Recently [Tucker Osman] brought to life what once was just a meme created by the BBC as it poked fun at Apple’s push for ever smaller devices that also dropped …read more
Over the centuries there have been an incredible number of purported medical devices released onto the market, with some having more outrageous claims than others. Released in the 1910s and …read more
Anyone whose first computing experience came in the form of an 8-bit home computer will tell you about booting straight into a BASIC interpreter. The machine invited you to program …read more
The phones! They were one of the basic utilities of the 20th century, and were just about as reliable as death and taxes. Even when then power grid went down, …read more
For users of a certain age, fractal patterns and computers are nearly synonymous. Typing in BASIC programs and seeing the Mandelbrot set or other fractals slowly render on screen is …read more
There’s a niche genre of text adventure that’s halfway between a traditional novel and a videogame. Think Zork if it had an extra few novels worth of words of well-crafted …read more
All but a few of our very youngest readers are surely familiar with music formats that rely on optical disks. When we say [RobDevBuilds] made a MOD tracker that uses …read more
The Universe is a large place, yet despite it being mostly empty space, there are still a lot of things to find and catalogue. This includes mildly terrifying things like …read more
The TermDriver 2 is a USB-to-serial interface with a twist—it has a built-in screen for displaying relevant information. It can run at anywhere from 100 bit/s to 2Mbit/s, while showing …read more
These days there are emulators for all the great consoles of yesteryear, as well as old retrocomputers and arcade machines and so much else to boot. Now, though, a particularly …read more
This week Jonathan chats with Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project! What is going on at the forefront of Open Source and privacy advocacy? Where are we on a true …read more
Quite a few in our community make a bit of cash on the side by selling our creations, and it’s not uncommon to find that a project which catches your …read more
Printed circuit boards were developed first for function over form. They were a way to mount components and connect them in a stable, robust fashion, while taking into regard things …read more
Large language models (LLMs) are generally thought of as machines that accept textual prompts and spit out textual content. However, if you’re creative in the way you interface with them, …read more
As children, many of us looked wistfully into the cockpits of heavy machinery, wondering just how the series of knobs and levers would do something like operate a bulldozer, crane, …read more
A pyrotechnic charge is set off by passing a high voltage through a filament within it, melting the filament and igniting the charge. We could think of a variety of …read more
[Matt Lenhard] has an interesting writeup explaining exactly how fraudsters offer access to cutting-edge AI models at a tenth of the price. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the secret is to get tokens …read more
Fluid simulations are one of the “killer apps” of high-performance computing, but if you can’t afford the performance, they can take a depressingly long time to run. Depending on your …read more
As software updates cease for operating systems, they eventually begin to lose access to parts of the LAN and internet due to out of date encryption features, as well as …read more
One of the stories of the last few weeks has been that AI companies have been scanning books in very large numbers in order to train their models with content …read more