Cooking with charcoal is a fairly common human activity, as much as others have come to prefer fuels like propane and propane accessories for their outdoor, summertime grilling. Although it’s made from wood, it has properties that make it much more useful for cooking — including burning at a higher temperature and with more consistent […]
[My Engines] has been doing some sterling work on Stirling engines for some years now. Their thermoacoustic engine is now finally far enough along to open-source, so the magic of collaboration can speed technological advancement. You’ve probably heard of Stirling Engines, but what’s this “thermoacoustic” business? Hot sound? Well, that’s the translation, and it’s not […]
The physicist William Shockley is perhaps today best known for three things: his role in the invention of the transistor, his calamitous management of Shockley Semiconductor which led to a mass defection of employees and precipitated the birth of the Silicon Valley we know, and his later descent into promoting eugenics. This was not the […]
Although the Apple II range of computers were based around the 6502 processor, they could still run x86 software using expansion cards that were effectively self-contained computers. This way an Apple IIe owner, for example, could install an Intel 8088-based AD8088 co-processor card by ALF Products and run CP/M-86 as well as MS-DOS. Unfortunately, as […]
Ford does sell an electric pickup, but not very many of them. We can’t say for sure, but it’s possible that if the F150 Lightning had the classic cool of [ScottenMotors] 1977 F150 SuperCab conversion they’d have better numbers. The battery box sits where a V8 used to choke on well-meaning emissions controls. On Reddit, […]
The Tesla turbine is a bladeless centripetal-flow turbine invented by Nikola Tesla in 1913, using the boundary-layer effect rather than having a stream of gases or a fluid impinge on blades. Recently [Jamie’s Brick Jams] constructed one using Lego to demonstrate just how well these turbines work compared to their bladed brethren. Since it uses […]
Remember those brick cellphones in the 1990s? They were comically large by today’s standards. These phones used the 1G network to communicate and, as such, have been unusable for decades now. However [Alan Boris] has resurrected this classic phone to operate today. Originally costing as much as today’s top-of-the-line phones, but instead of weighing just […]