Category: Rant

The holidays are rapidly approaching, and you probably already have a topic or two to argue with your family about. But what about with your hacker friends? We came upon an old favorite the other day: whether it “counts” as retrocomputing if you’re running a simulated version of the system or if it “needs” to […]
It was one of those weeks last week at Hackaday’s home office. My mother-in-law handed me her favorite power bank and said “it’s not charging”. She had every expectation that I’ll open it up, desolder the weary pouch inside, scrounge a LiPo out of some corner of the basement, and have it back up and […]
There was a time when version control was an exotic idea. Today, things like Git and a handful of other tools allow developers to easily rewind the clock or work on different versions of the same thing with very little effort. I’m here to encourage you not only to use version control but also to […]
In the early 2000s, the idea that you could write programs on microcontrollers that did things in the physical world, like run motors or light up LEDs, was kind of new. At the time, most people thought of coding as stuff that stayed on the screen, or in cyberspace. This idea of writing code for […]
In Al Williams’s marvelous rant he points out a number of the problems with speaking to computers. Obvious problems with voice control include things like multiple people talking over each other, discerning commands from background conversations, and so on. Somehow, unlike on the bridge in Star Trek, where the computer seems to understand everyone just […]
Starting a new microcontroller project can be pretty daunting. While you have at least a rough idea of where you want to end up, there are so many ways to get there that you can get locked into “analysis paralysis” and never get the project off the ground. Or arguably worse, you just throw whatever […]