firmware for an IoT company over a decade ago, but I've written tons of software over the years. I was very…
Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storage. While hard drives have been around since the 1950s, the current 3.5″ form factor (actually 4″ wide) appeared in the early 1980s. Since then, the capacity…
A look at AI Chip Architectures. NVIDIA, AMD, TPUs, Trainium, Groq, Cerebras.
Recently this post from @Merocle caught my eye: I'm fixing my iFixit soldering station. I haven't used it for a long time and the battery has gone overdischarge. I hope it will come back to life. Unfortunately, there are no replacements available for sale at the moment. Devices with built-in rechargeable batteries…
I write this from the latest MacBook Pro. I've been running this as my primary machine for almost a month. When I'm not grinding out the latest soon-to-be-relea
An experiment to design a cute PCB (without touching any tools) in plain English
The Fairphone 6 is an interesting target for mainline Linux and postmarketOS for a few reasons:
How I massively over-engineered a trivial problem again because I just can't help myself
Changing from part numbers had benefits for Intel, but it took time
In October, my Dad and I got to go behind the scenes at two St. Louis Blues (NHL hockey) games, and observe the massive team effort involved in putting together a modern digital sports broadcast. I wanted to explore the timing and digital side of a modern SMPTE 2110 mobile unit, and my Dad has been involved in studio…
Colin's things that might be useful or interesting2026154 points49 commentsHardware & Electronics details
I've always had a fascination with simpler and low power computing. This lead me to run Photoshop on a 60 pence computer chip and it amazes me that this is possible.
Dell sent me two of their GB10 mini workstations to test: In this blog post, I'll cover the base system, just one of the two nodes. Cluster testing is ongoing, and I'll cover things like AI model training and networking more in depth next year, likely with comparisons to the Framework Desktop cluster and Mac Studio…
Hiking with Wallace, my 6" f/2.8 corrected dobsonian.
A little over a month ago, I ran into a Tektronix TDS7104 at the Silicon Valley Flea Market , where else?
In my day job I work with ion thrusters for spacecraft, which are essentially electric-powered rockets that fling Xenon gas out at super high speeds to provide thrust and allow satellites to change…
reenigne's decoding of the 8088 microcode in 2020 opened the doors for extremely accurate emulation of the 8088 CPU. Although I had added...
Evidence-indexed documentation of TI-84 Plus OS 2.55MP ROM behavior and hardware interfaces.
I’m having a lot of fun with reverse engineering lately, so when I was looking over the service manual for my guitar amp, a Yamaha THR10c, and saw references to a UART header in the schematic, I got excited. I wondered if anything cool was hiding in there. Next to it was a JTAG header. I knew next to nothing about…
This guest post is from Jim Trageser , a long-time Goto 10 reader.
Hamming Codes ECC RAM corrects errors that occur in memory before it gets to the CPU. The most common form of ECC is the Hamming Code [1] which when it has R redundant bits can correct single bit e…
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
When making vacuum tubes, the glass is actually the easy part: premade tube stock of almost any size is easily available.
How wanting more is not always better
When I started using computers, we had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum at home and a nano-reseau of Thomson MO5 s at elementary school. I distinctly remember how unpleasant it was to type with them. These must have been the worst keyboards I ever used [1] . Ever since, I have paid close attention to the keyboards I use. Here…
Virtual reality for a 286 processor
For April First, a guide to replace everything with 555 ICs.
In our kitchen, the only device that displays the time is our oven! :D Looking at it was always a bit annoying.
The origin and the evolution of the most confusing modifier key
Everyone thinks China's robot factories are automated. They aren't. The robots are Chinese; the robots that make robots will be Western.
macOS 15 Sequoia had a hard time with CoreStorage – and thus encrypted HFS+ volumes – since it deprecated both technologies and callously crippled some important tools for working with them, but nonetheless it mostly still worked. While I’d often – but not always – have to manually unlock one of my HFS+ volumes – but…
