This one isn’t clickbait, but it is cheating. [Brian Haidet], the guy behind Alpha Phoenix, has managed to assemble movie footage of a laser beam crossing his garage, using a rig he put together for just a few hundred dollars. How, you ask? Well, for the long version, you’re going to want to watch the […]
It’s really never too early (or too late) to learn time management. All joking aside, carefully managing one’s time can result in some really wondrous achievements. So it’s best to learn early, when most of your time is spent generally having fun. Let’s say you’ve just heard you have five minutes left to play, but […]
Over the last few decades, electronic devices have drastically changed. Radios that once had point-to-point wiring gave way to printed circuit boards with through-hole parts, and now microscopic surface mount devices are the norm. But most of us still use probes that would have been just fine for a 1940s receiver. There are other options, […]
Despite the latest and greatest Intel-derived computers having multi-core 64-bit processors and unimaginably fast peripherals, at heart they all still retain a compatibility that goes back to the original 8086. This means that they can, in theory at least, still run MS-DOS. The venerable Microsoft 16-bit OS may now be long discontinued, but there is […]
Christmas: a good time to broach a topic of hope. We’re talking Esperanto. This language that spurred the hope it one day could hack the barriers between people, eliminating war and miscommunication. The video below unpacks the history of this linguistic marvel. Esperanto was a constructed language dreamed up in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhof, a […]
Whether you only dabble in electronics as a hobby or it’s your full-time job, there are few tools as indispensable as the multimeter. In fact, we’d be willing to bet nearly everyone reading this site owns at least one of them. But as common and mindbogglingly useful as they may be, they aren’t perfect. Even […]
We know, you’ve already got a USB to serial adapter. Probably several of them, in fact. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t use one more — especially when it’s as as cleverly designed as this one from [Anders Nielsen]. The first thing you notice about this adapter, and the big departure from the ones that […]
You wouldn’t typically associate graphing calculators with artificial intelligence, but hacker [KermMartian] recently made it happen. The innovative project involved running a neural network directly on a TI-84 Plus CE to recognize handwritten digits. By using the MNIST dataset, a well-known collection of handwritten numbers, the calculator could identify digits in just 18 seconds. If […]
Most people know about the numerical constant pi (or π, if you prefer). But did you know that pi has an evil twin represented by the symbol ϖ? As [John Carlos Baez] explains, it and its related functions are related to the lemniscate as pi relates to circles. What’s a lemniscate? That’s the proper name […]
If we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that the only thing hardware hackers love more than a device festooned with buttons is one that’s covered in LEDs — so it’s no surprise that this “Mr Christmas” jukebox caught the eye of [Roberts Retro]. But while the holiday gadget might have been mildly entertaining in […]