The chiptune music scene is largely rooted in the sounds of the original Nintendo Game Boy and the Commodore 64, while still welcoming a wide range of other hardware under its general umbrella. Still, few chip musicians show up to a gig hauling a PDP-1. That’s perhaps a shame, given that the 1950s era machine […]
It is easy to write off Tinkercad as a kid’s toy. It is easy enough for kids to learn and it uses bright colors looking more like a video game than a CAD tool. We use a variety of CAD tools, but for something quick, sometimes Tinkercad is just the ticket. Earlier this year, Tinkercad […]
Over on YouTube, [The Modern Rogue] created an interesting video showing a slide-rule-like encryption device called the Réglette. This was a hardware implementation of a Vigenère-like Cipher, technically referred to as a manual polyalphabetic substitution cipher. The device requires no batteries, is fully waterproof, daylight readable and easy to pack, making it really useful if […]
The Razer Nari is a decent wireless headset, but it’s a little oddball—because it uses a bespoke USB dongle for pairing. This is all well and good if you’re using a supported configuration; plug it into a Windows PC, run the utility, and you’re good to go. If you’re a Linux user, though, you were […]
Sometimes it’s fun to bring props from video games into the real world. [Hulk] has done just that with their latest Halloween build—creating a working replica of the lantern from Minecraft. Key to the build is the 3D printed enclosure, which faithfully mimics the look of the in-game item. By virtue of Minecraft’s simplistic visual […]
So much news, so little time left until Supercon! We hope you all have your tickets. If not: Workshop and general admission tickets are on sale now. We’re getting down to the last slightly-more-than-two-handfuls, so if you’re thinking of coming, the time for procrastination has passed. First up, we have two late-addition workshops, and tickets […]
The first generation of real-time train information screens for British railways came in the form of suspended color CRTs in familiar rounded fiberglass housings. They were a ubiquitous sight across the network for years, until of course suddenly, they weren’t. Can they be brought back? [Heliomass] has come about as close as it’s possible to […]
In the last edition of our ongoing series on how planets get ore– those wonderful rocks rich in industrial minerals worth mining– we started talking about hydrothermal fluid deposits. Hydrothermal fluid is the very hot, very salty, very corrosive water that sweats out of magma as it cools underground and under pressure. We learned that […]
The original Stream Deck was a purpose-built device to make it easier to manage a live video stream on the fly. Since its release, many other similar products have hit the market. Among them is the Ulanzi D200 U-Studio, which is proving popular with hackers for good reason. [Rodrigo Laneth] has been digging into the […]
If you think about it, STL files are like PDF files. You usually create them using some other program, export them, and then expect them to print. But you rarely do serious editing on a PDF or an STL. But what if you don’t have anything but the STL? [The Savvy Engineer] has a method […]