Despite a general lack of real-world experience, many teenagers are overly confident in their opinions, often to the point of brashness and arrogance. In the late 90s and early 00s I was no different, firmly entrenched in a clichéd belief that Apple computers weren’t worth the silicon they were etched onto—even though I’d never actually […]
In our wider community we are all familiar with the idea of open source software. Many of us run it as our everyday tools, a lot of us release our work under an open source licence, and we have a pretty good idea of the merits of one such document over another. A piece of […]
Have you been to FOSDEM? It’s a yearly two-day megaconference in Brussels, every first weekend of February. Thousands of software and hardware hackers from all across Europe come here each year, make friends, talk software and hardware alike, hold project-specific meetups to drink beer and talk shop, and just have a fun weekend surrounded by […]
The original locking wheel. Shopping carts are surprisingly expensive. Prices range up to about $300 for a cart, which may seem like a lot, but they have to be pretty rugged and are made to work for decades. Plastic carts are cheaper, but not by much. A basic metal cart can be had for about […]
DOOM. The first-person shooter was an instant hit upon its mrelease at the end of 1993. It was soon ported off the PC platform to a number of consoles with varying success. Fast forward a few years, and it became a meme. People were porting Doom to everything from thermostats to car stereos and even […]
Picture a football (soccer ball) in your head and you probably see the cartoon ideal—a roughly spherical shape made with polygonal patches that are sewn together, usually in a familiar pattern of black and white. A great many balls were made along these lines for a great many decades. Eventually, though, technology moved on. Footballs […]
Perhaps one of the clearest indications of the Anthropocene may be the presence of plastic. Starting with the commercialization of Bakelite in 1907 by Leo Baekeland, plastics have taken the world by storm. Courtesy of being easy to mold into any imaginable shape along with a wide range of properties that depend on the exact […]
If you’ve ever looked at the bottom of a bank check, you probably glanced over some strangely formed numbers? If you’re a fan of science fiction or retro computers, you’ve probably spotted the same figures on any number of books from the 1980s. They’re mostly readable, but they’re chunky and thin in places you don’t […]
The Universal Serial Bus. The one bus to rule them all. It brought peace and stability to the world of computer peripherals. No more would Apple and PC users have to buy their own special keyboards, mice, and printers. No more would computers sprout different ports for different types of hardware. USB was fast enough and […]
You might not have noticed if you’re not a digital artist, but most painting and image apps still get color mixing wrong. As we all learned in kindergarten, blue paint and yellow paint makes green paint. Try doing that in Photoshop, and you’ll get something altogether different—a vague, uninspiring brownish-grey. It’s the same story in […]