Recreating One Of The First Hackintoshes

March 30, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

Apple’s Intel era was a boon for many, especially for software developers who were able to bring their software to the platform much more easily than in the PowerPC era. Macs at the time were even able to run Windows fairly easily, which was unheard of. A niche benefit to few was that it made it much easier to build Hackintosh-style computers, which were built from hardware not explicitly sanctioned by Apple but could be tricked into running OSX nonetheless. Although the Hackintosh scene exploded during this era, it actually goes back much farther and [This Does Not Compute] has put together one of the earliest examples going all the way back to the 1980s.

The build began with a Macintosh SE which had the original motherboard swapped out for one with a CPU accelerator card installed. This left the original motherboard free, and rather than accumulate spare parts [This Does Not Compute] decided to use it to investigate the Hackintosh scene of the late 80s. There were a few publications put out at the time that documented how to get this done, so following those as guides he got to work. The only original Apple part needed for this era was a motherboard, which at the time could be found used for a bargain price. The rest of the parts could be made from PC components, which can also be found for lower prices than most Mac hardware. The cases at the time would be literally hacked together as well, but in the end a working Mac would come out of the process at a very reasonable cost.

[This Does Not Compute]’s case isn’t scrounged from 80s parts bins, though. He’s using a special beige filament to print a case with the appropriate color aesthetic for a computer of this era. There are also some modern parts that make this style computer a little easier to use in today’s world like a card that lets the Mac output a VGA signal, an SD card reader, and a much less clunky power supply than the original would have had. He’s using an original floppy disk drive though, so not everything needs to be modernized. But, with these classic Macintosh computers, modernization can go to whatever extreme suits your needs.

Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!

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Training A Transformer With 1970s-era Technology

March 29, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

Although generative language models have found little widespread, profitable adoption outside of putting artists out of work and giving tech companies an easy scapegoat for cutting staff, their their underlying technology remains a fascinating area of study. Stepping back to the more innocent time of the late 2010s, before the cultural backlash, we could examine these models in their early stages. Or, we could see how even older technology processes these types of machine learning algorithms in order to understand more about their fundamentals. [Damien Boureille] has put a 60s-era IBM as well as a PDP-11 to work training a transformer algorithm in order to take a closer look at it.

For such old hardware, the task [Damien Boureille] is training his transformer to do is to reverse a list of digits. This is a trivial problem for something like a Python program but much more difficult for a transformer. The model relies solely on self-attention and a residual connection. To fit within the 32KB memory limit of the PDP-11, it employs fixed-point arithmetic and lookup tables to replace computationally expensive functions. Training is optimized with hand-tuned learning rates and stochastic gradient descent, achieving 100% accuracy in 350 steps. In the real world, this means that he was able to get the training time down from hours or days to around five minutes.

Not only does a project like this help understand these tools, but it also goes a long way towards demonstrating that not every task needs a gigawatt datacenter to be useful. In fact, we’ve seen plenty of large language models and other generative AI running on computers no more powerful than an ESP32 or, if you need slightly more computing power, on consumer-grade PCs with or without GPUs.

Luthier Crafts Guitar From Cardboard

March 27, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

The people at Signal Snowboards are well known not only for producing quality snowboards, but doing one-off builds out of unusual and perhaps questionable materials just to see what’s possible. From pennies to glass, if it can go on their press (and sometimes even if it can’t) they’ll build a snowboard out of it. At some point, they were challenged to build different types of boards from paper products which resulted in a few interesting final products, but this pushed them to see what else they could build from paper and are now here with an acoustic guitar fashioned almost entirely from cardboard.

For this build, the luthiers are modeling the cardboard guitar on a 50s-era archtop jazz guitar called a Benedetto. The parts can’t all just be CNC machined out of stacks of glued-up cardboard, though. Not only because of the forces involved in their construction, but because the parts are crucial to a guitar’s sound. The top and back are pressed using custom molds to get exactly the right shape needed for a working soundboard, and the sides have another set of molds. The neck, which has the added duty of supporting the tension of the strings, gets special attention here as well. Each piece is filled with resin before being pressed in a manner surprisingly similar to producing snowboards. From there, the parts go to the luthier in Detroit.

At this point all of the parts are treated similarly to how a wood guitar might be built. The parts are trimmed down on a table saw, glued together, and then finished with a router before getting some other finishing treatments. From there the bridge, tuning pegs, pickups, and strings are added before finally getting finished up. The result is impressive, and without looking closely or being told it’s made from cardboard, it’s not obvious that it was the featured material here.

Some of the snowboards that Signal produced during their Every Third Thursday series had similar results as well, and we actually featured a few of their more tech-oriented builds around a decade ago like their LED snowboard and another one which changes music based on how the snowboard is being ridden.

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Modern Smartphone Vs. 80s Supercomputer

March 26, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 49 Comments

One of the most common ways of comparing the processing power of some microcontroller or older smartphone in a fantastical way was to say that they had more processing power than the Apollo Guidance Computer. While this sounds impressive on the surface, the AGC was the first integrated circuit computer ever built and is predictably under-powered by almost all modern standards. A more apt comparison would be to compare a smartphone to a supercomputer from some bygone era, and someone has recently done just that.

The linked article looks at a modern iPhone 17 compared to the Cray 2 supercomputer. When the Cray 2 was first built in the mid 80s, it was the fastest computer in the world at 1.9 GFLOPS using four vector processors. A modern iPhone is estimated to have slightly more than that, so in some ways the iPhone comes out on top.

However, the Cray 2 was built with vector processors, a specialized type of processor meant to perform rapid calculations on specific types of data sets. So the Cray 2 may have been faster at these types of tasks than the more general-purpose A19 processor, and the A19 may have the edge in other tasks.

The other major difference the article doesn’t discuss is what software runs on these computers. The Cray 2 supercomputer ran a modified version of UNIX System V, which at the time was owned by AT&T (and which ran on plenty of other computers as well). Although proprietary in some sense, it was much more open than Apple’s iOS operating system, allowing users to run whatever software they wanted to run on the supercomputers that they bought and paid for, and to modify many parts of the operating system itself. In that sense, the Cray will always maintain the edge over Apple and their walled garden.

Demonstrating Gray Codes With Industrial Display

March 25, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

Many people base huge swaths of their lives on foundational philosophical texts, yet few have read them in their entirety. The one that springs to the forefront of many of our minds is The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth. Full of many clever and outright revolutionary algorithms and new ways of thinking about how computers work, [Attoparsec] has been attempting to read this tome from cover to cover, and has found some interesting tidbits. One of those is the various algorithms around Gray Codes, and he built this device as a visual aid.

Gray Codes, otherwise known as reflected binary, is a way of ordering an arbitrarily large set of binary values so that only one bit changes between any two of them. The most common place these are utilized is in things like rotary encoders, where it provides better assurance that the position of a shaft is in a known location. To demonstrate this in a more visual way [Attoparsec] hooked up an industrial signal light, normally used for communicating the status of machinery in a factory, and then programmed it to display the various codes. A standard binary counter is used as a reference, and it can also display standard Gray Code as well as a number of other algorithms used for solving similar problems.

[Attoparsec] built this as an interactive display for the Open Sauce festival in San Francisco. To that end it needed to be fairly rugged, so he built it out of old industrial equipment, which is also a fitting theme for the light itself. There’s also a speed controller and an emergency stop button which also add to the motif. For a deeper dive on Gray Codes and their uses, take a look at this feature from a few years back.

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The Most Secure, Modern Computer Might Be A Mac

March 25, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 44 Comments

The Linux world is currently seeing an explosion in new users, thanks in large part to Microsoft turning its Windows operating system into the most intrusive piece of spyware in modern computing. For those who value privacy and security, Linux has long been the safe haven where there’s reasonable certainty that the operating system itself isn’t harvesting user data or otherwise snooping where it shouldn’t be. Yet even after solving the OS problem, a deeper issue remains: the hardware itself. Since around 2008, virtually every Intel and AMD processor has included coprocessors running closed-source code known as the Intel Management Engine (IME) or AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP).

These components operate entirely outside the user’s and operating system’s control. They are given privileged access to memory, storage, and networking and can retain that access even when the CPU is not running, creating systemic vulnerabilities that cannot be fully mitigated by software alone. One practical approach to minimizing exposure to opaque management subsystems like the IME or PSP is to use platforms that do not use x86 hardware in the first place. Perhaps surprisingly, the ARM-based Apple M1 and M2 computers offer a compelling option, providing a more constrained and clearly defined trust model for Linux users who prioritize privacy and security.

Before getting into why Apple Silicon can be appealing for those with this concern, we first need to address the elephant in the room: Apple’s proprietary, closed-source operating system. Luckily, the Asahi Linux project has done most of the heavy lifting for those with certain Apple Silicon machines who want to go more open-source. In fact, Asahi is one of the easiest Linux installs to perform today even when compared to beginner-friendly distributions like Mint or Fedora, provided you are using fully supported M1 or M2 machines rather than attempting an install on newer, less-supported models. The installer runs as a script within macOS, eliminating the need to image a USB stick. Once the script is executed, the user simply follows the prompts, restarts the computer, and boots into the new Linux environment. Privacy-conscious users may also want to take a few optional steps, such as verifying the Asahi checksum and encrypting the installation with LUKS but these steps are not too challenging for experienced users. Continue reading “The Most Secure, Modern Computer Might Be A Mac” →

Heating A Woodshop With Sawdust

March 24, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 16 Comments

Most carpenters and woodworkers find themselves with the problem of disposing of all the sawdust they create when performing their craft. There are lots of creative solutions to this problem, such as adding it compost, using it as groundcover in a garden, adding it as filler in a composting toilet, or pressing it into bricks to burn in a stove. All of these have their uses, but involve either transporting the sawdust somewhere or performing some intermediate step to process it. [Greenhill Forge] wanted to make more direct use of it so he built this stove which can burn the sawdust directly and which provides enough heat for his woodshop.

The design is based on one which is somewhat common in Japan and involves building a vessel with a central tube for airflow, with the sawdust packed around it. The tube is made from a hardware cloth or screen to allow air to reach the sawdust. The fire is lit from the top, closed, and then allowed to burn through the stack. [Greenhill Forge] welded the entire stove from various pieces of sheet metal and bar stock, with a glass plate at the top of the stove to close off the fire and a baffle to control the airflow and rate of burn.

Initially, [Greenhill Forge] thought that the fire would burn from the top down, but this turned out to create a smoldery, messy fire instead of a hot, clean burn. Eventually, though, an ember fell down to the bottom and let the stack burn from the top up, and then it started generating serious heat. He estimates that with around 5 kg of sawdust burning for three hours that it’s about equivalent to a 6 kW stove. While a woodworker might not have enough sawdust to run this stove every day, it could be good to have on hand to use once every few weeks when the sawdust builds up enough. [Greenhill Forge] has been hard at work building unique wood burning stoves lately, like this one we recently featured which generates and then uses charcoal as fuel.

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