Usually, designing a CPU is a lengthy process, especially so if you’re making a new ISA too. This is something that can take months or even years before you first get code to run. But what if it wasn’t? What if one were to try to make a CPU as fast as humanly possible? That’s […]
The software and hardware worlds have overlaps, and it’s worth looking over the fence to see if there’s anything you missed. You might’ve already noticed that we hackers use PCB modules and devboards in the same way that programmers might use libraries and frameworks. You’ll find way more parallels if you think about it. Building […]
This summer, I was pleasantly surprised when a friend of mine from Chicago turned up at one of the hacker camps I attended. A few days of hanging out in the sun ensued, doing cool hacker camp stuff, drinking unusual beverages, and generally having fun. It strikes me as a shame that this is such […]
From space, the most striking feature of our Pale Blue Dot is exactly what makes it blue: all that water. About three-quarters of the globe is covered with liquid water, and our atmosphere is a thick gaseous soup laden with water vapor. Almost everywhere you look there’s water, and even where there’s no obvious surface […]
One of the standard tropes in science fiction is some kind of device that can render someone unconscious — you know, like a phaser set to stun. We can imagine times when being aggressively knocked out would lead to some grave consequences, but — we admit — it is probably better than getting shot. However, […]
I recently got one of the new RP2040-based Bus Pirate 5 (BP5), a multi-purpose interface debugging and testing tool. Scanning the various such tools in my toolbox already: an Analog Discovery 2, a new Glasgow Interface Explorer, and a couple of pyboards, I realized they all had a Python or Micropython user interface. A few […]
You consider yourself a power user. You’ve got lots of files, and damn it, you like to keep them backed up. Around a decade ago, you gave up on burning optical discs, and switched to storing your files on portable hard drives. One local, one off-site, and a cloud backup just to be sure. You’re […]
If you are in need of a lesson on just how much things have changed in the last 60 years, an anecdote from my childhood might suffice. My grandfather was a junk man, augmenting the income from his regular job by collecting scrap metal and selling it to metal recyclers. He knew the current scrap […]
Static electricity often just seems like an everyday annoyance when a wool sweater crackles as you pull it off, or when a doorknob delivers an unexpected zap. Regardless, the phenomenon is much more fascinating and complex than these simple examples suggest. In fact, static electricity is direct observable evidence of the actions of subatomic particles […]