Electronics That Last: How I Built an Heirloom Laptop
Imagine an laptop you could pass down to your kids. Kurt Mottweiler walks us through the design considerations in making an heirloom laptop.
Computers
A Simple, Inexpensive Computer for Developing Nations Hits it Big at Home
A Kickstarter campaign for Endless Computer, a low cost desktop unit aimed at the developing world, has eclipsed its $100,000 funding goal with 22 days left on its campaign. “This product has been designed in the developing world, side by side with our users,” the Endless team wrote. “We went into the field and into people’s […]
Kits and Revolutions
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 […]
Intern’s Corner: Old Laptop, New Tricks
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.
Vintage PC ads
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
30 years of Apples in 2 minutes
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 […]
Fifty years of squares
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 […]