Back in "the old days" (that is, when I was a kid), kids led lives of danger and excitement. We rode bikes with no protective gear. We stayed out roaming the streets after dark without adult supervisi...

Everyone pays close attention to the weather, but for those who live where tornadoes are prevalent, watching the sky can be a matter of life and death. When the difference between making it to a sh…

I've had the fortune or misfortune of interviewing a lot of job candidates over the years. It amazes me how often someone will claim to know something, sound reasonable, but then if you quiz them on i...

[Ryan Bates] loves arcade games, any arcade games. Which is why you can find claw machines, coin pushers, video games, and more on his website.

We've covered his work before with his Venduino proje...

Lisp is a supremely elegant programming language, but you won't find it around much today. That's a shame; in the 80s and 90s, all the cool kids were using Lisp machines, computers dedicated to the cr...

The ESP8266 is certainly a versatile device. It does, however, draw a bit of power. That isn’t really surprising, though, since you would expect beaming out WiFi signals to take a little juic…

Gamifying life is silly, fun, and a great way to interact with those strangers who you pass everyday. Here's one example that might just pop up along your next walk to work. It's a way to take a very...

Rocket engines are undeniably cool. Experiencing the roar, seeing the fire, and watching the rocket blast off into the sky… what else can you ask for? Well, for [NightHawkInLight], a transpar…

“Quick! We’re having a baby and we need a baby monitor!” Rather than run to the local big box and plunk down cash for an off-the-shelf solution, any self-respecting hacker would r…

[GreatScott] bought a Game Boy case. Normally, you’d assume you wanted this to repair a damaged Game Boy, but in this case [GreatScott] used a Pi Zero and some 3D printing to build a game sys…

This week in [Hackenings], we've got a full roster of interesting upcoming events scattered all over the world. Can't afford airfare to India, but Dublin is in the next county over? We've got you cove...

Winter is coming, along with mittens, cold hands, snow, and jackets. Now that we’re all carrying around lithium batteries in our pocket, wouldn’t it be a great idea to build an electron…

Here’s a quick DIY hack if you happen to have multiple computers at home or at the office and are tired of juggling mice and keyboards. [Kedar Nimbalkar] — striving for a solution &#821…

Most of us who play an occasional arcade game will have never taken a look inside a cabinet however much its contents might interest us. We’ll know in principle what kind of hardware we&#8217…

Before the Arduino took over the hobby market (well, at least the 8-bit segment of it), most hackers used PIC processors. They were cheap, easy to program, had a good toolchain, and were at the hea…

RADIO WONDERLAND is a one-man band with many famous unintentional collaborators. [Joshua Fried]'s shows start off with him walking in carrying a boombox playing FM radio. He plugs it into his sound ri...

Very few residential architectural elements lend themselves to automation, with doors and windows being particularly thorny problems. You can buy powered doors and windows, true, but you'll pay a pret...

Nintendo look as though they may have something of a hit on their hands with their latest console offering. It’s not the next in the line of high-end consoles with immersive VR or silicon tha…

The Travelling Hackerbox is going International. I wrote a post on this earlier in the week, and I'm still looking for recipients for the box that are not in the United States. The sign-up form is ri...

For many parts of the world, the great raking has begun as deciduous trees in temperate zones drop their leaves. Of course not everyone can abide the simple yet laborious process of manual raking and ...