Top all-time · #13239
Eli Billauer
Personal blog · billauer.co.il/blogsystemshardwareprogramming
Eli Billauer writes my tech blog, a personal blog at billauer.co.il about systems, hardware and programming. Since 2011, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Eli Billauer's personal site for technical notes: a peak-detection algorithm (peakdet) for raw signals, such as heart rate from a phone camera, and a Linux fix for Lenovo Yoga WiFi being hardware-disabled.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
I've been toying with a similar setup. Most of the time, you can actually get a really good estimate of the heart rate by doing simple-minded peak detection on the raw averaged brightness signal (e.g. using the algorithm here: http://www.billauer.co.il/peakdet.html ). However, the iPhone camera can't be prevented from periodically adjusting exposure parameters (as far as I've been able to tell), and I've not been ab…
Comment linking /peakdet.html
on “Measuring heart rate with a smartphone camera”Submitted Xilinx’ Zynq Z007s: Is it really single core? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI personally use Lenovo laptops (Yoga 2 at home, Thinkpads at work) and have had good experiences. A word of caution if you're planning on installing Linux - there's a known issue with the ACPI driver for certain models that will "hardware disable" your WiFi even if you don't have a hardware disable switch. I found this fix to work: http://billauer.co.il/blog/2014/08/linux-ubuntu-yoga-hardwar...
Comment linking /blog/2014/08/linux-ubuntu-yoga-hardware-blocked-wireless-lan/
on “Ask HN: Which laptop brands are worth shortlisting for Windows work/development?”Submitted frandom - a Linux kernel prng, which is 10-50 times faster than /dev/urandom as a story · 2 points
HN discussionEDID is important because it is the only way for the host to know which resolution, color depth, frame rate the monitor supports. Even if you remove the DDC wires, the OS will still try to communicate, and it might delay this even more because of the retries and delays in code. You might get a headstart if you hardcode the EDID in the OS itself. There are ways to do this on Linux [1], Intel macOS [2] and Windows [3]…
Comment linking /blog/2020/08/linux-override-fake-edid/
on “Ask HN: Can you recommend an “instant-switch” Monitor? Does one exist?”Submitted Why MySQL’s DATETIME can and should be avoided as a story · 1 points
HN discussion