Procedural generation is a big part of game design these days. Usually you generate your map, and [Fractal Philosophy] has decided to go one step further: using a procedurally-generated world from an older video, he is procedurally generating history by simulating the rise and fall of empires on that map in a video embedded below. […]
Spending time as wee hackers perusing the family atlas taught us an appreciation for a good map, and [Billy Roberts], a cartographer at NREL, has served up a doozy with a map of the data center infrastructure in the United States. [via LinkedIn] Fiber optic lines, electrical transmission capacity, and the data centers themselves are […]
The solenoid and punch side of the machine. {Credit: Simon Boak) Although [Simon Boak] had no use for an automatic paper tape punch, this was one of those intrusive project thoughts that had to be put to rest. With not a lot of DIY projects to look at, the first step was to prototype a […]
Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [CircuitValley] repairs an old TDS8000 scope. The TDS8000 was manufactured by Tektronix circa 2001 and was also marketed as the CSA8000 Communications Signal Analyzer as well as the TDS8000 Digital Sampling Oscilloscope. Tektronix is no longer manufacturing and selling these scopes but the documentation is still available from […]
All-in-one computers in which the mainboard lurked beneath a keyboard were once the default in home computing, but more recently they have been relegated to interesting niche devices such as the Raspberry Pi 400 and 500. The Bento is another take on the idea, coming at it not with the aim of replacing a desktop […]
If he’s anything like us [Duncan Hall] was probably equal parts excited and disgusted when he found a 1987 Macintosh SE case at a garage sale. Excited, because not every day do vintage computers show up at these things. Disgusted, because it had been gutted and coated in house paint; the previous owner apparently wanted […]
After having been involved in an accident, [Kurt Kohlstedt] suffered peripheral neuropathy due to severe damage to his right brachial plexus — the network of nerves that ultimately control the shoulder, arm, and hand. This resulted in numbness and paralysis in his right shoulder and arm, with the prognosis being a partial recovery at best. […]
The original DOOM is famously portable — any computer made within at least the last two decades, including those in printers, heart monitors, passenger vehicles, and routers is almost guaranteed to have a port of the iconic 1993 shooter. The more modern iterations in the series are a little trickier to port, though. Multi-core processors, […]
Magnetic tape storage is something many of us will associate with 8-bit microcomputers or 1960s mainframe computers, but it still has a place in the modern data center for long-term backups. It’s likely not to be the first storage tech that would spring to mind when considering a relay computer, but that’s just what [DiPDoT] […]
Our hacker [Valve Child] wrote in to let us know about his Back to the Future lunchbox cyberdeck. Great Scott! This is so awesome. We’re not sure what we should say, or where we should begin. A lot of you wouldn’t have been there, on July 3rd, 1985, nearly forty years ago. But we were […]