You consider yourself a power user. You’ve got lots of files, and damn it, you like to keep them backed up. Around a decade ago, you gave up on burning optical discs, and switched to storing your files on portable hard drives. One local, one off-site, and a cloud backup just to be sure. You’re […]
There are a great many organizations out there, all with their own intentions—some selfish, some selfless, some that land somewhere in between. Most would put the Internet Archive in the category of the library—with its aim of preserving and providing knowledge for the aid of all who might call on it. Sadly, as [theresnotime] reports, […]
When you think of tennis, you probably think of Wimbledon, the All England Club’s famous competition that has run for 147 years. Part of that history has always been line judges who call the ball in or out, sometimes to the ire of players and fans alike. But line judges will be no more at […]
[John Graham-Cumming] might not be the first person to thumb through an old book and find an IBM punched card inside. But he might be the first to actually track down the origin of the cards. Admittedly, there were clues. The book was a Portuguese book about computers from the 1970s. The cards also had […]
Schematic version of on-site wastewater analysis using the microfluidic strips (Credit: Yuwei Pan et al., Cell, 2024) Wastewater sampling has become a popular way over the years to keep track of the health of a population, including human ones, as pathogens are often detectable in the effluence from toilets. Since most houses connected to the […]
Commodity bearings are a a boon for makers who to want something to rotate smoothly, but what if you don’t have one in a pinch? [Cliff] of might have the answer for you, in the form of 3D printed bearings with filament rollers. With the exception of the raw filament rollers, the inner and outer […]
What color are the street lights in your town? While an unfortunate few still suffer under one of the awful colors offered by vapor discharge lamps, like the pink or orange of sodium or the greenish-white of mercury, most municipalities have moved to energy-saving LED streetlights, with a bright white light that’s generally superior in […]
This week Jonathan Bennett and and Dan Lynch chat with Anthony Annunziata about Open Source AI and the AI Alliance. We get answers to our burning AI questions, and talk about the difficulty of defining what Open Source means for these large models. https://thealliance.ai/ Did you know you can watch the live recording of the […]
The Braun TS2 radio was a state-of-the art tube set in 1956. Today it still looks great, but unsurprisingly, the one that [Manuel Caldeier] has needed a little tender loving care. The table radio had a distinct style for its day and push-buttons. However, the dial glass and the speaker grill needed replacement. Even more […]
Visualization of the Sun-Earth Lagrange points. Orbital mechanics is a fun subject, as it involves a lot of seemingly empty space that’s nevertheless full of very real forces, all of which must be taken into account lest one’s spacecraft ends up performing a sudden lithobraking maneuver into a planet or other significant collection of matter […]