Resetting the paraffin trap. (Credit: MisterHW) Have you ever tipped all the stray bits of solder out of your tip cleaner by mistake? [MisterHW] is here with a bit pf paraffin wax to save the day. Hand soldering can be a messy business, especially when you wipe the soldering iron tip on those common brass […]
Wi-Fi! It’s everywhere, and yet you can’t really see it, by virtue of the technology relying on the transmission of electromagnetic waves outside the visual spectrum. Never mind, though, because you can always build yourself a Wi-Fi analyzer to get some insight into your radio surroundings, as demonstrated by [moononournation]. The core of the build […]
Probably the biggest story in the world of old cars over the past couple of weeks has been the surfacing of a GM EV1 electric car for sale from an auto salvage yard. This was the famous electric car produced in small numbers by the automaker in the 1990s, then only made available for lease […]
Some like it flat, and there’s nothing wrong with that. What you are looking at is the first prototype of Atlas by [AsicResistor], which is still a work in progress. [AsicResistor] found the Totem to be a bit cramped, so naturally, it was time to design a keyboard from the ground up. Image by [AsicResistor] via […]
One of the major difficulties in studying electricity, especially when compared to many other physical phenomena, is that it cannot be observed directly by human senses. We can manipulate it to perform various tasks and see its effects indirectly, like the ionized channels formed during lightning strikes or the resistive heating of objects, but its […]
The past few months, we’ve been giving you a quick rundown of the various ways ores form underground; now the time has come to bring that surface-level understanding to surface-level processes. Strictly speaking, we’ve already seen one: sulfide melt deposits are associated with flood basalts and meteorite impacts, which absolutely are happening on-surface. They’re totally […]
Now, Rock 5 ITX+ is no x86 board, sporting an ARM Rockship RK3588 on its ITX form-factor PCB, but reading this blog post’s headline might as well give you the impression. [Venn] from the [interfacinglinux.com] blog tells us about their journey bringing up UEFI on this board, thanks to the [EDK2-RK3588] project. Why? UEFI is […]
Who’s interested in a brand new, from-scratch boundary representation (BREP) kernel? How about one that has no topological naming problem, a web-native parametric CAD front end to play with, and has CAD-type operations making friends with triangle meshes? If you’re intrigued, check out [mmiscool]’s BREP project. Functioning (let alone feature-filled, or efficient) CAD systems are […]
Over on YouTube [Drake] from the [styropyro] channel investigates what happens when you take an enormous tungsten incandescent light bulb and pump 30,000 watts through it. The answer: it burns bright enough to light up the forest at night, and hot enough to cook food and melt metal. And why on Earth would anybody do […]
Ever heard of MUMPS? Both programming language and database, it was developed in the 1960s for the Massachusetts General Hospital. The goal was to streamline the increasingly enormous timesink that information and records management had become, a problem that was certain to grow unless something was done. Far from being some historical footnote, MUMPS (Massachusetts […]