Thermal energy storage is pretty great, as phase-change energy storage is very consistent with its energy output over time, ...

The 8051 was an 8-bit Harvard-architecture microcontroller first put out by Intel in 1980.  They’ve since discontinued that ...

Although the RTL-SDR is cheap, accessible, and capable enough for many projects, it does have some important limitations. In ...

A well-known property of wall warts like power bricks and USB chargers is that they always consume some amount of power even ...

Although the CRT has largely disappeared from our everyday lives, there was a decades-long timeframe when this was ...

The best part about retro computing is the idea that you’ll save some poor system from being scrapped and revive it to a ...

Admit it. If you haven’t created your own little programming language, you’ve probably at least thought about it. [Muffed] decided to create a unique — and sweet — programming language that uses M&M ...

Alan Turing theorized a machine that could do infinite calculations from an infinite amount of data that computes based on a set of rules. It starts with an input, transforms the data and outputs an ...

Some time ago, Lego released a beautiful (and somewhat pricey) typewriter set that was modeled after one used by company founder Ole Kirk Kristiansen. To the disappointment of some, it doesn’t ...

Visualizers used to be very much in vogue, something you’d gasp in at amazement when you’d fire up Winamp or Windows Media Player. They’re largely absent from our modern lives, but [Arnov Sharma] is ...

Over on [Ken Shirriff]’s blog is a tricky Commodore PET repair: tracking down 6 1/2 bad chips. WARNING: contains 8-bit assembly code. In the end there were 6 (and a half) bad chips which needed to be ...

Beyond the power variant, it sometimes seems as though we rarely encounter a discrete transistor these days, such has been the advance of integrated electronics. But they have a rich history, going ...