For better or worse, there are a few instruments that have been pigeonholed into specific genres of popular music. For example, banjos are often heard in bluegrass or folk, harmonicas in blues, and a sick horn section will take many of us immediately to third wave ska. Similarly, there are certain styles of synthesizers tied […]
Nothing lasts forever, but you’d think the leaded-glass face of a CRT would not be a place you’re likely to see Father Time causing failures. Alas, the particle accelerators we all lovingly stared at were very often not unitary pieces of glass: in case of implosion, safety glass was glued onto the front of the […]
The famous cuckoo clock, with its moving, chirping mechanical bird indicating various divisions of time, has been around since at least the 1600s. The most famous of them come from the Black Forest area of Germany, and are still being made worldwide even today. Other clocks with different themes take their inspiration from the standard […]
These days, it’s pretty easy to slap together a single-board computer and a cheap LCD screen to whip up a cool cyberdeck fast. But what if you wanna go more retro? [Manu] found a portable TV straight out of the original Blade Runner film, and decided this would be the perfect base for a cyberdeck […]
The Slug Algorithm has been around for a decade now, mostly quietly rendering fonts and later entire GUIs using Bézier curves directly on the GPU for games and other types of software, but due to its proprietary nature it didn’t see much adoption outside of commercial settings. This has now changed with its author, [Eric […]
Conway’s Game of Life excels in its simplicity, creating a cellular automaton on a 2D grid where each cell obeys a set of very simple rules that determine whether a cell is ‘alive’ or ‘dead’. After setting an initial condition the ‘game’ then evolves naturally from there, creating an endless series of patterns as a […]
The final second prototype flying. (Credit: Luke Maximo Bell, YouTube) The dream of fully powering everything from aircraft to cars on just the power generated from solar panels attached to the machine remains a tempting one, but always seems to require some serious engineering including putting the machine on a crash diet. The quadcopter that […]
Power banks come in many sizes, and those that target construction sites are probably among the largest. The massive four ton unit based around lead-acid batteries which the [Buy it Fix it] YouTube channel got handed is a good example. Inside it are Victron CCGX inverters among a lot of other Victron electronics, with the […]