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[BillPg] has been designing a fantasy 1980s-era home computer. As part of the exercise, he’s reevaluating all the assumptions that have grown organically over time in the small computer landscape. …read more

Nobody wants to breathe solder fumes; that’s a given. For most of us, an industrial-looking fan-and-filter made in China and picked up cheap feels like more than enough to keep …read more

People in hotter parts of the world may permit themselves a grin at this, but Europeans have recently been suffering under an unseasonal June heatwave. Most of us have been …read more

Happy belated July 4th to all the readers from the United States — hopefully you aren’t reading this from a hospital bed after losing a hand or burning off your …read more

Unlike almost every other kind of microscope, atomic-force microscopes (AFMs) don’t use any kind of optical beam to image their subjects. Instead, they physically detect the subject’s surface with a …read more

Generally, LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries are quite safe and stable, but it’s still possible for something to go wrong, even something catastrophic, like the battery management system (BMS) developing a direct …read more

When light reflects off a surface, not all of it reflects off at the same wavelength; some photons impart a portion of their energy to raising the vibrational energy of …read more

In theory, MIDI is an electrical and protocol standard that allows any such equipped instrument or computer to talk to any other. But as the wonderfully named [Knob Monster] will …read more

If you’re building a homelab rig, you could just use off-the-shelf hardware in standard cases and slap it all in a rack like the normies do. Or, you could follow …read more

Valve has always designed hacker-friendly hardware, and in that spirit, [NaKyle Wright] released Inkterface, a design for an E-ink faceplate to fit the recently released Steam Machine. As far as …read more

We all know the e-ink persistent displays, as they’re cheap and plentiful enough to have become ubiquitous in applications such as supermarket price labels. But we don’t often see some …read more

Although there’s probably no good reason to want to run image editing software from 1996 other than for nostalgia’s sake, if you ever wanted to run the GIMP version 0.54 …read more

Optical media is great — it’s pretty high density, relatively durable, and decently long-lasting if well cared for. If not well cared for, well, it’s only relatively durable, and we’ve …read more

A clock is by its very nature a device for measuring time, and thus it moves forward at a constant rate. But how about in a theatrical setting, where time …read more

Watching [sprite_tm]’s build of a handheld 486-based gaming computer, we got to thinking about retro computers and the eternal questions of how much of the computer needs to be actually …read more

For as good as solar panels are at converting sunlight directly into usable electricity, especially for how cheap they’re becoming, they can still only gather around 20-30% of the energy …read more

At one point in time web rings were one of the best ways to find content on the World Wide Web — involving not just a directory of participating sites, …read more

Once upon a time, there was a bit of a fad for fingerprint authentication in laptops and desktop computers. It has long since faded, but [superdog] wanted just such a …read more

Much like radio operators being encouraged to use the least possible amount of power to make a contact, chemists have a similar rule encouraging using the least amount of materials …read more

Humans are odd creatures, and no two are exactly alike, which is likely why so many different methods exist for tracking the progress of tasks that must be accomplished. [Simone …read more