Building A DIY Ryzen-Based PC!

November 2, 2025 by Dave Rowntree 25 Comments

This project gives a whole new meaning to DIY PC. We don’t know how capable you were as a teenager, but could you have designed your own Ryzen-based mini PC?

Whilst making repairs to laptop internals, [Dominik Baroński] was busy taking notes. Modern super-integrated laptop PCs have reached the point where all the functions of a complete PC are embedded in a single chip. But it’s a big, complicated chip with very specific feeding and care needs. Once you’ve figured out what it needs, it ‘merely’ remains to supply it power, hook up some DDR4 RAM, PCIe storage, and some USB ports, and you’re away. It sounds easy when you say it like that, but do not underestimate how difficult it is to create such a board—or even to populate it by hand—yet that’s precisely what [Dominik] has achieved.

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Tommy Flowers: How An Engineer Won The War

October 24, 2025 by Jenny List 26 Comments

Back in 2016, we took you to a collection of slightly dilapidated prefabricated huts in the English Home Counties, and showed you a computer. The place was the National Museum of Computing, next to the famous Bletchley Park codebreaking museum, and the machine was their reconstruction of Colossus, the world’s first fully electronic digital computer. Its designer was a telephone engineer named Tommy Flowers, and the Guardian has a piece detailing his efforts in its creation.

The front of the museum's Colossus MkII. — TNMOC’s Colossus MkII.

It’s a piece written for a non-technical audience so you’ll have to forgive it glossing over some of the more interesting details, but nevertheless it sets out to right a long-held myth that the machine was instead the work of the mathematician Alan Turing. Flowers led the research department at the British Post Office, who ran the country’s telephone system, and was instrumental both in proposing the use of electronic switches in computing, and in producing a working machine. The connection is obvious when you see Colossus, as its racks are the same as those used in British telephone exchanges of the era.

All in all, the article makes for an interesting read for anyone with an interest in technology. You can take a look at Colossus as we saw it in 2016 here, and if your interest extends to the only glimpse the British public had of the technology behind it in the 1950s, we’ve also taken a look at another Tommy Flowers creation, ERNIE, the UK Premium Bond computer.

Hacking A Banned Chinese Security Camera

October 18, 2025 by John Elliot V 46 Comments

Over on YouTube [Matt Brown] hacks a Chinese security camera recently banned by the US government. If you didn’t hear about this you can find out more over here: Major US online retailers remove listings for millions of prohibited Chinese electronics.

After powering the camera with a power-over-Ethernet (PoE) adapter [Matt] sets about monitoring network activity with Wireshark. The first data comes from DNS for the host devaccess.easy4ipcloud.com, which whois reports is operated by Alibaba Cloud LLC in California. This is a Chinese owned company with servers in the United States.

[Matt] covers some basics of TLS and how it works. He then goes on to explain how a Man in the Middle (MITM) attack works at a high level. To setup a MITM attack against the camera [Matt] sets up some port redirections using iptables for ports 443, 15301, 8683, 9898, and 12337 which his Wireshark analysis indicates were being used. His MITM attack works, which means the device is not properly verifying its certificate signing chain.

[Matt] goes on to reverse engineer the custom UDP protocol used for transmitting video data. He uses a vibe-coded Python program along with ffmpeg for that and manages to reconstruct a few frames of video taken from the UDP packet capture.

We think it would be safe to say that [Matt] did indeed find a few security problems with the camera as-is, but we don’t think that’s the point of the ban. The real problem is that there is auto-update facilities for the device firmware which means that in future malicious software could be uploaded by the manufacturer in the form of a firmware update. So even if this device was secure against MITM attacks and didn’t send unencrypted video data over UDP you would still have the problem of the firmware update if there is no trust.

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Programming Space Game For X86 In Assembly Without An Operating System

October 10, 2025 by John Elliot V 39 Comments

In this video our hacker [Inkbox] shows us how to create a computer game that runs directly on computer hardware, without an operating system!

[Inkbox] briefly explains what BIOS is, then covers how UEFI replaces it. He talks about the genesis of UEFI from Intel in the late 90s. After Intel’s implementation of UEFI was made open source it got picked up by the TianoCore community who make tools such as the TianoCore EDK II.

[Inkbox] explains that the UEFI implementation provides boot services and runtime services. Boot services include things such as loading memory management facilities or running other UEFI applications, and runtime services include things like system clock access and system reset. In addition to these services there are many more UEFI protocols that are available.

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Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KDE Linux

September 22, 2025 by Jenny List 44 Comments

Over this series test-driving operating systems, we’ve tried to bring you the unusual, the esoteric, or the less mainstream among the world of the desktop OS. It would become very boring very quickly of we simply loaded up a succession of Linux distros, so we’ve avoided simply testing the latest Debian, or Fedora.

That’s not to say that there’s no space for a Linux distro on these pages if it is merited though, as for example we marked its 30th anniversary with a look at Slackware. If a distro has something interesting to offer it’s definitely worth a look, which brings us to today’s subject.

KDE Linux is an eponymous distro produced by the makers of the KDE Plasma desktop environment and associated applications, and it serves as a technical demo of what KDE can be, a reference KDE-based distribution, and an entirely new desktop Linux distribution all in one. As such, it always has the latest in all things KDE, but aside from that perhaps what makes it even more interesting is that as an entirely new distribution it has a much more modern structure than many of the ones we’re used to that have their roots in decades past. Where in a traditional distro the system is built from the ground up on install, KDE Linux is an immutable base distribution, in which successive versions are supplied as prebuilt images on which the user space is overlaid. This makes it very much worth a look. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KDE Linux” →

Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses And The New Glassholes

September 22, 2025 by Maya Posch 135 Comments

It’s becoming somewhat of a running gag that any device or object will be made ‘smart’ these days, whether it’s a phone, TV, refrigerator, home thermostat, headphones or glasses. This generally means somehow cramming a computer, display, camera and other components into the unsuspecting device, with the overarching goal of somehow making it more useful to the user and not impacting its basic functionality.

Although smart phones and smart TVs have been readily embraced, smart glasses have always been a bit of a tough sell. Part of the problem here is of course that most people do not generally wear glasses, between people whose vision does not require correction and those who wear e.g. contact lenses. This means that the market for smart glasses isn’t immediately obvious. Does it target people who wear glasses anyway, people who wear sunglasses a lot, or will this basically move a smart phone’s functionality to your face?

Smart glasses also raise many privacy concerns, as their cameras and microphones may be recording at any given time, which can be unnerving to people. When Google launched their Google Glass smart glasses, this led to the coining of the term ‘glasshole‘ for people who refuse to follow perceived proper smart glasses etiquette.

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Computer Has One Instruction, Many Transistors

September 20, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

There’s always some debate around what style of architecture is best for certain computing applications, with some on the RISC side citing performance per watt and some on the CISC side citing performance per line of code. But when looking at instruction sets it’s actually possible to eliminate every instruction except one and still have a working, Turing-complete computer. This instruction is called subleq or “subtract and branch if less-than or equal to zero“. [Michael] has built a computer that does this out of discrete components from scratch.

We’ll save a lot of the details of the computer science for [Michael] or others to explain, but at its core this is a computer running with a 1 kHz clock with around 700 transistors total. Since the goal of a single-instruction computer like this is simplicity, the tradeoff is that many more instructions need to be executed for equivalent operations. For this computer it takes six clock cycles to execute one instruction, for a total of about 170 instructions per second. [Michael] also created an assembler for this computer, so with an LCD screen connected and mapped to memory he can write and execute a simple “hello world” program just like any other computer.

[Michael] does note that since he was building this from Logisim directly he doesn’t have a circuit schematic, but due to some intermittent wiring issues might have something in the future if he decides to make PCBs for this instead of using wire on a cardboard substrate. There’s plenty of other information on his GitHub page though. It’s a unique project that gets to the core of what’s truly needed for a working computer. There are a few programming languages out there that are built on a similar idea.

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