Category: Rants

Al Williams wrote up a seemingly innocent piece on a couple of rules-of-thumb to go between metric and US traditional units, and the comment section went wild! Nothing seems to rile up the Hackaday comment section like the choice of what base to use for your unit system. I mean, an idealized version of probably […]
I know many computer languages, but I’ve struggled all my life to learn a second human language. One of my problems is that I can’t stop trying to translate in my head. Just like Morse code, you need to understand things directly, not translate. But you have to start somewhere. One of the reasons metric […]
An old friend of mine at my hackerspace introduced me to the concept of Prototype Zero: The Version that Even Your Own Sweet Mother Isn’t Allowed to See. The idea is that when you’re building something truly new, or even just new to you, your first take will almost always be ugly, and nothing will […]
We’re saddened to report the passing of Shunsaku Tamiya, the man behind the Tamiya line of models. What was surprising about this, though, is how many of our readers and writers alike felt touched by the Tamiya model company. I mean, they made great models, and they’re definitely a quality outfit, but the outpouring of […]
A universal feature of traveling Europe as a Hackaday scribe is that when you sit in a hackerspace in another country and proclaim how nice a place it all is, the denizens will respond pessimistically with how dreadful their country really is. My stock response is to say “Hold my beer” and recount the antics […]
[Maya Posch] wrote up an insightful, and maybe a bit controversial, piece on the state of consumer goods design: The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics. Her basic thesis is that the “form follows function” aesthetic has gone too far, and all of the functionally equivalent devices in our life now […]
One of the tropes of the space race back in the 1960s, which helped justify the spending for the part of the public who thought it wasn’t worth it, was that the technology developed for use in space would help us out here back on earth. The same goes for the astronomical expenses in Formula […]
that I sometimes heard about as I was still splashing about in the kiddie pool with Visual Basic, PHP and JavaScript. The first formally standardized version of C++ is the ISO 1998 standard, but it had been making headways as a ‘better C’ for decades at that point since Bjarne Stroustrup added that increment operator […]
This week, we announced the winners for the previous Pet Hacks contest and rang in our new contest: The One Hertz Challenge. So that’s got me in a contesty mood, and I thought I’d share a little bit of soap-box philosophizing and inside baseball all at once. The trick to creating a good contest theme, […]
If you ever look at projects in an old magazine and compare them to today’s electronic projects, there’s at least one thing that will stand out. Most projects in “the old days” looked like something you built in your garage. Today, if you want to make something that rivals a commercial product, it isn’t nearly […]