The daily ledger

Cheap Yellow Display Dreams of PDA

Everybody loves the Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) ESP32 dev boards, so why not treat yours to a little PDA? That’s right: turn it into a Portable Digital Assistant and relive …read more

Step into the Creative Mind of Guillermo del Toro

via Reddit To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro recently hopped onto Reddit for an AMA. His answers gave a cool glimpse into his thought process, his inspirations when creating his…

Self-Repairing Conductive Material from Liquid Metal

PCB circuits are cool, but you know what is cooler? Terminator circuits that’s what! And what if the same material that makes Terminator circuits could also be used for smart …read more

A Pocket-Sized Digital Fish Tank

The problem with trying to make a fish tank fit in your pocket is that you’ll either end up with water everywhere or a bunch of dead fish. Perhaps that’s …read more

The Least Annoying of All Evils

If you missed the hubbub this week, it was discovered that the Raspberry Pi Foundation added code in the firmware that locks the boot process up if non-original RAM chips …read more

You Can Make a Microprocessor That’s All Your Own

For a while now we’ve followed the slow progression of affordable integrated circuit fabrication, and through the likes of Tiny Tapeout we’ve seen impressive strides made. But they’re not the …read more

Easy Ways To Sink a Hardware Startup

[Ryan Walker] may have written up his observations a few years ago, but the lessons are just as relevant today as they were back then. He shares five easy ways …read more

Abusing SQL to Play DOOM

Most laypeople who encounter SQL think of it purely as a tool for managing large datasets. While that is certainly what it was designed for, SQL is still a programming …read more

KryonOS turns ESP32 boards into JavaScript-powered mini computer

KryonOS is a small JavaScript-powered OS that turns a supported ESP32 development board with a touchscreen into a standalone computer with its own graphical interface, application launcher, and file storage. It provides…

The Low-Level Waste Dumps in The Atlantic Have Become Ecosystems

Recently French and international researchers took a look at the state of the thousands of barrels of radioactive waste that were dumped into the Atlantic Ocean between 1950 and 1990, …read more

AiboJam: Sony’s desktop dog escapes onto a $40 Fruit Jam

Tiny AIBO gets another place to live: a Fruit Jam, CircuitPython, native C, and room for more people to make weird things.

Reverse-engineering the vintage Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC

The lost atomic update on LoongArch LA664

Infecting the Steam Link with NixOS

Ukraine's army is experimenting with using Steam Decks to remote-control gun turrets (2023)