Windows 10 — the operating system people love to hate or hate to love. Even if you’re a Linux die-hard, it is a fair bet that your workplace uses it and that you have friends and family members that need help forcing you to use Windows at least some times. If you prefer a command […]
If you own a desktop 3D printer, you’re almost certainly familiar with Slic3r. Even if the name doesn’t ring a bell, there’s an excellent chance that a program you’ve used to convert STLs into the G-code your printer can understand was using Slic3r behind the scenes in some capacity. While there have been the occasional […]
These days everyone talks about data “in the cloud.” However, before that phrase was fashionable, there were a few pioneers and one of the most famous of these is Dropbox — a service that let you store files on a remote server that dates back to 2007. [Vincent Berg] first noticed some odd network traffic […]
Algebra is the bane of many a student, but it is surprisingly useful when it comes to electronics. Sure, you can just memorize all the permutations of things like Ohm’s law. But it is better if you can remember one form and deduce the others on the fly. There are many occasions where you — […]
When you think of Fortran you probably think of punched cards and green bar paper. While it is true that Fortran isn’t the go-to language it used to be — pun unintentional — it still has a vibrant community of people who do serious number crunching. However, many members of that community have been seduced […]
Getting a home music streaming system off the ground is typically a straightforward task. Using Apple devices with Airplay makes this task trivial, but if you’re a computing purist like [Connor] who runs a Linux machine and wants to keep it light on extra packages, the task gets complicated quickly. His goal is to bring […]
Over the years we’ve seen KiCad grow from a niche, somewhat incomplete, but Open Source PCB design suite to a full-featured extravaganza of schematics and board layouts. We’ve plumbed the depths of keys and kais and queues and quays, and KiCad just had its first conference last weekend. While we wait for the rest of […]
Like a lot of game developers [Amir Rajan] likes to put Easter Eggs into his creations. His latest Nintendo Switch title, A Dark Room, has a very peculiar one, though. Instead of a graphic or a Tetris game, [Amir] put a code editor and a Ruby interpreter in the game. Ruby is a language that […]
When Pano Logic went out of business in 2012, their line of unique FPGA-based thin clients suddenly became a burden that IT departments didn’t want anything to do with. New and used units flooded the second-hand market, and for a while you could pick these interesting gadgets up for not much more than the cost […]
When it comes to mathematics, the average person can probably get through most of life well enough with just basic algebra. Some simple statistical concepts would be helpful, and a little calculus couldn’t hurt. But that leaves out a lot of interesting mathematical concepts that really do have applications in everyday life and are just […]