Computers

Coputer topics

Dirt cheap frame grabber

This is a story of a a video digitizing circuit I built early 1990′s. It kind of worked, but was not practical then and much less useful nowadays. It is an interesting how simple circuit could be used for converting analogue composite video signal to digital for computer processing. This is the story of Dirt

Change of computing terms?

ZDnet reports at https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-to-replace-master-with-alternative-term-to-avoid-slavery-references/ that a number of people and companies plan to drop terms like “master” and “slave” for alternatives like “main/default/primary” and “secondary;” but also terms like “blacklist” and “whitelist” for “allow list” and “deny/exclude list.” ZDNet found that projects like the OpenSSL encryption software library, automation software Ansible, Microsoft’s PowerShell scripting language,

Pac-Man at 40

Pac-Man is a maze arcade game developed and released by Namco in 1980. The original Japanese title of Puck Man was changed to Pac-Man for international releases. Pac-Man was a widespread critical and commercial success, and has an enduring commercial and cultural legacy that has been featured in many computer games. It was also featured

Your computer can leak data in many ways

Here is some interesting information on leaking information from air-gapped computers. Most methods shown here use computer power supply to leak some pieces of information. But there are also some other methods shown. A researcher from Israel described a new method to covertly steal highly sensitive data from air-gapped computers using power supply units. Dubbed

Signal processing tips from Hackaday

Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analysing, modifying and synthesizing signals such as sound, images and biological measurements. Electronic signal processing was first revolutionized by the MOSFET and then single-chip digital signal processor (DSP). Digital signal processing is the processing of digitized discrete-time sampled signals. Processing is done by general-purpose computers

Intel hardware trust is lost again?

Yet another bad sounding Intel processor security vulnerability is released and this could be big again. Little over two years ago I wrote about Meltdown and Spectre, and posted links to some following vulnerabilities. Now an article Intel x86 Root of Trust: loss of trust from Positive Technologies details a new vulnerability. Researchers at enterprise

Inventor of copy, cut, or paste

Did you copy, cut, or paste today? Use a WYSIWIG interface with a mouse? Then take a moment to thank Larry Tesler, the influential computer scientist who died earlier this week at age 74. He was vice president of user experience and design at Yahoo, after he spent nearly two decades at Apple. Read more

The Improbable Origins Of Powerpoint – IEEE Spectrum

Here’s the surprising story behind the software that conquered the world, one slide at a time https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/the-improbable-origins-of-powerpoint PowerPoint is so ingrained in modern business life that the notion of it having a history at all may seem odd. But it does have a very definite lifetime as a commercial product that came onto the scene