Not that it’s the kind of thing that pops into your head often, but if you ever do think of a cyanotype print, it probably doesn’t conjure up thoughts of modern technology. For good reason — the monochromatic technique was introduced in the 1840s, and was always something of a niche technology compared to more […]
Air raid sirens have an important job to do, and have been a critical piece of public safety infrastructure in times of geopolitical turmoil. They sound quite unlike anything else, by virtue of their mechanical method of generating an extremely loud sound output. They’re actually remarkably simple to build yourself, as [MarkMakies] demonstrates. [Mark’s] build […]
A couple of years ago we were excited to read news of an entirely 3D printed camera, right down to the shutter. We wrote it up back then but sadly the required STL files were not yet available. Now after time away with his family, its creator [Mark Hiltz] is back. The medium-format Pioneer Camera […]
As of about a day ago, Google’s reasonably new Find My network just got more useful. [Leon Böttger] released his re-implementation of the Android tracker network: GoogleFindMyTools. Most interestingly for us, there is example code to turn an ESP32 into a trackable object. Let the games begin! Everything is in its first stages here, and […]
When you see a ventriloquist like [Jeff Dunham], you probably expect to see him with a puppet. This time – spoilers ahead – you won’t. Besides his fame on stage, [Dunham] is also a collector of vintage tech and a die-hard television enthusiast. In the video below, [Dunham] has gotten his hands on a rarity: […]
At the height of the Cold War, those of us on the western side of the wall had plenty of choice over our radio listening, even if we stuck with our country’s monolithic broadcaster. On the other side in the Soviet Union, radio for many came without a choice of source, in the form of […]
QR codes are designed with alignment and scaling features, not to mention checksums and significant redundancy. They have to be, because you’re taking photos of them with your potato-camera while moving, in the dark, and it’s on a curved sticker on a phone pole. So it came as a complete surprise to us that [Christian […]
There’s a mystique around ribbon microphones due to their being expensive studio-grade items, which has led more than one experimenter down the rabbit hole of making one. [Catherine van West] has posted her experiments in the field, and it makes for an interesting read. The recipe for a ribbon microphone is very simple indeed — […]
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 […]