Back in 2017 I wrote an article in which I attempted to explain how YouTube works under the hood, how it serves streams to the client, and also how you can exploit that knowledge to download videos from the site. … Read more
The 8086 processor was introduced in 1978 and has greatly influenced modern computing through the x86 architecture. One unusual instruction in this processor is HLT, which stops the processor and puts it in a halt state. In this blog post, … Read more
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978 and it had a huge influence on computing. I’m reverse-engineering the 8086 by examining the circuitry on its silicon die and in this blog post I take a look at how conditional jumps … Read more
How does a vintage airspeed indicator work? CuriousMarc picked one up for a project, but it didn’t have any documentation, so I reverse-engineered it. This indicator was used in the cockpit panel for business jets such as the Gulfstream G-III, … Read more
I got access to the public alpha of Notion AI yesterday, and within 2 hours I had used prompt injection to obtain the complete source prompts of every Notion AI feature: I am publishing the prompt sources today, but not … Read more
How did NASA communicate with the Apollo astronauts, hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth? The premodulation processor1 (below) was the heart of the communication system onboard the Apollo spacecraft. Its multiple functions included an FM radio for communication to … Read more
How hard could it be to fix a vintage solderless breadboard that doesn’t quite work? The “elite 2 circuit design test system” below combined a solderless breadboard with some supporting circuitry: power supplies, a waveform generator, a pulse generator, switches, … Read more
This is a rather large blog post consisting of multiple sections from some quick background information about the problem to an in-depth dive into the hacking process, reverse engineering and final custom application. I’ve included a table of contents to … Read more
For the holidays, I decapped a chip that plays three Christmas melodies. The UM66T melody chip from the 1980s was designed for applications such as greeting cards and toys. It looks like a transistor, but when connected to a battery … Read more
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became extremely popular, defining the sound of 1980s pop music. Because microprocessors weren’t fast enough in the early 1980s, the DX7 used two custom digital chips: the EGS “envelope” chip … Read more