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The Honeywell X2S Smart Thermostat is a Wi-Fi-enabled thermostat that is meant to integrate with your typical ‘smart home’ setup, with mobile app control available as well. Of course, just …read more

The Commodore 64 has, by modern standards, the interesting power requirement of needing both 5 VDC and 9 VAC. Traditionally, one would use an iron-core transformer to step-down the wall …read more

There’s a line in a [Weird Al] (no relation) song that says, “I upgrade my system at least twice a day…” I know how that is. I primarily use a …read more

Zinc air batteries have been a familiar sight for decades in the world of photography, where they provided an environmentally less dangerous alternative to mercury cells. They operate by the …read more

The 2000s was a decade of great change in the computer industry. The world had grown accustomed to corruptible floppy disks, blue screens of death, and achingly slow load times. …read more

After the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operations in 2022, it soon made a tantalizing discovery in the form of mysterious red dots: small, red-tinted astronomical objects of unknown …read more

Gravity batteries aren’t exactly a new idea. You can store energy by lifting something heavy, converting kinetic energy into potential energy. To get it back, you let the mass fall …read more

Computing goes hand-in-hand with how to structure and access data, and this internal training film from IBM regarding file organization and data processing with System/360 is from a time when …read more

Glass-based substrates are slowly beginning to push out organic substrates – as also commonly used in PCBs – due to often superior material properties for packaging. One area where glass …read more

There are many ways you can implement an Intel i386 CPU on an FPGA, with the use of original microcode probably being one of the most interesting approaches. This is …read more

Some of you may know there’s a version of UNIX for the Commodore Amiga, aptly called Amiga Unix or AMIX. There is an almost complete record of versions from 1.0 …read more

Unless you’ve managed to avoid touching a Windows computer until after the Windows XP era, it’s pretty good odds you’ve played Space Cadet Pinball. Some of you may have even …read more

There are a surprising number of experiments an amateur nuclear physicist can perform, from making a Geiger counter to fusing hydrogen atoms in a fusor. One project which we haven’t …read more

Processor design over the last few decades has moved toward RISC processors that aim to implement a few simple operations very efficiently. For a while, though, the trend was toward …read more

A twenty-sided die (d20) is a common thing in tabletop gaming, and [kati]’s slightly sentient d20 is a PCB that not only delivers random results on demand, but responds to …read more

Recently cheapo video walkie-talkies popped up on everyone’s favorite online retailers, which naturally lured in the usual gaggle of reverse-engineering enthusiasts of cheap tat to see what’s inside these devices, …read more

With so many online messaging services to choose from it’s almost as though the daddy of them all, email, has faded into the background as something you only use for …read more

If your first-generation Chromecast was acting a little wonky this week, don’t worry. Contrary to fears online, the 2014 device hasn’t been excommunicated by Google. In a statement to Ars …read more

Storage is expensive these days, whether you’re looking at the prices of spinning rust or magic little sticks of silicon. But what if there was some benevolent overlord that you …read more

[Kert Gartner]’s ASCII Aquarium turns a cheap yellow display (CYD) into a tiny simulated aquarium, complete with ASCII sea creatures each with their own behaviors. There’s all kinds of options …read more