Comment by dheera
14 hours ago
The lava lamps are just for show.
You can get entropy just by plugging an oscilloscope into a pile of dirt and cranking the gain up.
14 hours ago
The lava lamps are just for show.
You can get entropy just by plugging an oscilloscope into a pile of dirt and cranking the gain up.
Any high-gain amplifier can be used, with its input connected to a resistor or a diode.
For instance you can use the microphone input of a PC, together with an additional external amplifier made with an audio amplifier integrated circuit or an operational amplifier integrated circuit and with a diode or a resistor at its input. The microphone input of PCs provides a 5 V voltage that can be sufficient as a power supply for a noise source plugged in it.
Such a true RNG can be made on a small PCB with an audio jack, so you can plug it into any PC with microphone input and have a true RNG that you can trust better than the RNG included in modern Intel and AMD CPUs. In the past, many AMD CPUs had defective internal RNGs. Moreover, both for Intel and for AMD it is impossible to verify whether the internal RNG does what it claims to do or it generates predictable pseudo-random numbers.
Meh. The problem is that it might start receiving you local radio station and end up deterministic enough to screw you. So you need to shield the dirt properly.