Restoration Of A Thinkpad 701C

This is like ASMR for Hackers: restoration specialist [Polymatt] has put together a video of his work restoring a 1995 IBM Thinkpad 701c, the famous butterfly keyboard laptop. It’s an incredi…

Error-Correcting RAM On The Desktop

When running a server, especially one with mission-critical applications, it’s common practice to use error-correcting code (ECC) memory. As the name suggests, it uses an error-correcting alg…

Meshtastic And Owntracks To Kick Your Google Habit

I have an admission to make. I have a Google addiction. Not the normal addiction — I have a problem with Google Maps, and the timeline feature. I know, I’m giving my location data to Go…

How The 2022 CEZ Event Shows The Fragility Of Environmental Sensors In High-Risk Areas

In what reads somewhat like a convoluted detective story, the events unfolding at the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) in Ukraine during late February had the media channels lighting up with chatter …

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: SerenityOS, And In Particular, Ladybird

As we continue on with the series in which I take a different OS for a spin every month I am afraid, dear reader, that this month I have a confession to make. Our subject here isn’t a Daily D…

Decoding The 8088

There is a lot to like about open software, and in some areas, a well-thought-out piece of software can really make a huge impact. A great example of this is the Sigrok project. Creating simple dev…

Implementing Commodore’s IEC Bus Protocol On A KIM-1 Single Board Computer

Although the PET is most likely the more well-known of Commodore’s early computer systems, the KIM-1 (Keyboard Input Monitor) single board computer was launched a year prior, in 1976. It feat…

CPU Built From Discrete Transistors

We all know, at least intellectually, that our computers are all built with lots of tiny transistors. But beyond that it’s a little hard to describe. They’re printed on a silicon wafer …

TMD-3: Clever Hall Sensor Hack Leads To Better Turing Demo

We’ll beat everyone to the punch: yes, actually building a working Turing machine, especially one that uses a Raspberry Pi, is probably something that would have pushed [Allen Turing]’s…

Chromebooks Now Get Ten Years Of Software Updates

It’s an acknowledged problem with the mobile phone industry and particularly within the Android ecosystem, that the operating system support on a typical device can persist for far too short …

Adding Composite Video To The Mattel Aquarius

In the home computer market of the 1980s, there were several winners that are still household names four decades later: the Commodore 64, the Apple II and the Sinclair Spectrum, to name a few. But …

Cerabyte: One Terabyte Per Square Centimeter

Most of us will at one point have run out of storage and either had to buy a larger driver or delete some of those precious files. This problem can happen to data centers, too, with the ever-increa…

Intel’s Chips Light The Way To Faster Processor Arrays

It’s very likely indeed that whatever you are reading this on will have a multi-core processor. They’re now the norm, but the path to they octa-or-more-core chip in your phone has gone …

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: Raspberry Pi Desktop

One of the more exciting prospects upon receiving one of the earliest Raspberry Pi boards back in 2012 was that it was a fully-functional desktop computer in the palm of your hand. In those far-off…

Only 8 Chips Make A CPU

We’re no stranger to homemade CPUs on these pages, but we think that [Jiri Stepanovsky]’s 16-bit serial CPU might be a little special. Why? It has an astonishingly low chip count, with …

Thin Client Wysens Up To Become OpenWrt Router

For some of us, unused hardware lying around just calls to be used. It seems like [Miles Goodhew] heard the call, and wanted to put a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client to use — in this case as a wir…

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: FreeBSD 13.2

Last month I started a series in which I try out different operating systems with the aim of using them for my everyday work, and my pick was Slackware 15, the latest version of the first Linux dis…

Understanding And Using Unicode

Computer engineer [Marco Cilloni] realized a lot of developers today still have trouble dealing with Unicode in their programs, especially in the C/C++ world. He wrote an excellent guide that summa…

Running A Modern Graphics Card In A 33 MHz PCI Slot

If you ever looked at a PCI to PCIe x16 adapter and wondered what’d happen if you were to stick a modern PCIe GPU in it, the answer apparently is ‘it works’ according to an attemp…

Grab Your ‘Scope’s Screen From The Command Line

Many of us have oscilloscopes and other instruments with built-in digital interfaces, but how many of us use them? [Andrej Radović] has a Tektronix TDS2022 which can print its screen to any of its …