Hackaday.com

Our computers can display an astonishing range of symbols. Unicode alone defines more than 150,000 characters, covering everything from mathematical operators and phonetic alphabets to emoji and obscure historical scripts. …read more

The USB port which first appeared on our computers some time in the mid-1990s has made interfacing peripherals an easy task, save for the occasional upside down connector. But in …read more

A friend of mine is producing a series of HOWTO videos for an open source project, and discovered that he needed a better microphone than the one built into his …read more

During the 1990s, everyone wanted to surf the information super-highway — also known as the World Wide Web or just ‘Internet’ — but not everyone was interested in getting one …read more

Bluetooth is everywhere, but it’s hard to inspect. Most of the magic is done inside a Bluetooth controller chip, accessed only through a controller-specific Host-Controller Interface (HCI) protocol, and almost …read more

Until the 2000s, game consoles existed primarily to bring a bit of the gaming arcade experience to homes, providing graphical feats that the average home computer would struggle to emulate. …read more

Scientific calculators are an amazing invention that take pocket calculators from being merely basic arithmetic machines to being pocket computers that can handle everything from statistics to algebra. That said, …read more

What can one expect from 3D printing an 8″ Newtonian telescope? [Molly Wakeling] shares her thoughts after doing exactly that. The performance was on par with any solid 8″ telescope, …read more

Some synthesizer sounds are just catchy, but some of them are genre-defining. We think you could make that case for the Roland JP-8000 patch “Sandstorm”, which you’ve heard if you …read more

Sorting algorithms are a common exercise for new programmers, and for good reason: they introduce many programming fundamentals at once, including loops and conditionals, arrays and lists, comparisons, algorithmic complexity, …read more

The astute among you may remember an earlier version of this Russian beauty, the Lapa, which I featured last year around this time. Creator [lemosbor] claims that the worry was …read more

Many of us have them, few of us really hack on them: well, here we’re talking about large home appliances. [Severin von Wnuck-Lipinski] and [Hajo Noerenberg] were both working on …read more

NTP is one of the most interesting and important, but all too forgotten, protocols that makes the internet tick. Accurate clock synchronization is required for everything ranging from cryptography to …read more

UNIX version 4 is quite special on account of being the first UNIX to be written in C instead of PDP-11 ASM, but it was also considered to have been …read more

The 39th annual Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) is underway, and it kicked off with a talk that will resonate deeply with folks in the Hackaday universe. [Kliment] gave an impassioned invitation …read more

Everyone generally knows about piston and rotary engines, with many a flamewar having been waged over the pros and cons of each design. The “correct” answer is thus to combine …read more

In almost every measurable way, a lossless digital audio file is superior to any analog media. This doesn’t mean that analog audio isn’t valuable though; plenty of people appreciate the …read more

Over on YouTube [Lockdown Electronics] reviews an old bit of kit known as the Silicon Controlled Rectifier (SCR). Invented in the 1950s the SCR is a type of thyristor and …read more

The reason photographic darkrooms are needed is because almost any amount of light can ruin the film or the photographic paper before they are fixed. Until then these things are …read more

To make aerated concrete, add a foam-forming agent and stir in a significant amount of air. This serves to make the concrete significantly lighter, better insulating, and more resilient to …read more