One simple screening tool for cognitive impairment is the clock-drawing test (CDT): the patient is provided with a printed circle and asked to draw a clock face with the hands …read more
It seems fair to say that Dyson sits at the intersection of impressive engineering and borderline ridiculous products. The Dyson Airblade 9KJ hand dryer that [ElectrArc240] recently took to bits …read more
Although it can be hard to tell from looking at the often placid waters of the Earth’s oceans, their currents carry immense amounts of water around the globe on a …read more
Back in the 80s, buying a home computer could easily mean an inflation-adjusted cost of thousands of dollars (or your equivalent currency unit of choice), and all for an 8-bit …read more
Among so many other technological advances, the Cold War saw the advent of the ballistic missile submarine. The concept was simple—pack enough nuclear warheads to destroy a small civilization into …read more
In the long ago, pre-internet days when your clock project wasn’t an ESP32 getting its timing via NTP over WiFi, it was still possible to build a wirelessly-updating clock. All …read more
While most of us don’t design aircraft or racing cars, it’s likely that we’re still fascinated by some of the aerodynamic studies behind them. But a full-sized wind tunnel is …read more
There is a drawing of a bicycle in one of Leonarda DaVinci‘s sketchbooks– except it wasn’t drawn by DaVinci, and dates long after his death, so we can’t say the …read more
In some parts of the world it’s common for cell service providers to sell new phones at a price significantly below market value, with the caveat that these phones are …read more
We’ve covered etch-a-sketch robots before, but usually they’re not quite as fast as [Every Flavor of Robot]’s “video” etch-a-sketch, capable of drawing a full portrait in as little as a …read more
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