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After the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operations in 2022, it soon made a tantalizing discovery in the form of mysterious red dots: small, red-tinted astronomical objects of unknown …read more

Gravity batteries aren’t exactly a new idea. You can store energy by lifting something heavy, converting kinetic energy into potential energy. To get it back, you let the mass fall …read more

Computing goes hand-in-hand with how to structure and access data, and this internal training film from IBM regarding file organization and data processing with System/360 is from a time when …read more

Glass-based substrates are slowly beginning to push out organic substrates commonly used in PCBs due to often superior material properties. One area where glass substrates have however struggled is with …read more

There are many ways you can implement an Intel i386 CPU on an FPGA, with the use of original microcode probably being one of the most interesting approaches. This is …read more

Some of you may know there’s a version of UNIX for the Commodore Amiga, aptly called Amiga Unix or AMIX. There is an almost complete record of versions from 1.0 …read more

Unless you’ve managed to avoid touching a Windows computer until after the Windows XP era, it’s pretty good odds you’ve played Space Cadet Pinball. Some of you may have even …read more

There are a surprising number of experiments an amateur nuclear physicist can perform, from making a Geiger counter to fusing hydrogen atoms in a fusor. One project which we haven’t …read more

Processor design over the last few decades has moved toward RISC processors that aim to implement a few simple operations very efficiently. For a while, though, the trend was toward …read more

A twenty-sided die (d20) is a common thing in tabletop gaming, and [kati]’s slightly sentient d20 is a PCB that not only delivers random results on demand, but responds to …read more

Recently cheapo video walkie-talkies popped up on everyone’s favorite online retailers, which naturally lured in the usual gaggle of reverse-engineering enthusiasts of cheap tat to see what’s inside these devices, …read more

With so many online messaging services to choose from it’s almost as though the daddy of them all, email, has faded into the background as something you only use for …read more

If your first-generation Chromecast was acting a little wonky this week, don’t worry. Contrary to fears online, the 2014 device hasn’t been excommunicated by Google. In a statement to Ars …read more

Storage is expensive these days, whether you’re looking at the prices of spinning rust or magic little sticks of silicon. But what if there was some benevolent overlord that you …read more

[Kert Gartner]’s ASCII Aquarium turns a cheap yellow display (CYD) into a tiny simulated aquarium, complete with ASCII sea creatures each with their own behaviors. There’s all kinds of options …read more

[Ken Shirriff] does some of the most interesting teardowns. This time, he’s looking at a French-built minicomputer called the Mitra 125 MS from around 1980. In particular, it was the …read more

Some people who have a hankering to run GEM/TOS applications might just fire up an emulator, or maybe coax an old Motorola 68k-based Atari ST system back to life. Then …read more

Filtering sawdust out of an airflow is easy until you try to do it with cyclone separation, but the obvious appeal here is of course not spending a fortune on …read more

Whether you’re using granules or filament, FDM printing relies heavily on a consistent flowrate of the extruder. This is also the challenge with [HomoFaciens]’s direct granule extruder. Version 7.1 here …read more

PCBs are traditionally designed with traces laid out to support a circuit full of electronic components. However, they’ve become increasingly popular as a way to produce functional visual artworks. This …read more