The OTC Station 29.8 meter dish at Carnarvon, Australia, in need of a bit of paint. (Credit: ABC News Australia) Recently the 29.8 meter parabolic antenna at the Australian OTC (overseas telecommunications commission) station came back to life again after nearly forty years spent in decommissioning limbo. This parabolic dish antenna shares an illustrious history […]
The big news story of the week of course has been the wildfires in California, which as of Saturday have burned over 30,000 acres, destroyed 12,000 structures, caused 150,000 people to evacuate, and killed eleven people. Actually, calling them wildfires underplays the situation a bit because there are places where they’ve clearly become firestorms, burning […]
We couldn’t decide if [‘s] Dungeons and Dragons gaming table was a woodworking project with some electronics or an electronics project with some woodworking. Either way, it looks like a lot of fun. Some of the features are just for atmosphere. For example, the game master can set mood lighting. Presets can have a particular […]
With an exciting new year of retrocomputing ahead for [David Lovett] over at the Usagi Electric YouTube channel, recently some new hardware arrived at the farm. Specifically hardware from a company called Floating Point Systems (FPS), whose systems provide computing features to assist e.g. a minicomputer like [David]’s PDP-11/44 system with floating point operations. The goal […]
[Cody Lammer] built a sweet CNC router. But as always, when you build a “thing”, you inevitably figure out how to build a better “thing” in the process, so here we are with Cody’s CNC machine v2.0. And it looks like CNC v1.0 was no slouch, so there’s no shortage of custom milled aluminum here. […]
[Fraens] has been re-making industrial machines in fantastic 3D-printable versions for a few years now, and we’ve loved watching his creations get progressively more intricate. But with this nearly completely 3D-printable needle loom, he’s pushing right up against the edge of the possible. The needle loom is a lot like the flying shuttle loom that […]
Whatever the nuances are surrounding the reported taking down of remixes derived from the famous Benchy 3D printer stress test, it was inevitable that in its aftermath there would be competing stress tests appear under more permissive licensing. And so it has come to pass, in the form of [Depep1]’s Boaty, a model that’s not […]
In the world of showing off, there is alongside ‘Does it play Doom?’ that other classic of ‘Does it play Bad Apple?’. Whereas either would be quaint in the context of the Vim editor, this didn’t deter [Nolen Royalty] from making Vim play the Bad Apple video. As this is a purely black and white […]
Telephone systems predate the use of cheap computers and electronic switches. Yesterday’s phone system used lots of stepping relays in a box known as a “selector.” If you worked for the phone company around 1951, you might have seen the Bell System training film shown below that covers 197 selectors. The relays are not all […]
When we reviewed the iFixit FixHub back in September, one of the most interesting features of the portable soldering station was the command line interface that both the iron and the base station offered up once you connected to them via USB. While this feature wasn’t documented anywhere, it made a degree of a sense, […]