There’s always some debate around what style of architecture is best for certain computing applications, with some on the RISC side citing performance per watt and some on the CISC side citin…

We feel for [Jeff Geerling]. He spent a lot of effort building an AI cluster out of Raspberry PI boards and $3,000 later, he’s a bit regretful. As you can see in the video below, it is a neat…

Japan’s Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki was launched on May 21, 2010, and started its active mission in 2015 after an initial orbital insertion failure. Since that time, Akatsuki has continuou…

Nautical navigation has a long history of innovation, from the compass and chronometer to today’s computer-driven autopilot systems. That said, the poor compatibility of electronics with salt…

The PIXO Aspire is a roughly $35 USD vape that can almost play DOOM, with [Aaron Christophel] finding that the only thing that realistically stops it from doing so is that the Cortex-M4-based Puya …

Drums! You hit them, and they vibrate. It’s kind of fun. Piezoelectric elements can create electric current when they vibrate. [Will Dana] put two and two together to try and charge his phone…

Modern handheld game consoles are impressive feats of engineering, featuring full fledged computers in near pocket-sized packages. So what happens if you take an original Xbox and sprinkle on some …

Have you ever wished your hand had an extra feature? Like, maybe, a second thumb? A scope probe pinky maybe? Well, if you are building a robot effector, you get to pick what extra features it has. …

We’ve all seen spectacular pictures of space, and it’s easy to assume that’s how it looks to the naked eye through a nice telescope. But in most cases, that’s simply not true. Spa…

By virtue of its triple bond, acetylene burns hotter than any other common hydrocarbon when mixed with oxygen, but it isn’t the only flame hot enough for welding. With the assistance of a homemade …

[Too Many Wires] has a custom computer he’s building. He wanted a mouse, but USB is a bit of a stretch for the fledgling computer. We might have opted for PS/2, but he went for something even…

Remember AOL? For a lot of folks, America Online was their first ISP, the place where they got their first exposure to the Internet, or at least a highly curated version of it. Remembered by the co…

Ok, we’ll admit it. If you asked us what the first transistorized computer was, we would have guessed it was the TC from the University of Manchester. After all, Dr. Wilkes and company were a…

Often, we face tedious tasks with no way around them. Sometimes, you just have to grit your teeth and push through. But small tweaks can make the onerous task a bit easier to handle. [James Bowman]…

Repairing vintage computers is bread-and-butter for many of us around here. The machines themselves tend to be fairly fixable, assuming spare parts are available and there hasn’t been too muc…

Miniaturization is a trend that comes and goes in the cellular phone space. For a while, our phones were all getting smaller, then they started getting bigger again as screens expanded to show us e…

It’s becoming somewhat of a running gag that any device or object will be made ‘smart’ these days, whether it’s a phone, TV, refrigerator, home thermostat, headphones or gla…

You can read e-books on just about anything—your tablet, your smartphone, or even your PC. However, the interface can be lacking somewhat compared to a traditional book—on a computer, you have to u…

Over this series test-driving operating systems, we’ve tried to bring you the unusual, the esoteric, or the less mainstream among the world of the desktop OS. It would become very boring very…

Imagine trying to balance a heavy metal ball bearing on a cafeteria tray. It’s not the easiest thing in the world! In fact, it’s perhaps a task better automated, as [skulkami3000] demon…