Bernoulli Disk Goes “Wii!” When Plugged Into WiiU
The Bernoulli disk was a wild piece of 1980s hardware. Take a big floppy. Spin the platter at 1500 RPM just a micron or so from a read head. The airflow around …
Autopsy of a Freshly Cooked 10Gbit SFP+ Network Adapter
With the advent of affordable 2.5 Gbit, 5 Gbit, and 10 Gbit consumer networking gear, more and more people are taking advantage of these higher networking speed…
Defeat Blood-Sucking Mosquitoes by Becoming the Bug Zapper
One of the stun gun modules with battery pack. (Credit: Dani Cruster DiWHY, YouTube) Few things are more satisfying during a Summer night than hearing the crack…
Seeing the World in Radio Waves with the QuadRF
Although the basic principle of radio direction finding is easy to understand (measure the phase difference between different antennas, then calculate the angle…
Tricking a Bike Counter
Some municipalities implement bike counters on cycling routes in order to monitor traffic. [nullpxl] recently investigated how these counters work, and explored…
Home Automation: Simple vs Easy
We’ve been talking a bunch of home automation on the Podcast lately, and this week, in the Mailbag segment, a reader asked us about our setups. Neither Kristina…
The Repair Nightmare that are Smart Rings
In the quest to make every wearable device ‘smart’, a lot of electronics along have to be crammed in very small spaces, along with ways to make them…
A General Purpose Pi Zero Device for IoT
By now we’re all used to single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi Zero, but it’s likely we’ve all been frustrated at times by the numbe…
Making Old Computers Count To A Million
How fast can you count to a million? It would probably take you a while. A computer could certainly do it faster. Indeed, the The National Museum of Computing f…
How LLMs can be Assisted to do Arithmetic Correctly
One of the most hilarious things you can do with an LLM-based chatbot is to ask it to do calculations. If it’s a well-written chatbot frontend, it can det…