An old joke in physics is that of the “spherical cow”, poking fun at some of the assumptions physicists make when tackling a new problem. Making the problem simple like this can help make its fundamentals easier to understand, but when applying these assumptions to real-world problems these assumptions are quickly challenged. Which is what […]
Here at Hackaday we love floppy disks. While they are by no means a practical or useful means of storing data in the age of solid state storage, there is something special about the little floppy disc of magnetic film inside that iconic plastic case. That’s why we were so excited to see the tool […]
The QingPing Air Quality Monitor 2 is an Android-based device that not only features a touch screen with the current air quality statistics of the room, but also includes an MQTT interface that normally is used in combination with the QingPing mobile app and the Xiaomi IoT ecosystem. Changing it to report to a local […]
Out of all 49 beautiful US states (plus New Jersey), the one you’d probably least want to camp outside in during the winter is arguably Alaska. If you were to spend a night camping out in the Alaskan winter, your first choice of shelter almost certainly wouldn’t be a USPS electric cargo trike, but over […]
3D graphics are made up of little more then very complicated math. With enough time, you could probably compute a ray marching by hand. Or, you could set up Excel to do it for you! Ray marching is a form of ray tracing, where a ray is stepped along based on how close it is […]
What if you took a Nintendo 64 cartridge-based game and allowed it to also use a large capacity magnetic disc format alongside it? This was the premise of the Nintendo 64DD peripheral, and the topic of a recent video by [Skawo] in which an archaeological code dig is performed to see what traces of the […]
In a recent article from IEEE Spectrum, [Alfred Poor] asks the question what do consumers really want in smart glasses? And are you finally ready to hang a computer screen on your face? [Alfred] says that since Google Glass was introduced in 2012, smart glasses haven’t yet found their compelling use-case. Apparently it looks like […]
In the world of social media, “keeping receipts” refers to the practice of storing evidence that may come in handy for a callout post at a later date. For [Teddy Warner], though, it’s more applicable to a little printer he whipped up to record the very best banter from his cadre of friends. [Teddy’s] idea […]
In the 1980s there were an incredible number of personal computers of all shapes, sizes, and operating system types, and there was very little interoperability. Unlike today’s Windows-Mac duopoly, this era was much more of a free-for-all but that didn’t mean companies like Microsoft weren’t trying to clean up all of this mess. In 1983 […]
[Mike Stewart] powers up a thrust meter from an Apollo lunar module. This bit of kit passed inspection on September 25, 1969. Fortunately [Mike] was able to dig up some old documentation which included the pin numbers. Score! It’s fun to see the various revisions this humble meter went through. Some of the latest revisions […]