Ode to the AA Battery

Recently this post from @Merocle caught my eye:

I'm fixing my iFixit soldering station. I haven't used it for a long time and the battery has gone overdischarge. I hope it will come back to life. Unfortunately, there are no replacements available for sale at the moment.

Devices with built-in rechargeable batteries have been bugging me a lot lately. It's convenient to have a device you can take with you and use anywhere. And with modern Li-ion cells, battery life is remarkable.

Streaming a Turntable or CD to AirPlay Speakers

This article explains how to stream audio from a turntable or CD player to AirPlay and AirPlay 2 speakers using a Raspberry Pi. Hi-Fi was simple; a literal one-step process. …

The post Streaming a Turntable or CD to AirPlay Speakers appeared first on lo-tech.

Recapping My 5 Year Old Studio Monitors

A few weeks ago, I started hearing a slight crackle at the loudest parts of whenever sound was playing through my PreSonus Eris E3.5 speakers. It was very faint, but quite annoying, especially when editing my YouTube videos.

For a few days I thought it could be a hearing problem (at this point in my life, every year brings a new health adventure...), but after testing my wired headphones and another small computer speaker on the same output, I determined the problem was, indeed, coming from the PreSonus speakers.

Glowing Polyhedrons

Building wireframe polyhedra made from LED filaments, using graph theory to devise geometry and driving strategies.

Read the article on my hugo blog

Notes on the Intel 8086 processor's arithmetic-logic unit

In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors, however, the 8086 is a 16-bit chip. Its arithmetic/logic unit (ALU) operates on 16-bit values, performing arithmetic operations such as addition and subtraction, as well as logic operations including bitwise AND, OR, and XOR. The 8086's ALU is a complicated part of the chip, performing 28 operations in total.1

In this post, I discuss the circuitry that controls the ALU, generating the appropriate control signals for a particular operation. The process is more complicated than you might expect. First, a machine code instruction results in the...

Стеклодувные горелки. От истоков к современности. Краткий экскурс

Несмотря на архаичность ручной формовки стекла, стеклодувное дело ещё отчасти живо и привлекает своих адептов, в том числе и как хобби, домашние любительские экзерсисы. Сегодня ремесло это довольно громоздкое и дорогостоящее, так, однако, было не всегда — взять хотя бы горелки — первое, о чём задумывается будущий стеклодув. Рассмотрим же, с помощью чего творили предки и как развивалось огневое оснащение стеклодувного дела со времён царя Гороха, до дней нынешних, взглянем заодно на интересные примеры и вообще, полюбуемся огнями. За мной, мои дорогие пироманы, за мной!

OpenTitan Introduces New Membership Tiers and Deliverables to Accelerate Deployment

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Выход в интернет с ПК на i486DX4 в 2026 году

Приветствую всех!

Думаю, всем нам известно: ещё каких-то лет десять назад "компьютером для интернета" назывался очень бюджетный офисный ПК, тогда как теперь потребление ресурсов возросло настолько, что порой современный веб - чуть ли единственное, с чем не справляется тот или иной девайс.

А как насчёт чего-то совсем старого? Можно ли выйти в сеть с компьютера тридцатилетней давности и остались ли ещё какие-то сайты, которые можно полноценно просматривать с такого ПК? Сейчас и узнаем...

Migrating 13,000 Comments from Drupal to Hugo

After 16 years on the LAMP stack, I finished migrating this website from Drupal to Hugo a few weeks ago.

What's old is new, as this blog was originally built with Thingamablog, a Java-based Static Site Generator (SSG) I ran on my Mac to generate HTML and FTP it up to my first webserver (over 20 years ago!).

The main reason I moved from an SSG to Drupal was to add comments. I wanted my blog to have the same level of interactivity I had pre-Thingamablog, when I was (briefly) on Xanga.com.

HackRF Pro Shipping Update

After additional unexpected delays to our original projected shipping window for HackRF Pro, our staff worked hard over the holidays to ensure that reseller preorders would ship as soon as stock was received into our warehouse inventory. We are excited to announce that as of this week, all prepaid reseller preorders have shipped and are beginning to arrive! More units are in production and expected to arrive and ship in early February.

Here is a list of authorized resellers who are carrying HackRF Pro as of the date of this post: