With so much data being thrown at our eyeballs these days, it’s worryingly easy for the actually important stuff to slip by occasionally. So when [Liam Jackson] wanted a way to visualize the number of test failures popping up in the continuous integration system at work, he went with a novel but effective solution — […]
The word “algorithm” can sometimes seem like a word designed to scare people away from math classes, much like the words “calculus”, “Fourier transform”, or “engineering exam”. But in reality it’s just a method for solving a specific problem, and we use them all the time whether or not we realize it. Taking a deep […]
The world of audio has produced a variety of different loudspeaker designs over the last century, though it’s fair to say that the trusty moving coil reigns supreme. That hasn’t stopped plenty of engineers from trying new ways to make sound though, and [R.U.H] is here with a home-made version of one of them. It’s […]
There was a brief period through the 1960s into the 1970s when the last word in electronics was the calculator. New models sold for hundreds of dollars, and owning one made you very special indeed. Then the price of the integrated circuit at their heart fell to the point at which anyone could afford one, […]
We all know and love the humble seven-segment display, right? And if you want to make characters as well as numbers, you can do an okay job with sixteen segments off the shelf. But if you want something more art-deco, you’ll probably want to roll your own. Or at least, [Ben] did, and you can […]
Before flat screen technologies took over, we associate TV with the CRT. But there were other display technologies that worked, they just weren’t as practical. One scheme was the Nipkow disk, and [Bitluni] decided to build a working demonstration of how such a system works. Essentially, there’s a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of […]
[David Shadoff] has a clear soft spot for the NEC console systems and has been collecting many tools and data about them. When developing with these old systems, having a way to upload code quickly is a real bonus, hence the creation of the PC-FX Dev Cart. Based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040, the custom […]
[Sam Battle] is no stranger to these pages, nor is his Museum is not Obsolete. The museum was recently gifted an enormous Nixie tube created by Dalibor Farný, a B-grade (well, faulty) unit that could not be used in any of their commissioned works but was perfectly fine for displaying in the museum’s retro display display. […]
Over at the University of Wisconsin’s Undergraduate Projects Lab (UPL) there’s been a way to check whether this room is open for general use by CS undergraduates and others practically for most of the decades that it has existed. Most recently [Andrew Moses] gave improving on the then latest, machine vision-based iteration a shot. Starting […]
[Sebastian Mihai] is a prolific programmer and hacker with a particular focus on retrocomputing and period games, and this latest hack, adding new gameplay elements to Capcom’s Street Fighter II – Champion Edition, is another great one. [Sebastian] was careful to resist changing the game physics, as that’s part of what makes this game ‘feel’ […]