The x86 CPU landscape of the 1980s and 1990s was competitive in a way that probably seems rather alien to anyone used to the duopoly that exists today between AMD and Intel. At one point in time, Cyrix was a major player, who mostly sought to provide a good deal that would undercut Intel. One […]
Restomods let us relive some of the glory days of industrial design with internals that would blow the socks off the original device. [Mental Hygiene] decided to update an Apple IIc with a G4 brain. Starting with a broken IIc, they pulled the internals, including the venerable 6502, and transplanted the parts from a G4 Mac […]
Want to build your own espresso machine, complete with open-source software to drive it? The diyPresso might be right up your alley. diyPresso parts, laid out and ready for assembly. It might not be the cheapest road to obtaining an espresso machine, but it’s probably the most economical way to turn high-quality components (including a […]
If you want to smooth out the top surface of your FDM 3D prints, you can try ironing. Many slicers allow you to set this option, which drags the hot printhead through the top surface with a tiny bit of plastic to smooth out the extrusion lines. However, a recent paper explains how non-planar ironing […]
NASA’s ACS3 (Advanced Composite Solar Sail System) is currently fully deployed in low Earth orbit, and stargazers can spot it if they know what to look for. It’s actually one of the brightest things in the night sky. When the conditions are right, anyway. ACS3’s sail is as thin as it is big. What conditions […]
It takes but an ill-fated second to break a bone, and several long weeks for it to heal in a cast. And even if you have one of those newfangled fiberglass casts, you still can’t get the thing wet, and it’s gonna be itchy under there because your skin can’t breathe. Isn’t it high time […]
For many of us of a particular vintage, the internet blossomed in the ’90s with the invention of the Web and just a few years of development. Back then, we had the convenience of expression on the WWW and the backup of mature services such as IRC for all that other stuff we used to […]
With all the recent attention on Mars and the search for evidence of ancient life there, it’s easy to forget that not only has the Red Planet been under the figurative microscope since the early days of the Space Race, but we went to tremendous effort to send a pair of miniaturized biochemical laboratories there […]
Exhibit A: A standard-issue banana. We love it when a community grabs hold of an idea and runs wild with it despite obvious practicality issues. Gridfinity by YouTuber [Zach Freedman] is one of those concepts. For the unaware, this is a simple storage system standard, defining boxes to hold your things. These boxes can be […]