Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) is one of those things that sounds like it must be woo when you first hear of it. “A trickle of current that can deal with chronic pain better than the pills we’ve been using for decades? Yeah, and what chakras do you hook this doo-hickie up to?” It seems […]
A Crookes radiometer, despite what many explanations claim, does not work because of radiation pressure. When light strikes the vanes inside the near-vacuum chamber, it heats the vanes, which then impart some extra energy to gas molecules bouncing off of them, causing the vanes to be pushed in the opposite direction. On the other hand, […]
That MacOS (formerly OS X) has BSD roots is a well-known fact, with its predecessor NeXTSTEP and its XNU kernel derived from 4.3BSD. Subsequent releases of OS X/MacOS then proceeded to happily copy more bits from 4.4BSD, FreeBSD and other BSDs. In that respect the thing that makes MacOS unique compared to other BSDs is […]
There’s more to making an oscillator than meets the eye, and [lcamtuf] is here with a good primer on the subject. It starts with the old joke that if you need an oscillator it’s best to try to make an amplifier instead, but of course the real point here is to learn how to make […]
The history of the game Zork is a long and winding one, starting with MUDs and kin on university mainframes – where students entertained themselves in between their studies – and ending with the game being ported to home computers. These being pathetically undersized compared to even a PDP-10 meant that Zork got put to […]
[Andrew Greenberg] has some specific ideas for how open-source hardware hackers could do a better job with their KiCad schematics. In his work with students at Portland State University, [Andrew] finds his students both reading and creating KiCad schematics, and often these schematics leave a little to be desired. To help improve the situation he’s […]
For those of you who haven’t spent time in North America around this time of year, you may be unaware of two things: one, the obligatory non-stop loop of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” retail workers are subjected to starting November first, and two: there is a strong cultural association between Christmastime and […]