Despite the passing of several decades since that scene in Star Trek IV, the Voyage Home in which Mr. Scott remarks “A keyboard! How quaint!“, here on earth, they remain a central plank of our user interface experience. A plank is an appropriate metaphor, for the traditional keyboard with its layout derived from typewriters and intended […]
This two-decade old blinkenlights project (YouTube link, and also below the break) would look at home among current $1 soldering kits except for a few key differences. Firstly, it has the teardown artist’s name on the back and comes from an era when DIY circuit boards really meant doing things yourself including the artwork, etching, […]
While it isn’t quite universal, a lot of people enjoy a glass of wine now and again. But the world faced a crisis in the 1800s that almost destroyed some of the world’s great wines. Science — or some might say hacking — saved the day, though even though it isn’t well known outside of […]
Join us on Wednesday 5 June 2019 at noon Pacific for the Disrupting Cell Biology Hack Chat with Incuvers! A lot of today’s most successful tech companies have creation myths that include a garage in some suburban neighborhood where all the magic happened. Whether there was literally a garage is not the point; the fact […]
Those of us of advancing years will remember the era of the floppy disc. Maybe not that of the 8-inch drive, but probably its 5.25-inch and certainly its 3.5-inch cousins. Some will remember the floppy disc fondly, while for others there will be recollections of slow and unreliable media with inadequate capacity, whose ability to […]
If you’ve been kind enough to accompany me on these regular hardware explorations, you’ve likely recognized a trend with regards to the gadgets that go under the knife. Generally speaking, the devices I take apart for your viewing pleasure come to us from the clearance rack of a big box retailer, the thrift store, or […]
It’s been a long time coming but [Fran] finally has a DSKY display, a replica of the user interface display found in the Apollo Guidance Computer. The best part? It’s a t-shirt. This build is a long, long, time in the making first beginning in 2015 when Fran started investigating the DSKY of the Apollo […]
If you like mechanical keyboards, you like switches. Historically, switches were weird, with strange capacitive rubber dome switches in Topre boards, buckling springs in the IBM Model M, and beamsprings in earlier IBM keyboards. This teardown of an HP signal generator has the weirdest keyboard switches ever. They’re being called pulse transformer switches, but they […]
Lamps are quite often simple things, designed to light an area and perhaps add a touch of style to a room. Of course, it’s 2019 now, and we don’t need to settle for just that. We can have wildly colored animated lamps if we want to! (French Youtube link, embedded below.) The lamp in question […]
It has been fascinating to watch the rise of the #BadgeLife community in North America, and a little sad when viewed from a European perspective that their creative vibrancy has not quite fully made it across the Atlantic. It’s pleasing therefore to report on something traveling in the opposite direction. We’ve found a #BadgeLife creation […]