Rolling two six-sided dice (2d6) gives results from 2 to 12 with a bell curve distribution. Seven being the most common result, two and twelve being the least common. But what if one could do this with a single die? This eleven-sided die has a distribution matching the results of 2d6. As part of research […]
Intel’s 386 CPU is notable for being its first x86 CPU to use so-called standard cell logic, which swapped the taping out of individual transistors with wiring up standardized functional blocks. This way you only have to define specific gate types, latches and so on, after which a description of these blocks can be parsed […]
Whether the goal is reverse engineering, black hat exploitation, or just simple curiosity, getting inside the packages that protect integrated circuits has long been the Holy Grail of hacking. It isn’t easy, though; those inscrutable black epoxy blobs don’t give up their secrets easily, with most decapping methods being some combination of toxic and dangerous. […]
There’s no doubting the allure of a nicely crafted LED cube; likewise, there’s no doubting that they can be a tremendous pain to build. After all, the amount of work scales as the cube of the number of LEDs you want each side to have, and let’s face it – with LED cubes, the bigger, […]
There are truisms about dice that you’ve probably already heard: if you have just one of them it’s called a “die”, opposite faces of each die always add up to seven, and those dots that you’re adding together are known as “pips”. But what about the infrared properties of those pips? It turns out they […]
People take their tabletop games very, very seriously. [Andrew Lauritzen], though, has gone far above and beyond in pursuit of a fair game. The game in question is Star War: X-Wing, a strategy wargame where miniature pieces are moved according to rolls of the dice. [Andrew] suspected that commercially available dice were skewing the game, and […]