We don’t think of computers as something you’d find in the 17th century. But [Levi McClain] found plans for one in a book — books, actually — by [Athanasius Kirker] about music. The arca musarithmica, a machine to allow people with no experience to compose church music, might not fit our usual definition of a […]
Incomplete JSON (such as from a log that terminates unexpectedly) doesn’t parse cleanly, which means anything that usually prints JSON nicely, won’t. Frustration with this is what led [Simon Willison] to make The Incomplete JSON pretty printer, a single-purpose web tool that pretty-prints JSON regardless of whether it’s complete or not. Making a tool to […]
The “USB C” cable that comes with the Inaya Portable Rechargeable Lamp. (Credit: The Stock Pot, YouTube) Recently [Dillan Stock] over at The Stock Pot YouTube channel bought a $17 ‘mushroom’ lamp from his local Kmart that listed ‘USB-C rechargeable’ as one of its features, the only problem being that although this is technically true, there’s […]
Lots of people swear by large-language model (LLM) AIs for writing code. Lots of people swear at them. Still others may be planning to exploit their peculiarities, according to [Joe Spracklen] and other researchers at USTA. At least, the researchers have found a potential exploit in ‘vibe coding’. Everyone who has used an LLM knows […]
It started when [Mitxela] was faced with about a hundred incorrectly-placed 0603 parts. Given that he already owned two TS101 soldering irons, a 3D printer, and knows how to use FreeCAD (he had just finished designing a custom TS101 holder) it didn’t take long to create cost-effective DIY soldering tweezers. Two screws allow adjusting the […]
Earlier this year, I bought one of those K40-style laser machines that was listed at a ridiculously low price, and it arrived broken. Well, let me qualify that: the laser tube and the power supply work perfectly, but that’s about the best you can say about it. On first power-up, it made a horrible noise, […]
Most robots depend on controlled environments, because the real world is hard to get around in. The smaller the robot, the bigger this problem because little wheels (or legs) can take only little steps. One way around that is MIT’s latest one-legged hopping robot, which sports a set of four insect-like wings on its top […]
Sound hardware has been built into PC motherboards for so long now it’s difficult to remember the days when a sound card was an expensive add-on peripheral. By the mid to late 1990s they were affordable and ubiquitous enough to be everywhere, but three decades later some of them are starting to fail. [Necroware] takes […]
One of the delights in Bash, zsh, or whichever shell tickles your fancy in your OSS distribution of choice, is the ease of which you can use scripts. These can be shell scripts, or use the Perl, Python or another interpreter, as defined by the shebang (#!) at the beginning of the script. This signature […]
Human biology is very much like that of other mammals, and yet so very different in areas where it matters. One of these being human neurology, with aspects like the human brain and the somatosensory pathways (i.e. touch etc.) being not only hard to study in non-human animal analogs, but also (genetically) different enough that […]