There’s a meme which may have a basis in truth, of a teenager left clueless when presented with a rotary telephone. The dial, in reality a mechanical pulse chain generator, …read more
Sunday night, around 7:00 PM local time, a bright fireball streaked across the western German sky, exploded, and rained chunks of space rock down on the region around Koblenz. One …read more
Most people love arcade games, but putting a full-sized arcade cabinet in the living room can lead to certain unpleasant complications. Ergo the market for fun-sized cabinets has exploded alongside …read more
E-readers are an awesome creation allowing you to display digital information in a way that requires little battery life. While there’s plenty of very impressive models to chose from on …read more
At this point in time it can be safely stated that the question ‘Does it run Doom?’ defaults to a resounding ‘Yes’. This raises the question of what next games should …read more
[Michel Jean] asked a question few others might: what exactly is going on under the hood of a classic HP scientific calculator when one presses the ∫ key? A numerical …read more
IBM Selectric typewriters have a lot of unique parts that can be tricky to source, but one we didn’t think of was the clear acrylic(?) dust covers, that are apparently …read more
This unusual clock by [Moritz v. Sivers] looks like a holographic dial surrounded by an LED ring, but that turns out to not be the case. What appears to be …read more
Debugging an application crash can oftentimes feel like you’re an intrepid detective in a grimy noir detective story, tasked with figuring out the sordid details behind an ugly crime. Slogging …read more
Alzheimer’s disease remains a frustratingly difficult condition to manage for the millions of patients affected worldwide and their families. The cause of the disease is still not properly understood, and …read more
Who among us does not have a plethora of mains-powered devices on their workbench, and a consequent mess of power strips to run them all? [Jeroen Brinkman] made his more …read more
After all the crashing and burning of Imperial Germany’s Zeppelins in the later part of WWI – once the Brits managed to build interceptors that could hit their lofty altitude, …read more
There have been many questions about what direction Arduino would take after being bought by Qualcomm. Now it would seem that we’re getting a clearer picture. Perhaps unsurprisingly the answer …read more
If you think about it, you can’t be sure that what you see for the color red, for example, is what anyone else in the world actually sees. All you …read more
Recently [TheRetroChannel] came across an interesting failure mode on a Commodore 1541 5.25″ floppy disk drive, in the form of the activity LED blinking just once after power-up with the …read more
Admit it. If you haven’t created your own little programming language, you’ve probably at least thought about it. [Muffed] decided to create a unique — and sweet — programming language …read more
Most people see that garden shed as little more than a place to store some gardening tools in, but if you’re like [Dr. Semiconductor], then what you see is a …read more
What hardware hacker doesn’t have a soft spot for transparent cases? While they may have fallen out of mainstream favor, they have an undeniable appeal to anyone with an interest …read more
While it might not be comprehensive, [Bret.dk] recently posted a retrospective titled “Every Single Board Computer I Tested in 2025.” The post covers 15 boards from 8 different companies. The …read more
A friend of mine has been a software developer for most of the last five decades, and has worked with everything from 1960s mainframes to the machines of today. She …read more