PC Watercooling Prototype Is Pumpless

Watercooling is usually more efficient than air cooling for the same volume of equipment, and — important for many people — it is generally quieter. However, you still have water pump n…

Compaq Portable III Is More Than Meets The Eye

The Compaq Portable III hails from the 386 era — in the days before the laptop form factor was what we know today. It’s got a bit of an odd design, but a compelling one, and the keyboar…

IRC Client On Bare Metal

In the beginning, there was the BIOS, and it was good. A PC’s BIOS knows how to set up the different hardware devices, grab a fixed part of a hard drive, load it, and run it. That’s all…

OSHW Framework Laptop Expansion Hides Dongles

If you’ve got a wireless keyboard or mouse, you’ve probably got a receiver dongle of some sort tucked away in one of your machine’s USB ports. While modern technology has allowed …

Homebrew GPU Tackles Quake

Have you ever wondered how a GPU works? Even better, have you ever wanted to make one? [Dylan] certainly did, because he made FuryGPU — a fully custom graphics card capable of playing Quake a…

Upgrading PC Cooling With Software

As computing power increases with each new iteration of processors, actual power consumption tends to increase as well. All that waste heat has to go somewhere, and while plenty of us are content t…

Motherboard Revived With Simplest 1.8V SPI Shifter Ever

If you have ever had to fix a modern desktop motherboard, you might have noticed that the BIOS (UEFI) SPI flash is 1.8V – which means you can no longer use a Raspberry Pi or a CH341 adapter d…

Best Of Both Worlds: The MacPad

Despite a growing demand for laptop-tablet hybrid computers from producers like Lenovo, HP, and Microsoft, Apple has been stubbornly withdrawn this arena despite having arguably the best hardware a…

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Damn Small Linux 2024

There was a time when the gulf between a new computer and one a decade or more old was so large as to be insurmountable; when a Pentium was the chip to have an older computer had a 16-bit 8086 or 2…

Walking And Talking Through The UK National Museum Of Computing

I found myself in Milton Keynes, UK, a little while ago, with a few hours to spare. What could I do but rock over to the National Museum of Computing and make a nuisance of myself? I have visited m…

Accelerate Your Large Builds Locally With Distcc

The motto of Sun Microsystems back in the day was “The Network Is The Computer” which might be kind of relevant when CPUs were slower and single-core affairs, but lately to get a faster…

Outdated HP Microserver Gets A New Brain

What to do if you have a really cool old HP MicroServer that just can’t keep up with the demands of today? [jacksonliam] decided to restomod it by installing a mini PC into the drive bay. The…

What Is X86-64-v3?

You may have heard Linux pundits discussing x86-64-v3. Can recompiling Linux code to use this bring benefits? To answer that question, you probably need to know what x86-64-v3 is, and [Gary Explain…

Turing Complete Origami

Origami can be an interesting starting point for a project, but we weren’t expecting [Thomas C. Hull] and [Inna Zakharevich]’s Turing complete origami computer. Starting with the constr…

The Latest Windows 11 Release Might Not Work On Your Oldest Machines

Everybody knows you can’t install Windows XP on a 386, or Windows 95 on an original IBM PC. But for Windows 11, the goalposts seem to be changing with newer releases of the existing OS. As co…

FLOSS Weekly Episode 769: OpenCost — We Spent How Much?

This week Jonathan Bennett and Katherine Druckman talk with Matt Ray about OpenCost. What exactly is Cloud Native? Why do we need a project just for tracking expenses? Doesn’t the cloud make …

Arctic Adventures With A Data General Nova II — The Equipment

As I walked into the huge high bay that was to be my part-time office for the next couple of years, I was greeted by all manner of abandoned equipment haphazardly scattered around the room. As I la…

Retro-Styled Rasti Laptop Packs Framework Mobo

Today, every laptop pretty much looks like every other laptop. Sure you might run into a few different colors and screen sizes out there, but on the whole, all the manufacturers have pretty much ag…

Cheap Hack Gets PCI-X Card Working In PCI Slot

PCI and PCI-X are not directly compatible, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that means you’re out of luck if you need to use a PCI-X card in a machine that only has basic PCI slots. A…

How To Build Your Own 16-Bit System-on-Spreadsheet

Back in the hazy days of the  early home computers, many of us would rejoice at running our first BASIC applications, some of us even built our own 8-bit system from a handful of ICs and felt elate…