The modern hacker and maker has an incredible array of tools at their disposal — even a modestly appointed workbench these days would have seemed like science-fiction a couple decades ago. Desktop 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC mills, lathes, the list goes on and on. But what good is all that fancy gear if you […]
Originally Android apps were only developed in Java, targeting the Dalvik Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and its associated environment. Compared to platforms like iOS with Objective-C, which is just C with Smalltalk uncomfortably crammed into it, an obvious problem here is that any JVM will significantly cripple performance, both due to a lack of direct […]
As USB-C PD becomes more and more common, it’s useful to have a tool that lets you understand exactly what it’s doing—no longer is it limited to just 5 V. This DIY USB-C PD tool, sent in by [ludwin], unlocks the ability to monitor voltage and current, either on a small screen built into the […]
Modern retrocomputing tricks often push old hardware and systems further than any of the back-in-the-day developers could have ever dreamed. How about a neural network on an original Mac? [KenDesigns] does just this with a classic handwritten digit identification network running with an entire custom SDK! Getting such a piece of hardware running what is […]
emojis. It takes the long-established 7-bit ASCII character set and extends it into multiple bytes to represent many thousands of characters. How it does this may well be beyond that basic grasp, and [Vishnu] is here with a primer that’s both fascinating and easy to read. UTF-8 extends ASCII from codes which fit in a […]
As the saying goes, “if it can’t be grown, it has to be mined”– but what about all the metals that have already been wrested from the bosom of the Earth? Once used, they can be recycled– or as this paper charmingly puts it, become ore for “urban mining” techniques. The technique under discussion in […]
Tang FPGA boards are affordable, and [nand2mario] has been trying to get an x86 core running on one for a while. Looks like it finally worked out, as there is an early version of the ao486 design on a Tang FPGA board using a Gowin device. That core’s available on the MiSTer platform, which emulates […]