Modern retrocomputing tricks often push old hardware and systems further than any of the back-in-the-day developers could have ever dreamed. How about a neural network on an original Mac? [KenDesigns] does just this with a classic handwritten digit identification network running with an entire custom SDK! Getting such a piece of hardware running what is […]
emojis. It takes the long-established 7-bit ASCII character set and extends it into multiple bytes to represent many thousands of characters. How it does this may well be beyond that basic grasp, and [Vishnu] is here with a primer that’s both fascinating and easy to read. UTF-8 extends ASCII from codes which fit in a […]
As the saying goes, “if it can’t be grown, it has to be mined”– but what about all the metals that have already been wrested from the bosom of the Earth? Once used, they can be recycled– or as this paper charmingly puts it, become ore for “urban mining” techniques. The technique under discussion in […]
Tang FPGA boards are affordable, and [nand2mario] has been trying to get an x86 core running on one for a while. Looks like it finally worked out, as there is an early version of the ao486 design on a Tang FPGA board using a Gowin device. That core’s available on the MiSTer platform, which emulates […]
Handling large volumes of physical media can be a bit of a chore, whether it’s about duplication or archiving. Fortunately this is a perfect excuse for building robotic contraptions, with the robots for handling optical media being both fascinating and mildly frustrating. When [Shelby Jueden] of Tech Tangents fame was looking at using these optical […]
There you are at the surplus store, staring into the bin of faded orange, yellow, red, and black, boxes–a treasure trove of vintage vacuum tubes—dreaming about building a tube amp for your guitar or a phonograph preamp for your DIY hi-fi sound system. But, if you are not already in possession of a vintage, purpose-built […]
As is regrettably typical in the cordless tool world, Milwaukee’s M18 batteries are highly proprietary. Consequently, this makes them a welcome target for reverse-engineering of their interfaces and protocols. Most recently the full diagnostic command set for M18 battery packs were reverse-engineered by [Martin Jansson] and others, allowing anyone to check useful things like individual […]
Manual arrangement of the parts in Pepakura Designer. (Credit: Arvin Podder) Although these days it would seem that everyone and their pets are running 3D printers to churn out all the models and gadgets that their hearts desire, a more traditional approach to creating physical 3D models is in the form of paper models. These […]