Day: January 6, 2026

As areas of uncontrolled cell growth, cancerous growth form a major problem for a multi-celled organism like us humans. Thus before they can begin to affect our long-term prospects of a continued existence, eradicating these cells-gone-wrong is essential. Unfortunately, doing so without affecting healthy cells significantly is tough. Treatments such as chemotherapy are correspondingly rough […]
It’s a cliché in movies that whenever an airplane’s pilots are incapacitated, some distraught crew member queries the self-loading freight if any of them know how to fly a plane. For small airplanes we picture a hapless passenger taking over the controls so that a heroic traffic controller can talk them through the landing procedure […]
Besides being a fun way to pass time, video gaming is a surprisingly affordable hobby per unit time. A console or budget PC might only cost a few hundred dollars, and modern games like Hollowknight: Silksong can provide 40-60 hours of experience for only around $20 USD. This value proposition wasn’t really there in the […]
The concept of remote video calls has been worked on since Bell’s phone company began pitching upgrading from telegrams to real-time voice calls. It wasn’t until the era of digital video and real-time video compression that commercial solutions became feasible, with the 1985 Image Data Corporation Photophone CP220 being an early example. The CP220 is […]
If you’re looking to edit an image, you might open it in Photoshop, GIMP, or even Paint Shop Pro if you’re stuck in 2005. But who needs it — [Patrick Gillespie] explores what can be done when editing a JPEG on a raw, textual level instead. As the video explains, you generally can’t simply throw […]
Whenever it rains, people generally don’t look too closely at what the drops do exactly when they hit a surface. We generally assume that stuff will get wet and depending on the slope of the surface it’ll run off downhill at some point, probably in a nice, neat flow. Of course, reality doesn’t work that […]
One of the perennial challenges of building robots is minimizing the size and weight of drive systems while preserving power. One established way to do this, at least on robots with joints, is to fit each joint with a quasi-direct-drive motor integrating a brushless motor and gearbox in one device. [The 5439 Workshop] wanted to […]
[Kerry Wong] points out that the Uni-T MSO oscilloscopes have a logic analyzer built in — that’s the MSO, or Mixed Signal Oscilloscope, part — but you have to add the probes. He shows you how it works in a recent video below. He’s looked at the scope’s analog capabilities before and was not unimpressed. […]
The Commodore 1541 was built to do one job—to save and load data from 5.25″ diskettes. [Commodore History] decided to see whether the drive could be put to other purposes, though. Namely, operating as a standalone computer in its own right! It might sound silly, but there’s a very obvious inspiration behind this hack. It’s […]