One of the constants in consumer electronics is that designers will try to put as many features into a single device as possible, whether it’s a Walkman with a radio tuner or a new class of devices that crams a photo and video camera in the same enclosure as a music player. At the time […]
We start this week with a bit of a good news/bad news situation. On February 6th, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was shut down after 25 years of operation. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the RHIC was the only operating particle collider in the United States, and along with the Large […]
The middle of the 20th century produced a revolution in understated stylish consumer design, some of which lives on today. The reality of living in a 1950s or ’60s house was probably to be surrounded by the usual mess of possessions from many past decades, but the promise was of a beautiful sleek and futuristic […]
Computers are very good at doing exactly what they’re told. They’re still not very good at coming up with helpful suggestions of their own. They’re very much more about following instructions than using intuition; we still don’t have a digital version of Jeeves to aid our bumbling Wooster selves. [Sherrin] has developed something a little […]
Earlier this year Donut Lab caused quite the furore when they unveiled what they claimed was the world’s first production-ready solid state battery, featuring some pretty stellar specifications. Since then many experts and enthusiasts in the battery space have raised concerns that this claimed battery may not be real, or even possible at all. After […]
If you purchased an E-mu Audity 2000 ROMpler back in 1998, you almost certainly got a rig with the 1.00 firmware. It was fine, if a little limited, particularly where upgradability was concerned. E-mu would later offer firmware upgrades over MIDI with the 2.00 firmware, but to get the 2.00 firmware, you needed to ship the […]
The Core Duo processor from Intel may not have been the first multi-core processor available to consumers, but it was arguably the one that brought it to the masses. Unfortunately, the first Core Duo chips were limited to 32-bit at a time when the industry was shifting toward 64-bit. The Core 2 Duo eventually filled […]
Over on YouTube [Andrew Neal] has a Function Generator Build for Beginners. As beginner videos go this one is fairly comprehensive. [Andrew] shows us how to build a square-wave generator on a breadboard using a 555 timer, explaining how its internal flip-flop is controlled by added resistance and capacitance to become a relaxation oscillator. He […]
Pomodoro timers are a simple productivity tool. They help you work in dedicated chunks of time, usually 25 minutes in a sitting, before taking a short break and then beginning again. [Clovis Fritzen] built just such a timer of his own, and added a few bonus features to fill out its functionality. The timer is […]
Sometimes you have this project idea in your mind that seems so simple and straightforward, and which feels just so right that you have to roll with it. Then, years later you stumble across the sad remnants of the tearful saga and the dismal failure that it portrays. Do you put it away again, like […]