When asked ‘what makes you tick?’ the engineers at Vacheron Constantin sure know what to answer – and fast, too. Less than a year after last year’s horological kettlebell, the 960…

Today in the submersibles department our hacker [Rupin Chheda] wrote in to tell us about their submarine project. This sub is made from a few lengths of PVC piping of various diameters. There is an…

Film maker [David Greelish] wrote in to let us know about his recent documentary: Before Macintosh: The Apple Lisa. The documentary covers the life of the Apple Lisa. It starts with the genesis of …

The ZX Spectrum is perhaps most fondly remembered as a home computer and a games machine. [Tito] has grabbed the faithful black plastic box and turned it into a frequency counter as an innovative e…

After getting a new car, [Solo Pilot] missed the automatic garage door opening and closing system their old car had. So they set about building their own, called GarageMinder. On the project page y…

For as mysterious, fascinating, and beautiful as lightning is at a distance, it’s not exactly a peaceful phenomenon up close. Not many things are built to withstand millions of volts and tens…

Even within a single type of FDM filament there is an overwhelming amount of choice. Take for example Elegoo’s PETG filament offerings, which include such varieties like ‘Pro’ and…

Have you ever seen a toy and said “That wants to be a deck”? [Attoparsec] did, when his eyes fell upon the Little Talking Scholar, a punch card driven toy from the 1980s. It’s now…

Everything fails eventually, but moving parts fail fastest of all– and optical drives seemingly more than others, at least in our experience. Even when they work, vintage drives often have tr…

The Z80 might be decades obsolete and a few years out of production, but it’s absolutely a case of “gone but not forgotten” in the hacker world. Case in point is SymbOS, a multita…

Here’s something fun from our hacker [Piers]: Software Defined ROMs. In this series of three videos, [Piers] runs us through what a software defined ROM is, how to make them, and then how to …

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…