Over the course of more than a decade, physical media has gradually vanished from public view. Once computers had an optical drive except for ultrabooks, but these days computer cases that even support an internal optical drive are rare. Rather than manuals and drivers included on a data CD you now get a QR code […]
If you had to guess, what do you think it would take to build an ocean-going buoy that could not only survive on its own without human intervention for more than two years, but return useful data the whole time? You’d probably assume such a feat would require beefy hardware, riding inside an expensive and […]
Whenever the topic is raised in popular media about porting a codebase written in an ‘antiquated’ programming language like Fortran or COBOL, very few people tend to object to this notion. After all, what could be better than ditching decades of crusty old code in a language that only your grandparents can remember as being […]
An occasional series of mine on these pages has been Daily Drivers, in which I try out operating systems from the point of view of using them for my everyday Hackaday work. It has mostly featured esoteric or lesser-used systems, some of which have been unexpected gems and others have been not quite ready for […]
The first Philadelphia Maker Faire was extremely impressive, and seemed poised to be one of the premier maker events on the East Coast. Unfortunately, it had the misfortune of happening just a few months before COVID-19 made such events impossible. Robbed of all its momentum, the event tried out different venues after the shadow of […]
Over the history of the Web, we have seen several major shifts in browsing software. If you’re old enough to have used NCSA Mosaic or any of the other early browsers, you probably welcomed the arrival of Netscape Navigator, and rued its decline in the face of Internet Explorer. As Mozilla and then Firefox rose […]
These days, if you want to build something with modern chips and components, you probably want a custom PCB. It lets you build a neat and compact project that has a certain level of tidiness and robustness that you can’t get with a breadboard or protoboard. The only problem is that ordering PCBs takes time, […]
All the news that was fit to print. Image via Wikipedia In the 1982 movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High, a classroom of students receives a set of paperwork to pass backward. Nearly every student in the room takes a big whiff of their sheet before setting it down. If you know, you know, I […]
The list of countries to achieve their own successful orbital space launch is a short one, almost as small as the exclusive club of states that possess nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union was first off the rank in 1957, with the United States close behind in 1958, and a gaggle of other aerospace-adept states followed […]
When a Loch Ness Monster story appears at the start of April, it pays to check the date on the article just to avoid red faces. But there should be no hoax with this one published on the last day of March, scientists from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre were conducting underwater robotics tests in […]