Humans seem to have a need to do things that aren’t practical. Make the biggest ball of twine. Engrave the Declaration of Independence on a grain of rice. We want to make things bigger, smaller, faster, or whatever. That might explain why [nanochess] put out bootBASIC. The 8088 (or later) assembly code gives you a […]
We’ve all come to terms with a neural network doing jobs such as handwriting recognition. The basics have been in place for years and the recent increase in computing power and parallel processing has made it a very practical technology. However, at the core level it is still a digital computer moving bits around just […]
We featured [Fabrizio Di Vittorio]’s FabGL library for the ESP32 back in April of this year. This library allows VGA output using a simple resistor based DAC (3 resistors for 8 colors; 6 resistors for 64 colors), and includes functions for PS/2 mouse and keyboard input, a graphics library, and many of the miscellaneous functions […]
Cloud based IDEs and development tools have grown over the years, though most have limitations in their free tiers and may not be fully compatible with other services such as GitHub. [Aadi Bajpai] loved using PythonAnywhere and to collaborate using GitHub, so he made a update server that automatically updates the running code once you […]
Most of us have a pretty simple model of how a computer works. The CPU fetches instructions and data from memory, executes them, and writes data back to memory. That model is a good enough abstraction for most of what we do, but it hasn’t really been true for a long time on anything but […]
If you like nitpicking around C code and generated assembly language — and we’ll admit that we do — you shouldn’t miss [Scaramanga’s] analysis of what’s known as Kernighan’s trick. If you haven’t heard of the trick, it’s a pretty efficient way of counting bits. Like the Wheatstone bridge and a lot of other things, […]
Photoshop can take a bad picture and make it look better. But it can also take a picture of you smiling and make it into a picture of your frowning. Altering images and video can of course be benign, but it can also have nefarious purposes. Adobe teamed up with researchers at Berkeley to see […]
In an era where everything seems to be getting “smarter” every year, it will probably come as no surprise to find that even relatively middling networking hardware is now packing advanced features and considerable computational power. A case in point is the Dell N1108T-ON Ethernet switch. Despite only costing around $100 USD on the second […]
We’ve seen our fair share of interesting knitting hacks here at Hackaday. There has been a lot of creative space explored while mashing computers into knitting machines and vice versa, but for the most part the resulting knit goods all tend to be a bit… two-dimensional. The mechanical reality of knitting and hobbyist-level knitting machines […]
If you are browsing GitHub it is very tempting to open up the source code to some project and peek at how it works. The code view is easy to read, but the viewer lacks one important feature: the ability to click on an included file and find it. The Octolinker extension fixes that oversight. […]