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A build log for the slurptop, a home-built cyberpunk luggable computer using a Ryzen 7 mini PC, a custom 82-key mechanical keyboard, an integrated trackball and a UPS that runs on swappable 24V Kobalt power tool batteries, covering design, power delivery, bill of materials, filaments and battery life.
10 min · 2,252 words
Ben Hardill describes his Lenovo X1 Carbon developing crashing tabs and BTRFS checksum errors, confirming faulty soldered RAM with memtest86+, and working around the bad addresses with the Linux memmap kernel parameter instead of replacing a module, arguing soldered RAM is especially painful amid today's shortage-driven memory prices.
5 min · 1,068 words
Memory is slow, Disk is fast - Part 3
Jared Hulbert benchmarks an on-disk sorted-set structure (DiskArray on 8 NVMe drives, 264 MiB RAM) against an in-RAM AVL tree at 2 billion keys and finds the disk-based design faster at search, rank, insert and delete, arguing Big O misleads and that memory must be treated like a parallel, pipelined block device.
19 min · 4,345 words
Recreate the Apollo Guidance Computer
Raspberry Pi Official Magazine profiles avionics engineer Michael Newton's open source Recreate Apollo project, a 1:1 3D-printed Apollo DSKY replica driven by a Raspberry Pi running the Virtual AGC emulator with the Apollo 13 Command Module software.
6 min · 1,372 words
Reverse engineering a Beyblade launch tracker
Simone Marzulli describes getting hooked on Beyblade X, then reverse engineering the Beybattle Pass launch tracker: sniffing its Bluetooth traffic, decoding the payloads that record each launch's RPM, and building DiZZi 0.2, an AI companion app inspired by the anime with a spinning 3D bey and voice callouts.
17 min · 3,852 words
John Gruber's week-long review of Apple's folding iPhone Duo: how the cover and inner screens, thickness, weight, hardware buttons and software feel in daily use, and why it feels like an extraordinarily polished prototype rather than a finished product.
38 min · 8,767 words
cakehonolulu digs into why older Samsung TVs can't mute their built-in speakers while using Q-Symphony with a Q990D soundbar, walks through the configuration issues and the TV's service menu, and finds a workaround by setting the service menu's Max Volume to 0, which mutes the TV speakers while Q-Symphony keeps working.
9 min · 2,037 words
Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account
Josephine Pfeiffer gets Arch Linux ARM running on the Windows-only ASUS ProArt P16 with NVIDIA's N1X chip, publishing a bootable installer and patches, comparing CPU performance against Windows in 7-Zip, explaining the 116 GiB unified memory split, and benchmarking local Qwen inference.
6 min · 1,453 words
Inside the Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor's microcode and circuitry to explain exactly how it performs addition and subtraction, including exponent alignment, normalization, rounding and the many special cases for infinities, denormals, unnormals and pseudo-zeros.
25 min · 5,808 words
Classic 68000 Macintosh programs from the 1980s and '90s reverse-engineered and rebuilt for modern macOS, with notes on how AI-assisted reverse engineering made the ports practical.
2 min · 380 words
ThinkPad I9990303 Error Catch-22
Michal Necasek of the OS/2 Museum digs into why a circa-1994 IBM ThinkPad 750C refuses to boot or enter BIOS setup with error I9990303, traces it to corrupted BIOS flash contents, and shows how the very error blocks reflashing until a hacked UPDTFLSH.EXE bypasses the check and fixes it.
5 min · 1,257 words
Using Artificial Intelligence to reverse engineer hardware
Christian F.K. Schaller describes using Claude Code with a Windows VM capturing USB traffic to write a working Linux SANE driver for his Plustek 8200i film scanner within hours, then reusing the setup to patch the kernel and libcamera for his laptop's MIPI camera, and releasing hw-harness, a generic toolkit to help AI agents reverse engineer undocumented hardware.
8 min · 1,760 words
What was a Token Ring network?
Dave Farquhar explains Token Ring, the IBM networking technology announced on October 15, 1985 that competed with Ethernet through the 1980s and 1990s. He covers why Ethernet won, how to tell Token Ring cards from Ethernet ones today by connectors, speed markings and brand, whether the old hardware is worth using, and why anyone chose it.
7 min · 1,584 words
Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack
Oxide's Product Assurance team introduces Voxel, a tool that emulates a full Oxide rack, including its real control plane, switches, service processors and customer-like networking topologies, so the team can test current software without scarce hardware; it covers image creation, launch, SP emulation and the MPL 2.0 release.
18 min · 4,170 words
Counting Stars: Open Source Hardware at Chip Companies
Zero ASIC founder Andreas Olofsson tallies GitHub stars on public chip design repositories by company to argue that the semiconductor industry contributes almost nothing to open source hardware. Ten-person Zero ASIC ranks first with about 3,900 stars, ahead of SiFive, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel, and the post explains the counting method and notes the work of startups and projects like OpenROAD.
6 min · 1,310 words
Making 1,750 programmable PCB badges for Canada's biggest hackathon
Nick Ficara tells how Hack the North's cardstock name tag became 1,750 programmable circuit-board badges with a screen, buttons and radio, walking through EVT, DVT and PVT prototypes, part-selection errors, flipped ICs, supply chain and the production run, with open-source hardware, firmware and a WebAssembly emulator.
24 min · 5,525 words
Why I Started Moving Inference In-House
Nicholas Reese explains why he moved the AI behind USA Arms onto in-house hardware — three servers with four AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 cards each — covering costs, the parts list, the build video, and a free build guide meant to hand to an AI.
9 min · 2,029 words
Google's Gemini 4 Argon post for robotics: physical reasoning that leads ERQA, with representative prompts for zero-shot control, Real2Sim practice, visual-coordinate harnesses, and agentic verification workflows across the robotics stack.
13 min · 3,033 words
We turned EmbeddingGemma 2 into a speech-to-text model
Google's EmbeddingGemma 2 is a multimodal embedding model; this write-up shows how a small trained reader turns its audio encoder into on-device speech-to-text—about an hour of audio in ~13 seconds on a base MacBook Air—without retraining the base model for ASR.
1 min · 339 words
Railroads, UPenn, and a Well-Loved UNIX Machine
A restoration log for an AT&T 3B2/300: from a 43MB hard-drive backup the author reconstructs the machine's history, from short-line railroad operations to railroad expert-witness consulting, plus development material for UPenn's telephone class-registration system PARIS, with records spanning 1984 to 2002.
5 min · 1,116 words