If you live near Central Park or some other local chess hub, you’re likely never short of opponents for a good game. If you ...

Stephen] has a basement that depends on a sump pump. What that means is if the pump fails or the power goes out, the basement ...

Analog dials used to be a pretty common way of displaying information on test equipment and in industrial applications. They ...

Folaefolc] was craving a new keyboard build a few weeks ago and got inspired by the humble 3.5″ floppy disk. So much so that ...

Most RC planes follow a simple control scheme: elevators for pitch, rudder for yaw, and ailerons for roll. This one-to-one ...

It is hard to imagine that there was a time when having a keyboard and screen readily available was a real problem for people ...

What if GPS had existed in 1565? No satellites or microelectronics, sure—but let’s play along. Imagine the bustling streets ...

There’s an old joke that they want to send an exploratory mission to the sun, but to save money, they are going at night. The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter has gotten as close ...

MindYourDecisions] presents a Babylonian tablet dating back to around 1800 BC that shows that the hypotenuse of a unit square is the square root of two or 1.41421. How did they know that? We ...

Kevin] doesn’t stock zener diodes anymore. Why? Because for everything he used to use zeners, he now uses TL431 bandgap ...

Last time we checked in on [Inkbox], he had made a 16-bit CPU in Excel. Impressive, but not really practical. Presumably, his ...

A common part used to create a high voltage is a CRT flyback transformer, having been a ubiquitous junk pile component. So many attempts to use them rely on brute force, with power transistors in ...