Techno Babble

When firefighters are battling a blaze, it’s difficult for them to find each other in the smoky darkness. To help stand out they wear glow-in-the-dark decals on their helmets, but since they spend so much of their down time stowed away in a dark locker, they don’t always have a …read more

Back in April we challenged hackers to make the best of a tough situation by spending…

If you’re serious about engineering the things you build, you need to know the limits of the materials you’re working with. One of important way to characterize materials is to test the tensile strength — how much force it takes to pull a sample to the breaking point. Thankfully, with …read more

An editing battle over Kamala Harris’s race is a sign of what’s to come.

Tiny remote control cars burst onto the scene from time to time, often sold from mall kiosks and covered in garish stickers. However, sometimes it’s more fun to build than to buy. [diorama111] clearly fits into this camp, building a tiny 1:150 scale RC car from the ground up.

The …read more

At the end of May, as protests against the police killing of George Floyd got under…

[jcprintnplay] has challenged himself to making Raspberry Pi cases in different ways, and his Fold-a-Pi enclosure tries for a “less is more” approach while also leveraging the strong points of 3D printing. The enclosure prints as a single piece in about 3 hours, and requires no additional hardware whatsoever.

The …read more

The crown jewels of the Earth’s mountain ranges, the Himalayas, are unsurpassed in their beauty, their height, and their deadly attraction to adventurers, both professional and amateur. The gem of the Himalayas is, of course, Mount Everest, known as Sagarmatha to the Nepalis and Chomolungma to the Tibetans. At 8,848 …read more

At a time when practical graphical user interfaces were only just becoming a reality on desktop computers, Apple took a leap of faith and released one of the first commercially available mice back in 1983. It was criticized as being little more than a toy back then, but we all …read more

Every now and then, along comes an awesome hack from years past that we missed at the time. We kick ourselves for somehow missing such amazing work, and since it’s that good, we share it with you with apologies. Such is the case with [Andrei Anatska]’s faithful replication of the …read more

We love the simplicity of Arduino for focused tasks, we love how Raspberry Pi GPIO pins open a doorway to a wide world of peripherals, and we love the software ecosystem of Intel’s x86 instruction set. It’s great that some products manage to combine all of them together into a …read more

TikTok could persist in many ways in America. None is good.

Patients and doctors are rediscovering the unexpected virtues and hidden pitfalls of homebound care.

In Subnautica, players explore an alien underwater landscape with the help of a number of futuristic tools and vehicles. [Robert Cook] found himself particularly enamored with the large submarine you unlock towards the later parts of the game, so much so that he decided to build his own real-life …read more

You’d be hard pressed to find a hacker or maker who doesn’t have a soft spot for the tantalizing buzz and snap of a high voltage spark gap, but it remains the sort of project that most of us don’t take on personally. There’s a perceived complexity in building a …read more

We always enjoy [NileRed’s] videos. His latest shows how he made some relatively high-temperature superconducting ceramic. After finding what appeared to be some really good instructions on the Internet, [NileRed] found there were some things in the paper that didn’t make sense. You can watch the video, below.

The superconductor …read more

When you buy a mass-market mobile phone, you’re making the decision to trust a long list of companies with your private data. While it’s difficult for any one consumer to fully audit even a single piece of consumer technology, there have been efforts to solve this problem to a degree. …read more

Swimming is a great way to exercise, both for the cardiovascular benefits and the improved muscle tone. However, while he’s a fan, [Peter Quinn] sometimes finds it hard to keep track of how far he’s gone when he gets in the zone. Obviously, the solution is an electronic lap counter, …read more

If you home has never been subject to a rodent invasion then you are fortunate. Our world is full of rats and mice, and despite the best efforts of humanity to keep them at bay it is inevitable that a few will find their way through. For [Marius Taciuc] this …read more