As we all look across a sea of lifeless, nearly identically-styled consumer goods, a few of us have become nostalgic for a time when products like stereo equipment, phones, appliances, homes, cars,…

A fundamental difficulty of working with nanoparticles is that your objects of study are too small for an optical microscope to resolve, and thus measuring their size can be quite a challenge. Of c…

If you’ve never used a PDP-11 before it’s probably because you simply weren’t around in the 70s and 80s. Although they started as expensive machines only in research labs and indu…

It’s late at night, and you’re avoiding work that was supposed to be done yesterday. You could open an application on your desktop to keep your attention, or what about the desktop itself? [Underpi…

Convenient though they may be, [Trevor Faber] found some serious shortcomings in shifting spanners: their worm gears are slow to adjust and prone to jamming, they don’t apply even force to all face…

“Sorry, my mic was muted…” With the rise of video calls, we’ve all found ourselves rushing to mute or unmute our mics in the midst of a call. This open-source Mute Button, s…

One of the interesting things about Prusa’s FDM 3D printers is the availability of official upgrade kits, which allow you to combine bits off an older machine with those of the target machine…

While we have nothing against other 1980s 8-bit machines, the Commodore 64 has always been something special. A case in point: another new instrument using the C-64 and its beloved SID chip. Not ju…

ECE 4760/5730 is the Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers course at Cornell University taught by [Hunter Adams]. The list of projects for spring this year includes forty write-ups — …

The Neon glow of a Nixie tube makes for an attractive clock, but that’s not enough neon for some people. [Changliang Li] is apparently one of those people, because he’s using soviet-era…

3D prints destined for presentation need smooth surfaces, and that usually means sanding. [Uncle Jessy] came across an idea he decided to try out for himself: spraying Bondo spot putty onto a 3D pr…

A business card is a convenient way to share your contact information, but it’s unfortunately prone to being thrown away or forgotten. PCB business cards try to get around this problem, but w…

Launched in 2004, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory – formerly the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer – has been dutifully studying gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) during its two-year mission, bef…

Ask a Hackaday scribe who’s helped run the lightning talks at one of our events, and they’ll tell you that keeping the speakers on time is a challenge. Conversely if the staffer is tryi…

Back in March, we covered the story of Davis Lu, a disgruntled coder who programmed a logic bomb into his employers’ systems. His code was malicious in the extreme, designed as it was to regu…

In late 2024 Microsoft removed support for WMR (Windows Mixed Reality), and they didn’t just cease development. As of Windows 11 version 24H2, headsets like the HP Reverb and others by Acer, …

In the 1930s, as an alternative to celluloid, some Japanese companies printed films on paper (kami firumu), often in color and with synchronized 78 rpm record soundtracks. Unfortunately, between th…

As NASA’s Artemis program trundles onwards at the blazing pace of a disused and very rusty crawler-transporter, the next mission on the list is gradually coming into focus. This will be the f…

To say that neutrinos aren’t the easiest particles to study would be a bit of an understatement. Outside of dark matter, there’s not much in particle physics that is as slippery as the …

Often times, e-bikes seek to build the biggest battery with the most range. But what if you want to take a couple lunch loops on your bike and only need 20 minutes of charge? That’s [Seth] fr…