It’s safe to say that most of us have at least one Raspberry Pi hanging from a USB cable someplace, silently hammering away at some unglamorous task that you’d rather not do on a “real” computer. With as cheap as they are, it’s not like there’s a big concern about where it sets up shop. […]
Playing classic games on the real hardware is an experience many of us enjoy, but sometimes the hardware is just a bit too retro for modern sensibilities. A case in point is the miserable monochrome LCD that was originally installed in the Amstrad PPC640 portable 8086 PC that [Drygol] recently picked up. He decided that […]
There are probably few parents who haven’t watched their kids sitting on the floor, afloat on a sea of LEGO pieces and busily creating, and thought, “If only they could make a living at that.” But time goes on and kids grow up, and parents soon sing the same refrain as the kids sit transfixed […]
Proprietary components are the bane of anyone who dares to try and repair their own hardware. Nonstandard sizes, lack of labeling or documentation, and unavailable spare parts are all par for the course. [Jason] was unlucky enough to have an older Dell computer with a broken, and proprietary, cooling fan on it and had to […]
A common measurement for circuits is heat dissipation inspection. While single point thermometers do the trick, they can be quite annoying to use. Meanwhile, a thermal imaging camera is often out of the budget for hobbyists. How about building your own visual thermometer for cheap? That’s what [Thomas Fischl] decided to do, using an infrared […]
Can you generate VGA and handle a PS/2 keyboard with a Cortex-M4 in Rust? That’s precisely what [theJPster] wanted to find out with Monotron, a 1980s style home computer programmed in pure Rust. In order to run embedded Rust without a working operating system, some tools are necessary: an LLVM back-end for generating machine code, […]
If you ask people how they rate as a driver, most of them will say they are better than average. At first, that seems improbable until you realize one thing: people judge themselves by different criteria. So Sally thinks she’s a good driver because she goes fast. Tom’s never had a wreck. Alice never gets […]
We no longer use floppy disks on the vast majority of computers, but a recent Old New Thing blog post from Microsoft sheds light on one of their possible unexpected legacies. It seems Windows disk cache items expire after two seconds, and as the post explains this has its origin in the development of MS-DOS […]
Laptops are great for portable productivity, but ergonomically they can leave something to be desired. They tend to force the user to look down, creating neck strain over extended periods. Rather than invest in expensive massages, [DIY Perks] decided what he really wanted was a dual screen laptop. So he built one! (Video embedded below.) […]
Back in the early dawn of the GUI age, cathode ray tubes were the dominant display technology for the personal computer. In order to avoid burn-in of static display elements, screensavers were devised to help prevent this problem. Out of love for the software of yesteryear, [Greg Kennedy] has put together a bot that posts […]