Category: Software Development

A well-known secret in the world of open source software is that many projects rely on donated hosting for everything from their websites to testing infrastructure. When the company providing said hosting can no longer do so for whatever reason, it leaves the project scrambling for a replacement. This is what just happened for Alpine […]
If you read Japanese, you might have seen the book “Design and Implementation of Microkernels” by [Nu Tian Sheng]. An appendix covers how to write your own operating system for RISC-V in about 1,000 lines of code. Don’t speak Japanese? An English version is available free on the Web and on GitHub. The author points […]
If you have access to a laser cutter, we sincerely hope you’re aware of boxes.py. As the name implies, it started life as a Python tool for generating parametric boxes that could be assembled from laser-cut material, but has since become an invaluable online resource for all sorts of laser projects. Plus, you can still […]
When you think of languages you might read about on Hackaday, COBOL probably isn’t one of them. The language is often considered mostly for business applications and legacy ones, at that. The thing is, there are a lot of legacy business applications out there, so there is still plenty of COBOL. Not only is it […]
Multiplication on a common microcontroller is easy. But division is much more difficult. Even with hardware assistance, a 32-bit division on a modern 64-bit x86 CPU can run between 9 and 15 cycles. Doing array processing with SIMD (single instruction multiple data)  instructions like AVX or NEON often don’t offer division at all (although the […]
Artificial intelligence has always been around us, with [Timothy J. O’Malley]’s 1985 book on AI projects for the Commodore 64 being one example of this. With AI defined as being the theory and development of systems that can perform tasks that normally requiring human intelligence (e.g. visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making), this book is a […]
The dialogue that greets you when you try to open an unsigned application in MacOS Sequoia 15.1. Many MacOS users are probably used by now to the annoyance that comes with unsigned applications, as they require a few extra steps to launch them. This feature is called Gatekeeper and checks for an Apple Developer ID […]
While most operating systems are written in C and C++, KolibriOS is written in pure x86 assembly and as a result small and lightweight enough to run off a standard 1.44 MB floppy disk, as demonstrated in a recent video by [Michael]. Screenshot of the KolibriOS desktop on first boot with default wallpaper. As a […]
The name BeOS is one which tends to evoke either sighs of nostalgia or blank stares, mostly determined by one’s knowledge of the 1990s operating system scene. Originally released in 1995 by Be Inc., it was featured primarily on the company’s PowerPC-based BeBox computers, as well as being pitched to potential customers including Apple, who […]
Probably not too many people around the world celebrated November 1st, 2023, but on this momentous date FreeBSD celebrated its 30th birthday. As the first original fork of the first complete and open source Unix operating system (386BSD) it continues the legacy that the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) began in 1978 until its final release […]