All the news that was fit to print. Image via Wikipedia In the 1982 movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High, a classroom of students receives a set of paperwork to pass backward. Nearly every student in the room takes a big whiff of their sheet before setting it down. If you know, you know, I […]
When you think of attacking or defending computer systems, you probably think of software viruses and the corresponding anti-virus software. But MIT’s 6.5950 class teaches secure hardware design — how to attack and defend CPUs from bad actors. Interested? The course is open source, so you can follow along as long as you don’t mind […]
S/Sgt Betty Vine-Stevens, Washington DC, May 1945. On 31 March of this year we had to bid farewell to Charlotte Elizabeth “Betty” Webb (née Vine-Stevens) at the age of 101. She was one of the cryptanalysts who worked at Bletchley Park during World War 2, as well as being one of the few women who […]
It’s not often you’ll see us singing the praises of Microsoft on these pages, but credit where credit is due, this first-person account of how the software giant got its foot in the proverbial door by Bill Gates himself is pretty slick. Now it’s not the story that has us excited, mind you. It’s the […]
You can salvage lithium 18650 cells from all sorts of modern gadgets, from disposable vapes to cordless power tools. The tricky part, other than physically liberating them from whatever they are installed in, is figuring out if they’re worth keeping or not. Just because an 18650 cell takes a charge doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any […]
There seems to be nothing a 555 can’t do. We’ve seen it before, but [electronzapdotcom] reminds us you can use a 555 and a few parts to make a reasonable touch switch. The circuit lives on a breadboard, as shown in the video below. The circuit uses some very large resistors so that noise from […]
The plethora of smart home devices available today deliver all manner of opportunities, but it’s fair to say that interfacing with them is more often done in the browser or an app than in the terminal. WattWise from [Naveen Kulandaivelu] is a tool which changes all that, it’s a command-line interface (CLI) for power monitoring […]
Macro pads are handy for opening up your favorite programs or executing commonly used keyboard shortcuts. But why stop there? That’s what [Jeroen Brinkman] must have been thinking while creating the Programmer’s Macro Pad. Based on the Arduino Pro Micro, this hand-wired pad is unique in that a single press of any of its 16 […]
This week, Jonathan Bennett chats with Bashonly about yt-dlp, the audio/video downloader that carries the torch from youtube-dl! Why is this a hard problem, and what does the future hold for this swiss-army knife of video downloading? Watch to find out! https://github.com/bashonly https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://discord.gg/H5MNcFW63r Did you know you can watch the live recording of the […]