Despite the repeated warnings of system administrators, IT personnel, and anyone moderately aware of operational security, there are still quite a few people who will gladly plug a mysterious flash…

Facebook and Yandex have been caught performing user-hostile tracking. This sort of makes today just another Friday, but this is a bit special. This time, it’s Local Mess. OK, it’s an a…

When home computers first appeared, disk drives were an expensive rarity. Consumers weren’t likely to be interested in punch cards or paper tape, but most people did have consumer-grade audio…

In the Blackberry-keyboard-based project lineage story last week, I covered how a series of open-source projects turned into Beepy, a cool Linux PDA with a lively community. To me, it’s yet a…

When a wrist mounted keyboard floated past in the Hackaday feed, a mental image surfaced, perhaps something like a Blackberry keyboard mounted on a wrist cuff, maybe with some kind of display. It&#…

Today in old school nostalgia our tipster [Clint Jay] wrote in to let us know about this rotary dial. If you’re a young whippersnapper you might never have seen a rotary dial. These things we…

How hard could it be to make a chicken coop door that can be configured to open and close automatically using a straightforward interface? That’s the question that [Jeff Sandberg] set out wit…

The Portal games were revolutionary not only for their puzzle-based, narrative-driven gameplay, but also for their unique physics engine, which let players open portals anywhere and conserve moment…

The city of London is no stranger to tall constructions today, but long before the first skyscrapers would loom above its streets, Watkin’s Tower was supposed to be the tallest structure in n…

Most of us spend our lives within reach of a device that provides a clock, stopwatch, and a timer – you’re almost certainly reading this article on such a device – but there are fewer options if yo…

For those of us who have worked on SNES and GameCube controllers, we know that these are pretty simple to get into and maintain. However, in the trend of making modern game controllers more complex…

The intersection between “woodworkers” and “programmers” is not a densely populated part of the Venn diagram, but [Michael Schiebler] is there with his Kerf Bend Wizard to h…

Recently, [Samuel Leeuwenburg] got his paws on a Francis! Francis! X1 (yes, that’s the name) espresso machine. This is the espresso machine that is mostly famous for having been in a lot of b…

If you’ve worked on a project with small LEDs, you know the frustration of determining their polarity. This ingenious LED Probe from [David] packs a lot of useful features into a simple, easy-to-im…

We’ve all been there. [Kasyan TV] had a universal adapter for a used laptop, and though it worked for a long time, it finally failed. Can it be fixed? Of course, it can, but it is up to you i…

Both small children and cats have a certain tendency to make loud noises at inopportune times, but what if there were a way to combine these auditory effects? This seems to have been the reasoning …

The advent of cheap and accessible one-off PCB production has been one of the pivotal moments for electronic experimenters during the last couple of decades. Perhaps a few still etch their own boar…

After having been involved in an accident, [Kurt Kohlstedt] suffered peripheral neuropathy due to severe damage to his right brachial plexus — the network of nerves that ultimately control th…

With the newer generation of quick and reliable 3D printers, we find ourselves with the old collecting dust and cobwebs. You might pull it out for an emergency print, that is if it still works… In …

It’s a common enough problem: you’re hitting the books, your phone dings with a notification, and suddenly it’s three hours later. While you’ve done lots of scrolling, you d…