Part of the reason there are always free pianos on your digital classifieds listing of choice is that, at least economically speaking, a piano is less of a musical instrument …read more
We’ve all built projects that are a rats’ nest of wiring and feature creep, but the best projects in the end are usually those that use a simple solution to …read more
Perhaps we’ve all found ourselves at one time or another with more computers in use than keyboards and other peripherals at hand to use them with. With a single user …read more
Things are not looking good for iRobot. Although their robotic Roomba vacuums are basically a household name, the company has been faltering financially for some time now. In 2024 there …read more
WiFi-enabled ‘smart’ light bulbs are everywhere these days, and each one of them has a microcontroller inside that’s capable enough to run all sorts of interesting software. For example, [vimpo] …read more
The human body and sharp objects don’t get along very well, especially when they are being wielded with ill-intent. Since antiquity there have been various forms of armor designed to …read more
Over on YouTube [Usagi Electric] shows us how he installed an 84MB hard drive into his PDP-11/44. In the beginning he purchased a bunch of RA70 and RA72 drives and …read more
Rust is the new hotness in programming languages because of how solid its memory protections are. Race conditions and memory leaks are hardly new issues however, and as greybeards are …read more
[Mellow Labs] wanted to grab a multimeter that could do Bluetooth. Those are cheap and plentiful, but the Bluetooth software was, unsurprisingly, somewhat lacking. A teardown shows a stock Bluetooth …read more
Should you spend some time around the less scientifically informed parts of the internet, it’s easy to find “Free power” stories. Usually they’re some form of perpetual motion machine flying …read more
This week Jonathan and Ben chat with Jason Shepherd about Ocre and Atym.io! That’s the lightweight WebAssembly VM that lets you run the same containers on Linux and a host …read more
In the global game of nuclear brinksmanship, secrets are the coin of the realm. This was especially true during the Cold War, when each side fielded armies of spies to …read more
It is well known that pictographic languages that use Hanzi, like Mandarin, are difficult to work with for computer input and output devices. After all, each character is a tiny …read more
Raspberry Pi clusters have been a favorite project of homelabbers and distributed computing enthusiasts since the platform first launched over a decade ago, and for good reason. For an extremely …read more
Algorithms? Datamining? Brainrot? You don’t need those things to have a social network. As we knew back in the BBS days, long before anyone coined the phrase “social network”, all …read more
[Juan] describes himself as a software engineer, a lover of absurd humor, and, among other things, a player of Nethack. We think he should add computer game archaeologist to that …read more
There are many applications out there that use more than one window, with every modern-day platform and GUI toolkit offering the means for said application to position each of its …read more
Over on the [Behind The Code with Gerry] YouTube channel our hacker [Gerry] shows us how to emulate a 74LS48 BCD-to-7-segment decoder/driver using an Altera CPLD Logic Chip From 1998. …read more
[Samcervantes] wanted a cyberdeck. Specifically, he wanted a Clockwork Pi uConsole, but didn’t want to wait three months for it. There are plenty of DIY options, but many of them …read more
If you’re familiar with electrical slip rings as found in motors and the like you’ll know them as robust assemblies using carefully chosen alloys and sintered brushes, able to take …read more