Devices, Tinkering, and Open Hardware
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My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things your modern iPhone still can't do!
I like to tinker with old hardware. The DEC PDP-8 is my favorite retro computer and Office 2003 is the best version ever released IMHO. One of my other favorite retro devices is the HP Jornada 720. A small handheld PC (smaller than a netbook) running Windows CE or in my case, Linux. It has a decent keyboard, CFL backlit screen, 32 MB of RAM(!), a compact Flash card for storage and a stylus for the resistive touchscreen. Oh and I got a 10Mbit PCMCIA network card, but wireless cards are also still available. It might be old, released in 1999, but can do one thing your modern iPhone can't.
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Security Expert Defeats Lenovo Laptop BIOS Password With a Screwdriver
New Zealand-based cyber security experts at CyberCX have detailed and demonstrated an alarmingly simple way to consistently access older BIOS-locked laptops. In the linked blog post, and video demo, an exec at the firm detailed how to short some EEPROM chip pins with a simple screwdriver to access a fully-unlocked BIOS. Then all it took was a quick poke around the BIOS settings screen to disable any BIOS password altogether.
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This Arduino reads punch cards for cloud computing
You already know that computers store and interpret data in binary: ones and zeroes. There are many, many ways to store binary data, because it works with anything that can maintain at least two states. In the early days of computing, punch cards were common. They were paper cards with a grid of points. A hole at any of those points could represent either a one or zero (depending on the system), while the lack of a hole would represent the opposite. To bring old and new together, Nino Ivanov built an Arduino punch card reader for cloud computing.
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Raspberry Pi Scoreboard Tracks Real-Time Baseball Scores
With so many APIs available this day and age, the possibilities are seemingly endless when it comes to what you can tap into with a Raspberry Pi. From using AI to power your creations with ChatGPT to using Amazon’s API to create a custom Alexa device, there’s just so much you can use. Today, we’ve got an awesome project to share created by Clayton from Design Build Make who’s using an API to pull baseball scores for a custom desktop scoreboard that tracks his favorite team—the Cardinals.
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ESP32-C6-EVB is Open Source Hardware board with WiFi6, Bluetooth 5(LE) and Zigbee Four relays and Four opto-isolated inputs
ESP32-C6 is Espressif’s first Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax) SoC integrating 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 (LE) and the 802.15.4 low-rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN) protocol which is the basis for the Zigbee, ISA100.11a, WirelessHART, MiWi, 6LoWPAN, Thread and SNAP specifications.