From the very dawn of the personal computing era, the PC and Apple platforms have gone very different ways. IBM compatibles surged in popularity, while Apple was able to more closely guard the Maci…

Over the course of evolution microorganisms have evolved pathways to break down many materials. The challenge with the many materials that we humans have created over just the past decades is that …

Humans have forever been using all manner of techniques to better secure the food we need to sustain our lives. The practice of agriculture is intimately tied to the development of society, while t…

The Rigol oscilloscopes have a long history of modifications and hacks, and this latest from [Matthias] is an impressive addition; he’s been working on adding a function generator to the DHO8…

If you need to cool something, the gold standard is using a gas compressor arrangement. Of course, there are definite downsides to that, like weight, power consumption, and vibrations. There are so…

Bees are incredible insects that live and die for their hive, producing rich honey in complicated hive structures. The problem is as the average beekeeper, you wouldn’t see much of these intricate …

Many people who get analog electronics still struggle a bit to design oscillators. Even common simulators often need a trick to simulate some oscillating circuits. The Barkhausen criteria state tha…

Yes, you read that right– not benchy, but beanie, as in the hat. A toque, for those of us under the Maple Leaf. It’s not 3D printed, either, except perhaps by the loosest definition of …

Some people slander retrocomputing as an old man’s game, just because most of those involved are more ancient than the hardware they’re playing with. But there are veritable children in…

Normally you can’t read out the One Time Programming (OTP) memory in Microchip’s PIC MCUs that have code protection enabled, but an exploit has been found that gets around the copy prot…

Do you ever look at the news, and wonder about the process behind the news cycle? I did, and for the last couple of decades it’s been the subject of one of my projects. The Raspberry Pi on my…

If you are a certain age, you probably remember the ads and publicity around Chisanbop — the supposed ancient art of Korean finger math. Was it Korean? Sort of. Was it faster than a calculato…

It should probably come as no surprise to anyone that the images which we look at every day – whether printed or on a display – are simply illusions. That cat picture isn’t actual…

This week Jonathan chats with Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss about KDE’s eco initiative and the End of 10 campaign! Is Open Source really a win for environmentalism? How does the End of 10 campaig…

We always enjoy [FloatHeadPhysics] explaining any math or physics topic. We don’t know if he’s acting or not, but he seems genuinely excited about every topic he covers, and it is infec…

[Cal Bryant] hacked together a home automation system years ago, which more recently utilizes Piper TTS (text-to-speech) voices for various undisclosed purposes. Not satisfied with the robotic-soun…

The volume slider on our virtual desktops is a skeuomorphic callback to the volume sliders on professional audio equipment on actual, physical desktops. [Maker Vibe] decided that this skeuomorphism…

[Ryan] purchased a large fume extractor designed to sit on the floor below the work area and pull solder fumes down into its filtering elements. The only drawback to this new filter was that its co…

The aerospike engine holds great promise for spaceflight, but for various reasons, has remained slightly out of reach for decades. But thanks to Leap 71, the technology has moved one step closer to…

If you’re into Macs, you’ll always remember your first. Maybe it was the revolutionary classic of 1984 fame, perhaps it was the adorable G3 iMac in 1998, or even a shiny OS X machine in…