The human eye’s color perception is notoriously variable (see, for example, the famous dress), which makes it difficult to standardize colours. This is where spectrophotometers come in: they measur…

Here’s a fun project. Over on their YouTube page [Urban Circles] introduces Project Scribe. The idea behind this project is that you can print out little life “receipts”. Notes, j…

In the auto world, there are lots of overarching standards that all automakers comply with. There are also lots of proprietary technologies that each automaker creates and uses for its own benefit.…

Long before electricity was a common household utility, humanity had been building machines to do many tasks that we’d now just strap a motor or set of batteries onto and think nothing of it.…

Normally, mechanical devices like record players move smoothly, with well-greased contact surfaces enabling the tone arm to automatically move, the multi-record mechanism to drop down a fresh disc,…

Our hacker [John Duffy] wrote in to let us know about a video he put together to explain the design of his open-source multimeter, the HydraMeter. If you’re interested in how the circuitry fo…

In the relatively short time that the James Webb Space Telescope has been operational, there’s seemingly no end to its list of accomplishments. And if you’re like us, you were sure that…

We loved keygens back in the day. Our lawyers advise us to clarify that it’s because of the demo-scene style music embedded in them, not because we used them for piracy. [Patch] must feel the…

Content warning: Human alteration and scalpels. General warning: We are not speaking as doctors. Or lawyers. If you watch sci-fi, you probably do not have to think hard to conjure a scene in a tren…

For some reason, people are really into tiny arcade machines that basically require you to ruin your hands and eyes in order to play on them. That said, unlike the fifty gazillion ‘retro cons…

3D printing has simplified the creation of many things, but part of making something is knowing just how much you can rely on it. On the [BubsBuilds] YouTube channel, he built a cheap rotary table …

In 1983, the Lisa was supposed to be a barnburner. Apple’s brand-new computer had a cutting edge GUI, a mouse, and power far beyond the 8-bit machines that came before. It looked like nothing…

When you first get your hands on an old piece of equipment, regardless of whether it’s an old PC or some lab equipment, there is often the temptation to stick a power lead into it and see wha…

By and large, the human body is designed to breathe from birth, and keep breathing continuously until death. Indeed, if breathing stops, lifespan trends relatively rapidly towards zero. There&#8217…

[Scott Baker] wrote in to let us know about his freezer monitor. After a regrettable incident where the ice cream melted because the freezer failed [Scott] decided that what was called for was a mo…

[danjovic] came up with a nifty entry for our 2025 One-Hertz Challenge that lands somewhere between the categories of Ridiculous and Clockwork. It’s a clock that few hackers, if any, could re…

Having a robot that can quickly and unsupervised pick any lock with the skills of a professional human lockpicker has been a dream for many years. A major issue with lockpicking robots is however t…

JavaScript is everywhere these days, even outside the browser. Everyone knows that this is because JavaScript is the best programming language, which was carefully assembled by computer experts and…

For a brief, buzzing moment in 1983, the Coleco Adam looked like it might out-64 the Commodore 64. Announced with lots of ambition, this 8-bit marvel promised a complete computing package: a keyboa…

Out on Maui, [rabbitcreek] desired to keep track of local ocean conditions. The easiest way to do that was by having something out there in the water to measure them. Thus, they created a floating …