‘Hearing voices’ doesn’t have to be worrisome, for instance when software-defined radio (SDR) happens to be your hobby. It can take quite some of your time and attention to pull …read more
In his regular browsing on AliExpress, [Ben Jeffrey] came across something he didn’t understand—a $5 fiber optic to RF cable TV adapter. It was excessively cheap, and even more mysteriously, …read more
Like many early microcomputers, the Commodore VIC-20 did not come with an interna real-time clock built into the system. [David Hunter] has seen fit to rectify that with an add-on …read more
Elliot and Dan got together this week for a review of the week’s hacking literature, and there was plenty to discuss. We addressed several burning questions, such as why digital …read more
Many decades ago, IBM engineers developed the typeball. This semi-spherical hunk of metal would become the heart of the Selectric typewriter line. [James Brown] has now leveraged that very concept …read more
The Internet is fighting over whether robots.txt applies to AI agents. It all started when Cloudflare published a blog post, detailing what the company was seeing from Perplexity crawlers. Of …read more
The TP4056 is the default charge-controller chip for any maker or hacker working with lithium batteries. And why not? You can get perfectly-functional knockoffs on handy breakout boards from the …read more
Although these days we get to tap into many sources of entropy to give a pretty good illusion of randomness, home computers back in the 1980s weren’t so lucky. Despite …read more
Imagine you have a projector pointing at a scene, which you’re photographing with a camera aimed from a different point. Using the techniques of modelling light transport, [okooptics] has shown …read more
If the term ‘NLWeb’ first brought to mind an image of a Dutch internet service provider, you’re probably not alone. What it actually is – or tries to become – …read more
Ever since the invention of washing machines, the process of doing laundry has become rather straightforward. Simply toss the dirty laundry into the machine, fill up the detergent, and let …read more
For those living in the continental US who, for whatever reason, don’t have access to an NTP server or a GPS device, the next best way to make sure the …read more
Let’s say you want to build a Nixie clock. You could go out and find some tubes, source a good power supply design, start whipping up a PCB, and working …read more
Many of us have boiled an egg at some point or another in our lives. The conventional technique is relatively straightforward—get the water boiling, drop the egg in, and leave …read more
It’s a well-known factoid that batteries keep getting cheaper while capacity increases. That said, as with any market that is full of people who are hunting for that ‘great deal’, …read more
You don’t have to be a Snow Crash or Tron fan to be familiar with the 3D craze that characterized the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web in …read more
Modern computers generate a great deal of heat when under load, thus we cool them with fans and sometimes even water cooling systems. [Doug MacDowell] figured that water was alright, …read more
If you’re hunting for a bench power supply, you’ll quickly notice options dry up above 48 V or so, and you definitely won’t find a 330 kV supply on the …read more
The hackers over at [HTX Studio] built a set of twenty trash cans which can automatically catch and remove rubbish. In order to catch trash a bin needs to do …read more