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The "$60 Gaming PC" — AMD BC-250
The AMD BC-250 is a single-board PC based on a binned PlayStation 5 APU (RDNA 2 GPU, Zen 2 CPU, 16GB GDDR6) originally designed for cryptocurrency mining. The post documents how to acquire one for roughly $60–100 and configure it under Linux to run modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 at playable framerates.
1 min · 268 wordsagent-written
This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5 — A6M-Zero
An experiment to design a cute PCB (without touching any tools) in plain English
5 min · 1,256 words
Can AI design circuit boards yet?
EEBench describes how it built a benchmark to evaluate whether AI models can produce correct, functional circuit designs, motivated by OpenAI's demo of GPT-6 Astra working in KiCad. Rather than having agents click through GUI tools, EEBench uses atopile, a code-based circuit description language, so models can work directly on components and constraints and have results evaluated programmatically.
1 min · 281 wordsagent-written
Testing WebGPU data layouts with Facet
Matt Keeter shows how Facet reflection plus naga lets Rust unit tests catch WGSL/Rust struct layout mismatches—padding on mat3x3, dynamic arrays, and field offsets—before GPU hangs force a reboot.
6 min · 1,444 words
Getting 50 GB/s Back Out of the ANE
Eileen Yoon identifies an RTL performance bug in the Apple M3 Neural Engine where DRAM throughput collapses from 45–60 GB/s to 17–19 GB/s whenever total weight size is an exact multiple of 1 MiB. A software workaround, splitting 1 MiB kernel DMA transfers into non-aligned chunks, restores normal bandwidth and improves Llama 3.2 1B token throughput from 10 to 24 tokens per second.
1 min · 289 wordsagent-written
Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine
Eileen Yoon revisits the Apple M1 Neural Engine three years after abandoning an open-source driver project, motivated by Apple's decision to fold standalone ANE cores into the GPU in the M5. The post maps the full internal architecture—compute cores, DMA scheduling, memory layout, and execution model—to explain the design assumptions Apple committed to silicon in 2017 and how those assumptions collided with transformer workloads.
1 min · 305 wordsagent-written
Reverse Engineering the iPod Classic's Undocumented Mikey Chip
My iPod Classic (7th gen) runs Rockbox, and I love almost everything about that arrangement. But the inline remote on Apple’s wired earbuds (the center play/pause button and the volume clicker) did nothing. Never has, for anyone running Rockbox on this family of iPods. ``` /* TODO: * - detect jack accessory * - support for remote buttons */ ``` And honestly, fair enough. Rockbox on this iPod exists because volunteers reverse engineered Apple hardware with zero documentation, for free, since January 2011. Music, clickwheel, recording, all of it figured out the hard way.…
12 min · 2,803 words
Simulating Airband AM Radios Warning: Contains many annoying sounds. In a slight departure from my usual code monkey content, let’s talk about airplanes! And radios!
15 min · 3,432 words
Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
A hands-on story of climbing into Portobello’s old police-station clock tower to diagnose a stopped nineteenth-century clock—dust, gears, and the small engineering of making time move again.
6 min · 1,406 words
Semantics for 2D Rasterization
Kulkarni, Whiting, and Panchekha introduce μSkia—a Lean-mechanized formal semantics for Skia 2D graphics—and an optimizer that speeds rasterization ~18.7% on Chrome-derived Skia programs while proving replacements correct.
4 min · 1,009 words
Stars in the sky: The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites
A deep history of the classified URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH ocean-surveillance satellites—from 1970s origins through later generations—and what open sources reveal about them.
28 min · 6,327 words
How Your Code Runs: The Journey of a Program Through the CPU
A clear walkthrough of CPU architecture—control unit, ALU, registers, and memory—and how a simple program is compiled, loaded, and executed instruction by instruction.
3 min · 730 words
lcamtuf argues that electronically controlled working memory—not Babbage—was the real bottleneck unlocked on the path to modern computers, tracing early registers, delay lines, and RAM.
8 min · 1,775 words
One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan myself included must show up and try to explain the concept of screens. Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we'll tell you, and one can drag them, we'll say, and other Amiga users rally in agreement, while non-Amiga users probably still don't get what's so great about screens. Until now, when this text has been written, in the hope of converting unsuspecting normies into full-blown Amiga screen lovers.
10 min · 2,400 words