In the era of digital streaming, the market is full of wireless speakers that will play content from your smartphone or pull it down from the Internet directly over WiFi. …read more
It’s rarely appreciated just how much more complicated nuclear fusion is than nuclear fission. Whereas the latter involves a process that happens all around us without any human involvement, and …read more
Around these parts, projects needlessly using a microcontroller where a simpler design would do are often derided with the catch-all “Should have used a 555,” even if the venerable timer …read more
The cartridge based game consoles of decades ago had a relatively simple modus operandi — they would run a program stored in a ROM in the cartridge, and on the …read more
Every year, USB flash drives get cheaper and hold more data. Unfortunately, they don’t always get faster. The reality is, many USB 3.0 flash drives aren’t noticeably faster than their …read more
By some estimates, the English language contains over a million unique words. This is perhaps overly generous, but even conservative estimates generally put the number at over a hundred thousand. …read more
Lithium technology has ushered in a new era of batteries with exceptionally high energy density for a reasonably low cost. This has made a lot possible that would have been …read more
Those who indulge in trading card games know that building the best deck is the key to victory. What exactly that entails is a mystery to us muggles, but keeping …read more
This week, Jonathan Bennett chats with Neal Gompa about Fedora 42 and KDE! What’s new, what’s coming, and why is flagship status such a big deal? Website: https://neal.gompa.dev/ GitHub Sponsors: …read more
Printed circuit boards were once so simple. One or two layers of copper etched on a rectangular fiberglass substrate, with a few holes drilled in key locations so components could …read more
These days we don’t get too fussed about miniaturized electronics, not when you can put an entire processor and analog circuitry on a chip the size of a grain of …read more
You might think you don’t need a hearing aid, and you might be right. But in general, hearing loss eventually comes to all of us. In fact, you progressively lose …read more
Recently Raspberry Pi publicly announced the release of their new rpi-image-gen tool, which is advertised as making custom Raspberry Pi OS (i.e. Debian for specific Broadcom SoCs) images in a …read more
Many of us could have been lucky enough to have some form of pedal go-kart in our formative years, and among such lucky children there can have been few who …read more
When Apple first launched the Macintosh, it created a new sort of “Lunchbox” form factor that was relatively portable and very, very cool. Reminiscent of that is this neat portable …read more
A moment’s inattention is all it takes to gather the information needed to make a physical copy of a key. It’s not necessarily an easy process, though, so if pen …read more
Although NVidia’s current disastrous RTX 50-series is getting all the attention right now, this wasn’t the first misstep by NVidia. Back in 2014 when NVidia released the GTX 970 users …read more
There are a million ways to use LEDs to make a clock. [sjm4306] chose to go a relatively conventional route, making something that approximates a traditional analog timepiece. However, he …read more
The Vectrex console from the early 1980s holds a special place in retrocomputing lore thanks to its vector display — uniquely for a home system, it painted its graphics to …read more
[Robert’s Retro] is one of those great YouTube channels that shows us the ins and outs of old and obscure computers. [Robert] likes going a step beyond the traditional teardown …read more