Perhaps every gardener to attempt to grow a tomato, lettuce, or bean has had to contend with animals trying to enjoy the food before the gardener themselves can, whether it’s …read more
Imagine a time before Discord servers and cheap long-distance calls. Back in the 1950s, a curious and crafty group of enthusiasts invented their own global social network: on reels of …read more
The Enigma machine is perhaps one of the most legendary devices to come out of World War II. The Germans used the ingenious cryptographic device to hide their communications from …read more
This week, Jonathan Bennett chats with Doc Searls about SCaLE and Personal AI! What’s the vision of an AI that consumers run themselves, what form factor might that take, and …read more
Imagine you want to monitor a pot on the stove to see if it’s boiling over for just a few minutes, but you don’t want to have a dedicated permanent …read more
More and more of the ‘smart’ gadgets like watches and phones that we carry around with us these days come with features that we’d not care to ever need. Since …read more
LEDs are getting smaller and smaller, and the newest generations of indexable RGB LEDs are even fiddlier to use than their already diminutive predecessors. [Alex Lorman] has written some notes …read more
While the Bus Pirate 5 is an impressive piece of hardware, the software is arguably where the project really shines. Creator [Ian Lesnet] and several members of the community are …read more
If you were one of the earliest of early adopters in the home computing revolution, you might have had to settle for paper tape mass storage. It was slow, it …read more
We have all seen optimistic claims for electronic products that fail to match the reality, and [Electronic Wizard] is following one up in a recent video. Can a relatively small …read more
[Simon Willison] has put together a list of how, exactly, one goes about using a large language models (LLM) to help write code. If you have wondered just what the …read more
We’re used to low cost parts and a diversity of electronic functions to choose from in our projects, to the extent that our antecedents would be green with envy. Back …read more
Although taken for granted these days, autofocus (AF) used to be a premium feature on film- and digital cameras, with [Markus Kohlpaintner] taking us through an exhaustive overview of Canon’s …read more
[Alex] of YouTube channel [EastMakes] wrote into tell me about his fantastic QWERTY ‘hexpansion’ board for the 2024 EMF Tildagon badge, and [Alex], I’m super glad you did. The system …read more
Unless you’ve got an especially small lap, calling the Toshiba Libretto a laptop is a bit of a stretch. The diminutive computers from the mid-1990s had a lot of the …read more
In the world of programming languages it often feels like being stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque loop through purgatory, as effectively the same problems are being solved over and over, …read more
Popular Science has an excellent article on how Josephine Cochrane transformed how dishes are cleaned by inventing an automated dish washing machine and obtaining a patent in 1886. Dishwashers had …read more
How many cars go down your street each day? How fast were they going? What about folks out on a walk or people riding bikes? It’s not an easy question …read more
There’s something magical about the clunk of a heavy 1950s portable radio – the solid thunk of Bakelite, the warm hum of tubes glowing to life. This is exactly why …read more
Satellite imagery is in the news right now, but not all satellite constellations are the preserve of governments. Satellogic operates a series of CubeSats with Earth imaging payloads, and best …read more