When we first heard the term “random laser,” we did a double-take. After all, most ordinary sources of light are random. One defining characteristic of a traditional laser is that it emits coherent light. By coherent, in this context, that usually includes temporal coherence and spatial coherence. It is anything but random. It turns out, […]
AC induction motors are everywhere, from ceiling fans to vehicles. They’re reliable, simple, and rugged — but there are some disadvantages. It’s difficult to control the speed without complex electronics, and precisely placing the shaft at a given angle is next to impossible. But the core of these common induction machines can be modified and […]
Over the course of its nearly 30 years in orbit, the International Space Station has played host to more “firsts” than can possibly be counted. When you’re zipping around Earth at five miles per second, even the most mundane of events takes on a novel element. Arguably, that’s the point of a crewed orbital research […]
Since the RP2040 microcontroller is available as a stand-alone component, it’s easy enough for third parties to churn out their own variations — or outright clones of — the Raspberry Pi Pico. Thus we end up with for example AliExpress sellers offering their own versions that can be significantly cheaper than the genuine article. The […]
We’ve been aware of projects like Cosmopolitan that allow you to crank out a single executable that will run on different operating systems. [Kamila] noticed that the idea was sound, but that the executables were large and there were some limitations. So she produced a 13K file that will run under Windows, Linux, or even […]
[Anthony Francis-Jones], like us, has a soft spot for the educational electronic kits from days gone by. In a recent video you can see below, he shows the insides of a Philips EE08 two-transistor radio kit. This is the same kit he built a few months ago (see the second video, below). Electronics sure look […]
The cache hierarchy of the 2008 Intel Nehalem x86 architecture. (Source: Intel) Writing good, performant code depends strongly on an understanding of the underlying hardware. This is especially the case in scenarios like those involving embarrassingly parallel processing, which at first glance ought to be a cakewalk. With multiple threads doing their own thing without […]
The balance bikes toddlers are rocking these days look like great fun, but not so great in the snow. Rather than see his kid’s favourite toy relegated to shed until spring, [John Boss] added electric power, and an extra wheel to make one fun-looking snow trike. Like a boss, you might say. Physically, the trike […]
An audio amplifier was once a fairly simple analogue device, but in recent decades a typical home entertainment amplifier will have expanded to include many digital functions. When these break they are often proprietary and not easy to repair, as was the case with a broken Pioneer surround-sound device given to [Boz]. It sat on […]
This week Jonathan and Randal chat with Jose Valim about Elixir! What led Jose to create this unique programming language? What do we mean that it’s a functional language with immutability? https://elixir-lang.org/ https://github.com/elixir-plug/plug Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us […]