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PlayTaurus argues guitarists should buy hardware for what it is and run community firmware on it—ESP32-class chips are cheap enough, NAM models are open, and closed pedal firmware is the last proprietary lock.
2 min · 477 words
NEC V20 CPU: A bit of pep for an XT
A deep dive into the NEC V20 CPU as a drop-in 8088 upgrade for IBM PC/XT-class machines—what it changes, how fast it feels, and why collectors still care.
11 min · 2,628 words
The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art
There's a recurring argument made about how modern pixel art often doesn't look right. For example, TikTok user "mylifeisanrpg" has made a popular video in which he explains how pixel artists used to work with the innate physical properties of Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs). In short, he describes how the fuzziness of a CRT smoothed out the rough edges of low resolution pixels and made things look much less blocky than if viewed on a modern flatscreen display. This is correct. I also agree that modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia. However, there's a…
14 min · 3,171 words
Making portable my unportable transputer C compiler
Oscar Toledo recounts porting his 1990s transputer C compiler from 32-bit DJGPP assumptions to a modern 64-bit Mac—fixing int/pointer aliasing, FILE*, and self-hosting constraints along the way.
14 min · 3,196 words
This Digital Radio Gets Messages to the World's Remotest LocationsIt sends encrypted signals with no satellites or relay towers required
IEEE Spectrum interviews Rhizomatica’s Peter Bloom on HERMES, an open-source HF data radio that pushes files and optional encryption over the ionosphere for remote and emergency communities.
3 min · 594 words
dlab Open Source Week: Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware
Tim Dettmers argues that small academic labs can compete by building coherent open-source ecosystems rather than isolated papers. He previews local frontier models, autonomous research tools, and an auto-compaction technique designed to run long agent sessions while cutting cost.
1 min · 276 words
M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review: The Dream Mac for Local AI Agents
Federico Viticci reviews the M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256 GB RAM—why it is a dream machine for local AI agents, what workloads it unlocks, and where it still falls short.
14 min · 3,293 words
Inside the Tiny Unfixable Eye: iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max Teardown
iFixit’s teardown of the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max covers the new variable aperture camera, battery tray, cooling, and the repair tradeoffs—including plastic frames that tore on multiple units.
12 min · 2,777 words
Overview of AOOSTAR WTR Pro on *BSD
Joel Carnat’s hands-on FreeBSD/OpenBSD notes on the AOOSTAR WTR Pro NAS mini-PC: networking, storage, power, quirks, and what works out of the box.
10 min · 2,326 words
A new world airport and its baggage
A longform history of Denver International Airport’s automated baggage system: ambition, failure, and what the wreckage still teaches about complex infrastructure.
32 min · 7,322 words
Reversing the SH-4 fpu with the help of three AI models
Using three AI models to reverse-engineer approximate SH-4 FPU instructions (FIPR, FTRV, FSCA, FSRRA) for Dreamcast emulation accuracy.
10 min · 2,333 words
Bryan Cantrill reflects on Sun Microsystems’ culture and mistakes—what Oxide’s homage tees revive, and which lessons still matter for hardware-software companies.
3 min · 718 words
An unofficial community project revives Amiga Unix (Amix) for 68040/68060 machines and modern accelerators, with a modern toolchain, package manager, and open grimoire of the work.
3 min · 626 words
Own the Agent, Rent the Intelligence: Building My Always-On AI Agent Server
James M explains why a Mac mini M6 became his always-on Hermes agent server—routing hard work to cheap cloud models like DeepSeek Flash and Claude Sonnet instead of owning local inference hardware.
24 min · 5,439 words
Hello, HellGatesPostmortem of a year-unsolved gate-level crackme that GPT-6 cracked in minutes
xutaxkamay recounts designing HellGates—a VHDL custom CPU with obfuscation, anti-tamper, and anti-debug that stumped humans and LLMs for a year—until GPT-6 solved it in under half an hour, then walks through what actually broke.
25 min · 5,662 words
Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure DebugDifferential photon-emission microscopy localized debug enable register activity before SWD-guided laser injection restored Secure debug on an RP2350 A4.
Ledger Donjon shows how photon-emission microscopy guided laser fault injection to set DEBUGEN bits on a locked Raspberry Pi RP2350 A4, then used rescue reset to recover an OTP challenge secret—requiring destructive access and ~$250k lab gear.
13 min · 3,017 words
ShapeLearn-Lite Held Up. ShapeLearn Did Better: Qwen 3.8 27B
ByteShape publishes full ShapeLearn GGUF builds of Qwen 3.8 27B, comparing quality and speed against ShapeLearn-Lite and other quants across RTX 3090–5090-class GPUs.
19 min · 4,316 words
Daniel Mangum digs into unexpected register values on Nordic's nRF54L while poking the Key Management Unit from a debugger, and explains how SoC security components can make the debugger's view of memory misleading.
11 min · 2,579 words
How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
Daniel Lemire compares AMD Ryzen 7 X3D chips from Zen 3 to Zen 5: Geekbench gains of ~50% came less from clock and more from wider cores, larger caches, bigger ROBs, and 512-bit SIMD.
2 min · 468 words
The Lamentable Later Life of LemmingsHow a 1990s smash franchise faded after DMA Design’s early triumph
Jimmy Maher’s Digital Antiquarian traces the later Lemmings sequels and ports after the 1991 phenomenon—covering DMA Design’s struggle to turn a surprise hit into a lasting franchise, and why the later games never matched the original’s magic.
19 min · 4,454 words