You wouldn’t typically associate graphing calculators with artificial intelligence, but hacker [KermMartian] recently made it happen. The innovative project involved running a neural network directly on a TI-84 Plus CE to recognize handwritten digits. By using the MNIST dataset, a well-known collection of handwritten numbers, the calculator could identify digits in just 18 seconds. If […]
Most people know about the numerical constant pi (or π, if you prefer). But did you know that pi has an evil twin represented by the symbol ϖ? As [John Carlos Baez] explains, it and its related functions are related to the lemniscate as pi relates to circles. What’s a lemniscate? That’s the proper name […]
If we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that the only thing hardware hackers love more than a device festooned with buttons is one that’s covered in LEDs — so it’s no surprise that this “Mr Christmas” jukebox caught the eye of [Roberts Retro]. But while the holiday gadget might have been mildly entertaining in […]
We all know and love the humble seven-segment display, right? And if you want to make characters as well as numbers, you can do an okay job with sixteen segments off the shelf. But if you want something more art-deco, you’ll probably want to roll your own. Or at least, [Ben] did, and you can […]
An unfortunate reality of pre-1990s computer systems is that any manuals and documentation that came with them likely only existed on paper. That’s not to say there aren’t scanned-in (PDF) copies of those documents floating around, but with few of these scans being indexable by search engines like Google and Duck Duck Go, they can […]
[Filip] got his hands on a sweet old Hammond X5 organ, but it had one crucial problem: only half of the keys worked. Each and every C#, D, D#, E, F, and F# would not play, up and down the keyboard, although the other notes in between sounded just fine. Those of you with an […]
To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their Trinitron line of televisions, Sony launched the KX-45ED1. At forty three inches the screen on this particular model made it the largest tube television in the world, and it came with the kind of price tag that if you need to ask…you can’t afford it (likely around $100,000 […]
[Corelatus] said recently that “someone” asked them to identify the phone signals in the 1982 film The Wall, based on the Pink Floyd song of the same name. We suspect that, like us, that someone might have been more just the hacker part of the brain asserting itself. Regardless, the detective work is fascinating, and […]
Game Boys have a link cable that lets two of them play together. You know, to battle with a friend’s Pokemon and stuff like that. But who says that it should be limited to transmitting only what Big N wants you to? [Chromalock] wrote a custom GB program that takes in data over the link […]
Down-Sun picture of the RTG with the Central Station in the background. (Credit: NASA) Although the US’ Moon landings were mostly made famous by the fact that it featured real-life human beings bunny hopping across the lunar surface, they weren’t there just for a refreshing stroll over the lunar regolith in deep vacuum. Starting with […]