cpuinfo

I have a whole load of unfinished hobby projects. Many times I was taken by some idea, implemented the most challenging part and lost my interest.
But some of the projects have been actually finished and may be interesting to someone.

It’s time to let the world see my creations 🙂

The hero of the day is the small cross-platform utility that measures the clock speed of the CPU and shows it alongside its summary information, such as brand name, family, stepping, etc.

It started as a command-line application made in Borland C++ Builder. This IDE provides a straightforward and convenient syntax for embedding the x86 Assembler instructions into your regular C++ code. Which is great, when your application built around one of them: rdtsc.

freq.exe (download archive)

Here’s the code (please take into account, that I was not professional or even amateur programmer back then, so give me some slack):

Continue reading “cpuinfo”

How your electric kettle knows when it boils

Have you ever thought about how a kettle turns off when it boils? Or maybe, how it turns off when you forget to pour water into it?
It there any thermometers? Not quite.

To understand what actually clicks inside, let’s take two separate plates of the same size but made of different metals. One of brass and other of steel:

Continue reading “How your electric kettle knows when it boils”

Google pays tribute to Tim Berners-Lee, but not to Jobs' creation

One fun fact — in its doodle dedicated to 30th anniversary of World Wide Web, Google used stylized picture of desktop computer, that pretty much
resembles the IBM PC, especially the AT and PCjr models.

But it’s widely known that Sir Tim Berners-Lee — “father” of WWW (which we call simply “Internet” nowadays) — used the NeXTcube computer to develop and run the very first Web server and Web browser.

Photo by Coolcaesar distributed under CC BY-SA 3.0 licence

This computer was the property of CERN and it’s been designed and produced by the NeXT Inc, which was established by Steve Jobs in 1985 after he left the Apple. The company’s goal was to produce the high-end computers, and NeXTCube totally was the one of:

  • 17″display at 1120×832
  • 25 MHz Motorola 68k with integrated FPU
  • 16 to 64 MB of RAM
  • 400 MB to 2.8GB HDD
  • UNIX-based graphical OS NeXTSTEP

Similar specs were achieved only by top models of IMB PS/2 in 1990’s. And 80’s PC were not exactly suitable for Web.

P.S. Don’t take it too seriously. The title is just a joke ?

Honor V10 (Huawei BKL-AL20) Screen zoomed: subpixel pattern

Here you can see how the screen of Honor V10 smarthone looks like under microscope.

This curved shape of subpixel rows creates interesting but little bit annoying effect, as if the the image was “knitted”.

But you can notice this only if you hold the screen VERY close to your face, and if you’re still able to focus on it ☺️

  • Let’s take a look…
  • No way to see subpixels via magnifying glass – it’s 403 PPI!
  • LCD as seen seen via microscope
  • Close-up subpixels