The Industrial Revolution began with kits. In 1763, Glasgow University’s scale model Newcomen steam engine broke, so the physics professor asked the school’s resident mechanic to fix it. A talented instrument maker, this university employee didn’t just get the machine working again, he figured out a clever way to improve the design by turning a […]
One of our lab interns, Paul Mundell, is inspired by Volume 30’s Smarter Homes theme to create a media server from his ailing laptop.
Remember these ads? I sure do. I remember a surprising number of them, from magazines like Byte and PC Age. 30 Old PC Ads That Will Blow Your Processor
Gary Katz sent us this video that he did of his Apple Computer collection. One system morphs into another, starting with the Apple II. Not every system is here, but most of them are. Seeing the eMate (remember that?) reminded me I want to do a casemod of some modern hardware inside that case. The […]
Sci-fi and horror author extraordinaire, John Shirley (whom William Gibson dubbed “Cyberpunk Patient Zero”), sent me a link to this fascinating article about the birth of the square pixel in digital imaging. The piece starts out: Russell Kirsch says he’s sorry. More than 50 years ago, Kirsch took a picture of his infant son and […]
Phillip covered this awesome homebrewed CPU before, but there’s now more info on the builder’s site and a series of videos showing it in action. Visitors to the 2007 Maker Faire Bay Area may remember seeing the Magic-1 and meeting its builder, Google engineer Bill Buzbee. The project is incredibly well documented on the site. […]
By way of Alden Hart at HacDC comes this amazing computer-controlled analog piano that speaks, *almost* comprehensible English, when a frequency spectrum of a child reading the text of the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court is transferred to robot fingers that press the piano’s keys. Creepy. Cool. [Thanks, Alden!] Speaking Piano – Now […]
