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The History of ThinkPad: From IBM’s Bento Box to Lenovo’s AI Workstations
A sourced history of ThinkPad from IBM's 1992 700C to Lenovo's 2026 AI workstations: TrackPoint, keyboards, X-series, T-series and P-series.
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GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend
Welcome to LTT Labs - your go-to destination for all things tech. Explore comprehensive test results, insightful commentary, and the latest analysis in hardware.
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Using Blu-ray M-Disk as backup of last resort
In my previous blog post I talked about how I bought a Blu-ray drive and a couple of M-Discs to use it for long-term archival backups.
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Light without electricity? Glowing algae could make it possible
CU Boulder researchers have developed 3D-printable materials embedded with living bioluminescent algae that can produce sustained light.
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Sony Data Discman
Let's look at this little gizmo Sony produced in the early 1990s.
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I built a pint-sized Macintosh
To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico: This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040). The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a…
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Hacking with Claude on a $27 smart watch
The Pine Time is a $27 smart watch that runs open source firmware. I’ve had one sitting in the back of a drawer for a...
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TCXO Failure Analysis
Back in January, the ThunderScope team sent me a PCIe card version of their prototype open hardware oscilloscope.
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Notes on the Intel 8086 processor's arithmetic-logic unit
In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors,...
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Canyon HUD helmet for road riding
Performance and safety information with an audio and haptic communication system allows you to receive warnings before you see them.
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The first wired XR glasses powered by Android XR
XREAL AURA, the first wired XR glasses powered by Android XR, lets you work, watch, and play anywhere with Gemini by your side.
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Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020)
Repairing a dead power supply and replacing the NVRAM in a vintage UNIX workstation.
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Fixing analog audio on the $2.58 HDMI-to-VGA adapter
Adventures in programming, hardware, DSP, and chiptune
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IRIX 3dfx Voodoo driver and glide2x IRIX port
At the moment only SST1 (Voodoo1) is supported on IP32 (O2). Only tested on IRIX 6.5.30 with RM7000C CPU. -driver sources (SST1 and CVG support on IP32) https://github.com/sdz-mods/tdfx_irix -glide2x IRIX port (SST1 on IP32) https://github.com/sdz-mods/glide_irix -hinv wrapper with 3dfx support…
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ZX Spectrum: Experimenting with 1-Bit Sound
As part of the ZX Spectrum tour, I implemented some routines that would let you play simple tones out of the 1-bit beeper. These were in large part inspired by earlier work I did on the Apple II. W…
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The Z80 Membership Card (2015)
The microcomputer is an incredible, revolutionary invention. Like the electric light, the printing press, and the wheel, it has changed the world. Without microcomputers, the internet, and perhaps even "life as we know it" would not be possible!
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80386 Multiplication and Division
When Intel released the 80386 in October 1985, it marked a watershed moment for personal computing. The 386 was the first 32-bit x86 processor, increasing the register width from 16 to 32 bits and vastly expanding the address space compared to its predecessors. This wasn't just an incremental upgrade—it was the…
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Sam Altman Thinks You're Wasting DRAM
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed in a recent podcast discussion that it's "terrible" for everyday people to own DRAM that data centres can use.
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The Serial TTL connector we deserve
Goodbye dangling Dupont pins, hello Julet E-Bike connector. I have them now everywhere, from my router to my servers.
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I built a 10 inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions
I built a 10-inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions and I had a lot of fun doing it. I want to share my build in this post.
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A PCB business card with a batteryless LED, powered by the phone that taps it
I made a circuit-board business card that opens my website and lights an LED with power harvested from the phone tapping it.
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Train Simulator Controller
From January to July 2026, I have continued to work on my UK Class 800-inspired train simulator. There are a number of components in progress, but few newly completed: in lieu of posts about completed portions of the simulator, here’s a roundup of progress across the different hardware aspects of the project.
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Shapelearn Qwen 3.8 27B (13.1 GB VRAM)
ByteShape's full ShapeLearn release of Qwen 3.8 27B: five GGUF models on the quality-speed frontier across six GPUs. GPU-5 is the default wherever it fits, at 99.63% of BF16. GPU-4 stays very competitive in a much smaller file.
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DDR4 Sdram – Initialization, Training and Calibration
A detailed tutorial on DDR4 SDRAM Initialization, Training and Calibration. Exploring topics such as Read/Write Training, ZQ Calibration, Vref Training, Read Centering, Write Centering, Write Leveling and Periodic Calibration.
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Building a local positioning system to track runners using Ultra-Wideband
An open-source multi-tag fully local UWB positioning system.
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Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver
I bought an NVIDIA DGX Spark! It's actually quite a competent general purpose computer while being super tiny and power efficient. It basically just has an ARM CPU, a decent NVIDIA GPU (with the same number of CUDA cores as the RTX 5070), 128 GB of unified memory, and a 4 TB SSD.
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