Many engineers graduate from their studies and head out into the workforce, seeking a paycheck and a project at some existing company or other. Often, it’s not long before an experienced engineer begins to contemplate striking out on their own, working as a skilled gun-for-hire that makes their own money and their own hours. It’s […]
If you think of a 1960s mainframe computer, it’s likely that your mental image includes alongside the cabinets with the blinkenlights, a row of reel-to-reel tape drives. These refrigerator-sized units had a superficial resemblance to an audio tape deck, but with the tape hanging down in a loop either side of the head assembly. This […]
There comes a moment in the life of any operating system when an unforeseen event will tragically cut its uptime short. Whether it’s a sloppily written driver, a bug in the handling of an edge case or just dumb luck, suddenly there is nothing more that the OS’ kernel can do to salvage the situation. […]
Over on Hackaday.io there’s a fun and playful write-up for a fun and playful project — the Piko, an ESP32 powered smartwatch. Our hackers [Iloke Alusala], [Lulama Lingela], and [Rafael Cardoso] teamed up to design and manufacture this wrist-worn fitness wearable. Made from an ESP32 Beetle C6 and using an attached accelerometer with simple thresholds […]
How many people haven’t looked at their Game Boy Advance (GBA) handheld gaming device and wondered how much better it might be if it could run FreeDOS. Inside an 8086 emulator. If you’re like [ZZAZZ] and similarly suffer intrusive project-related thoughts, then this might be a moment of clear recognition, somewhat like sharing one’s story […]
Distortion pedals and overdrive effects usually have a bunch of lovely transistors or op-amps inside and lots of knobs and dials to tweak the sound to your personal taste. However, it’s possible to get some crunchiness in your audio signal without all that fuss, as [Simon Hutchinson] demonstrates with his $2 “analog saturation box”. The […]
For some people (e.g. this author) solder wick is a tool of last resort. Unfortunately, solder suckers and vacuum pumps lose most of their utility when you move from through-hole to SMD components, forcing us to use the dreaded wick. For those of us in this mindset, [nanofix]’s recent video which we’ve placed below the […]
The advent of affordable computing over the last few decades has certainly been a boon for many people with disabilities, making it easier to access things like text-to-speech technology, automation, or mobility devices, and even going as far as making it easier to work in general by making remote work possible. Some things still lag […]
This week Jonathan and Rob chat with Nate Graham about KDE! Why did Nate walk away from Apple, and how did he find Linux and KDE? And what does he see coming next? Watch to find out! https://invent.kde.org/ngraham https://pointieststick.com https://techpaladinsoftware.com Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our […]