Sad breaking news late this Sunday afternoon of the passing of nerd icon Tom Lehrer at 97. Coming up through the culture, knowing at least a few of Tom’s ditties, preferably “The Elements” or “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” was as essential to proving one’s bona fides as committing most Monty Python bits to memory. […]
The ZX Spectrum is perhaps most fondly remembered as a home computer and a games machine. [Tito] has grabbed the faithful black plastic box and turned it into a frequency counter as an innovative entry to our 2025 One Hertz Challenge. The code was prepared in assembly using ZASM—a Z80 online assembler. It works in […]
If you’ve ever fancied building a ZX Spectrum clone without hunting down ancient ULAs or soldering your way through 60+ chips, [Alex J. Lowry] has just dropped an exciting build. He has recreated the Leningrad-1, a Soviet-built Spectrum clone from 1988, with a refreshingly low component count: 44 off-the-shelf ICs, as he wrote us. That’s […]
Although ham radio can be an engaging, rewarding hobby, it does have a certain reputation for being popular among those who would fit in well at gated Florida communities where the preferred mode of transportation is the golf cart. For radio manufacturers this can be a boon, as this group tends to have a lot […]
A spectrometer is a pretty common lab instrument, useful for determining the absorbance of a sample across a spectrum of light. The standard design is simple; a prism or diffraction grating to break up a light source into a spectrum and a detector to measure light intensity. Shine the light through your sample, scan through […]
The Sun has been remarkably active lately, so much so that it might have set a new sunspot record. According to the sun watchers at the Space Weather Prediction Center, on August 8, the Solar Dynamics Observatory snapped a picture that was positively bedazzled with sunspots. Counting methods vary, but one count put the sunspot […]
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was a popular computer in the 8-bit era, and particularly so in its homeland of the United Kingdom. It was known more for its low cost than its capabilities, but it gained many add-ons over the years. One of those was the Cheetah SpecDrum, which turned the Spectrum into a rudimentary […]
If the great Samuel Clemens were alive today, he might modify the famous meteorological quip often attributed to him to read, “Everyone complains about weather forecasts, but I can’t for the life of me see why!” In his day, weather forecasting was as much guesswork as anything else, reading the clouds and the winds to […]
Creating a game from scratch can be hard work. There are concepts to be designed, coding to be done, and art to be created to make it all happen. However, it doesn’t always have to be quite so difficult. There are a variety of development tools that allow budding game designers to get started with […]
The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, UK, receive many donations from which they can enrich their collection and museum displays. Many are interesting but mundane, but the subject of their latest video is far from that. The wire-wrapped prototype board they reveal with a flourish from beneath a folded antistatic mat is no ordinary […]