For a little while vacuum tubes and semiconductors were fighting a heated battle for dominance, with bipolar junction transistors and 1959’s RCA Nuvistor both allowing you to build a compact …read more
Nintendo has made many game consoles in its long history — one that famously overlaps that of the Ottoman Empire — but only one of them was ever Super. It’s …read more
In this specially-numbered podcast episode that lines up quite nicely with our Retrocomputing Challenge, Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met over surprisingly low latency and loud beverages to bring you …read more
The revival in film photography has brought a range of specialist films to tempt the experimenter, as well as increased the popularity of loading your own cartridges. But perforating the …read more
Several times this summer, Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, the monthly roundup of major security patches for Microsoft products, has included record-breaking numbers of security fixes. The August 2026 patch set actually …read more
One of the things we used to appreciate about broadcast television is that… you kinda just got what you got. You didn’t have to choose beyond picking a channel, and …read more
Expressif might not have intended the ESP32-S3 to become an emulation powerhouse, but that’s certainly what has happened. The little microcontroller seems perfect for recreating the Game Boys or Game …read more
Once upon a time, you had to carefully budget your microcontroller’s resources if you wanted to do something as simple as flash a bunch of LEDs. These days, they’re powerful …read more
As FDM printers keep getting faster, we are forced to deal with a range of bottlenecks, all of which conspire to hold us back from another Benchie world record. A …read more
A fun part of modifying something like a motorbike is that you sometimes have to come up with creative solutions to basic questions, like how you can still access the …read more
Remember those tiny little droids skittering around the pristine corridors of the Death Star in Star Wars? [heychaostheory] has put together something vaguely along the lines of those charming little mobile …read more
There are plenty of ways to capture 3D images or simulations of such if you know what you’re doing with camera hardware and fancy mathematics. However, a little more unusual …read more
Nifty little AMOLED screens are easy to get nowadays, and [Sophie D] demonstrates they are both thin and light enough to be worn with OpenChoker, a design for a choker …read more
Usually in Tech In Plain Sight, we talk about technology you probably see every day, even if you don’t notice it. But we hope you don’t get to see one …read more
Drones have become a potent military threat, particularly on the small scale. Nimble multi-rotor drones are fast, difficult to spot, and can cause plenty of harm if allowed to go …read more
E-ink is supposed to be the electronic version of dead-tree paper, but there’s one enormous difference: how you get your images and text onto it. For paper, you print on …read more
Origami is a wonderful art form, but as a new project from the Shibaura Institute of Technology demonstrates, it can also have applications in the world of wearable tech. The …read more
You can 3D print all kinds of things, from Yoda heads to little models of Pikachu. Eventually, though, most of us get to a point where we want to print …read more
This is going to be a very personal question, because when you’re talking cloud vs local anything, it comes down to this: how much are you willing to pay for …read more
The Philips PM5139 is not famous. It won no great victories on the battlefield, nor was instrumental in changing the political landscape. It was just a useful function generator that …read more