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[Popular Mechanics] has an interesting article about Alan Turing’s nearly-forgotten speech encryption device. Codenamed Delilah, it was in many ways an early form of digital encryption. It was secretly developed alongside …read more

Age-verification has been a topic of hot debate recently, with many in the community feeling that keeping kids safe online is better handled by the parents. But what does that …read more

The smart TV is a fixture in most houses, variously an entertainment portal, corporate data gathering tool, or sometimes an outright spy. It’s a nice monitor with a computer built …read more

In structures like photovoltaic cells there is only a limited spectrum of wavelengths that can perform useful work, with the remaining wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation effectively wasted. If the energy …read more

Although paperbacks are a much-loved aspect of the literary world, they are not really intended to last the decades the way that hardcover books are. Beyond the typical ravaged covers, …read more

The 1981 Casio VL-1 was a fine cheap keyboard. It had a robust build, though an admittedly limited sound palette. [Max Vega] had one of these charming instruments, and decided …read more

There are lots of graphics libraries available for the ESP32, and lots of ways to program one to boot. Even still, most of us wouldn’t immediately think to CSS when …read more

Even though GPS makes it possible for us to easily navigate around the planet in almost any vehicle we’d like, whether that’s a passenger vehicle, airplane, or cargo ship, it’s …read more

Typically, when you’re sitting on a plane on the tarmac, you switch your phone to flight mode while you’re sitting through yet another “quirky” (boring) safety video. You’ll watch some …read more

Audio CDs were the ubiquitous audio format of the 1990s. Lesser known were the extensions to the format that packaged all kinds of interesting additional data into a musical release. …read more

A long time before Beowulf clusters wired up with commodity Ethernet hardware became a hobbyist thing and a running joke, the transputer took a swing at a very similar architecture. …read more

iButtons are microchips housed in small, round, metal containers, and are similar to coin cell batteries in appearance. Among other things, they’re used for logging data in industrial contexts, particularly …read more

There is a phenomenon where as you get older, your sense of scale becomes somewhat fixed in the earlier era that shaped you– things like expecting the Dollar Store to …read more

[Stefan] of CNC Kitchen has an informative video describing his experiences with trying to cleanly laser-mark 3D printed plastics using different methods, and it also happens to be a fantastic …read more

How do you measure the inside of a cave? You could do a bunch of hard work with classic surveying gear… or you could just use a laser scanner. [9nl] …read more

This week Jonathan chats with Tristan Sherliker about the Craig Wright case, Open Source and the law, and Tristan’s own Open Source project, BunTool. How did Open Source help win …read more

There are lots of different ways to build a clock. [Sciter_] came into the possession of some old calculator parts, and decided to reuse them for just such a project. …read more

The train was one of the game-changing inventions that defined the Industrial Age. No more would humanity rely on tempestuous animals to haul goods and passengers great distances across the …read more

As announced by [André] on Bluesky, next month the much loved Rpilocator.com website will cease displaying the stock status and pricing of Raspberry Pi computers from various online retailers. One …read more

These days, most of us are fortunate enough to use smartphones with decent touchscreen keyboard capabilities. However, once upon a time, if you wanted to type something on a phone, …read more