Memory safety where it matters most: CHERI for OpenTitan

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Upgrade your PHP installs immediately to protect against php2shell

This morning, two critical PHP Security Advisories were published:

If you're running PHP for any service, you need to upgrade immediately to 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, or 8.5.12. And if you use Remi's repos on RedHat-derivative Linux distros, you need to switch to official repos temporarily as Remi's on vacation and can't update his community repo. (Reminds me of xkcd 2347). Remi pushed updates even while on vacation!

ESP32-P4-PC got two new software demos – GSM LTE connectivity and full hardware features check

We have added two new demos to the ESP32-P4-PC GitHub repository. ESP32-P4-PC connectivity with GSM LTE 4G modem USB-LTE4G-EU (Arduino) https://github.com/OLIMEX/ESP32-P4-PC/tree/main/SOFTWARE/Arduino/ESP32-P4-PC-and-USB-LTE4G-EU This demo connects ESP32-P4-PC to our USB-LTE4G-EU LTE Cat 1 bis modem over UART. At startup it probes the modem, disables modem sleep, and reads the modem info, SIM status and signal quality. After […]

Inside the Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 8087 supports advanced operations such as tangents, square roots, and logarithms, this article focuses on basic arithmetic operations: addition and subtraction. The 8087 provided a spectacular speed improvement over the 8086 processor, speeding up addition by a factor of almost 100, and complicated operations by even more.1 In this article, I examine the 8087's microcode and circuitry to explain exactly how floating-point addition and subtraction are implemented, including numerous special cases for infinities and other special values.

To explore the 8087's circuitry, I popped the lid...

К истории радиоламп. Ранние приборы с конусными анодами

Современнику, доводившемуся держать в руках некрупные стеклянные радиолампы, будь то новодел для музыки или остатки ламповой эпохи, привычен устоявшийся современный их вид, как правило, цилиндрический или прямоугольный коробчатый анод с открытыми концами, нафаршированный остальными мелкими электродами. Конструкция технологичная, удобная, с широкими возможностями. Вначале же ламповой эры, на пути к, нащупываемым вслепую, удачным вариантам нередко возникали самые причудливые формы. Опять же, дело осложнялось заборами патентов, которые расторопные заграничные коллеги старались оформить на любое новшество — на горизонте маячила Первая Мировая, правительства отчаянно нуждались в надёжной радиосвязи, и дело пахло большими деньгами от военных заказов. Неудачные попытки таких обходных приборов [1] мы...

Чтобы не произошло беды, в каждом лифте всегда есть это

Приветствую всех!

Уверен, многие из вас слышали о том, что в лифте есть какое‑то устройство, которое в нештатной ситуации не даёт ему сорваться вниз. Но вот о том, как всё это устроено и работает, знают далеко не все. Как насчёт восполнить это упущение?

Итак, сегодня мы посмотрим на один из самых важных узлов любого лифта — ограничитель скорости. Узнаем, как он выглядит, разберём его и посмотрим на начинку, ну и, конечно же, выясним, как он работает. Как водится, будет много интересного.

Formlabs dropped the Raspberry Pi on the way to a $699 SLA printer

Formlabs sent me a Form Studio 1 resin 3D printer to test after years of back-and-forth about their Form 4 printer.

Like the Form 4, it's an SLA (stereolithography) printer, but unlike the Form 4 (which starts at $2,600), it's affordable for a hobbyist. It's not cheap, coming in at $699 (or $749 with a flex build platform, which I highly recommend), but it is affordable.

I can't say as much about this printer as people who are well-versed in resin printing and use other SLA printers (all my experience until now is with FDM, or Fused Deposition Modeling1, printers). But I...

What Makes a Great Hack: How Jurors Choose Winning Projects

From the outside, hackathon judging can look like a black box. We open it up: the four criteria our jurors score, why demo polish is deliberately half-weighted, and how the winners really get chosen.

Inside a 1980s filter chip that uses switched capacitors

Sometimes it's easier to identify an IC with a microscope. While sorting a box of old ICs, CuriousMarc came across some Harris ICs labeled "F1-10-5", a mysterious part number that didn't show up in any databooks. Since unidentifiable ICs are useless, he gave me one to analyze. Conveniently, it was in a ceramic package, so I could open it up with a quick tap from a chisel. Under the microscope, the chip's most striking feature was a grid of square capacitors. With all those capacitors, I guessed that it was a switched-capacitor filter. The die provided another clue: the part number HF-10. With this information, we...

Radxa's Q8B has 2x the performance and expansion of the Pi 5

There was a time I'd look at a board like the Radxa Dragon Q8B (at left, above) and be like, "there's no way I'd spend $209 on an SBC with 8 gigs of RAM". But we're in 2026, and seeing the 8 gig Raspberry Pi 5 going for almost the same amount, I figured I'd give it a shot.

On paper, the Q8B beats the Pi 5 in pretty much every way. A lot of that is thanks to this Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip, which is the same chip I tested on Microsoft's Windows Dev Kit 2023.