When writing a recent piece about Reverse Polish Notation, or RPN, as a hook for my writing I retrieved my Sinclair Scientific calculator from storage. This was an important model in the genesis of…

Water is kind of like information: both are a vital part of life and are found all around us. But not all water or information is healthy. Much of it may look harmless, but is actually polluted. A …

The first time I saw 3D modeling and 3D printing used practically was at a hack day event. We printed simple plastic struts to hold a couple of spring-loaded wires apart. Nothing revolutionary as f…

As the candy rush fades, the Halloween hacks continue pouring in. [Jeremy S Cook] has taken a few fundamental concepts and dressed them up inside the smartest pumpkin on the block. This pumpkin has…

[B. Aswinth Raj] wanted to control a VLC player with hand gestures. He turned to two common ultrasonic sensors and Python to do the job. There is also, of course, an Arduino. You can see a video of…

Most new hams quickly learn that the high-frequency bands are where the action is, and getting on the air somewhere between 40- and 160-meters is the way to make those coveted globe-hopping contact…

The Raspberry Pi is possibly the world’s most popular emulation platform these days. While it was never intended to serve this purpose, the fact remains that a small, compact computer with fl…

The Vectrex is in no way the most popular console of all time, but it is one of the more unique. Eschewing typical raster-based rendering, it instead relies on a vector-based display. Since the ave…

Bill Shockley brought the transistor to a pasture in Palo Alto, but he didn’t land there by chance. There was already a plot afoot which had nothing to do with silicon, and it had already bee…

Ever wanted to try your hand at wood burning? If you already threw away your first soldering iron—you know the one: plugged straight in to the wall, no temperature control, came with a thick piece …

Let’s start off with one of my favorite quotes from John von Neumann: “Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as ha…

Shoes are some of the most complex pieces of equipment you can buy. There’s multiple materials ranging from foam to weird polyesters in a simple sneaker, and if you dig into shoes for biking,…

In the old days, spies eavesdropped on each other using analog radio bugs. These days, everything’s in the cloud. [Sebastian] from [Hacking Beaver]  wondered if he could make a WiFi bug that …

[Jan Mrázek] is a pro when it comes to rolling his own PCBs. He can crank out a 6/6 mil double-sided PCB in 45 minutes flat. As a challenge to his prowess, he decided to experiment with plating thr…

[Alec Richter] had a good idea on how he could convert the leftover filament spindles from his 3D printer into multi-compartment storage. An empty spindle is fitted with several trays that rotate o…

When the apocalypse comes, we want [Justin] on our team! He made a hefty 400 W work light out of four 100 W LEDs mounted to a giant, aluminum slab-like heat sink he had lying around. He manufacture…

[Mohamed Sami] built a syringe pump out of Meccano building set parts. It consists of a simple framework with a DC motor mounted on it that actuates the syringe when powered. A check valve harveste…

1976 was the year the Apple I was released, one of several computers based on the MOS 6502 chip. MOS itself released the KIM-1 (Keyboard Input Monitor) initially to demonstrate the power of the chi…

Your fancy white electronic brick of consumer electronics started off white, but after some time it yellowed and became brittle. This shouldn’t have happened; plastic is supposed to last fore…

The good people at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory [CSAIL] have found a way of tricking Google’s InceptionV3 image classifier into seeing a rifle where there act…