Essays
An exploration of the global repair movement — from iFixit and YouTube masters to hackerspaces and India's e-waste economy — and how enthusiasts are fighting planned obsolescence through knowledge sharing, right-to-repair legislation, and hands-on learning.
Essays
A comprehensive guide to receiving open radio transmissions from weather satellites like NOAA-15/18/19 and Meteor M2-3/M2-4 using affordable SDR equipment, simple antennas, and the open-source SatDump software.
Essays
A mobile app called Transit can determine a subway passenger's location 90% of the time using only accelerometer data, while military-grade alternatives to GPS leverage quantum sensors, Earth's magnetic field, and celestial navigation.
DevOps
A comprehensive guide covering everything you need to plan before deploying a production Kubernetes cluster: architecture, storage, networking, security, observability, autoscaling, and CI/CD pipelines.
AI
A hardware design professor describes a clever strategy for creating assignments that are nearly impossible to solve with ChatGPT, by requiring students to extract information through simulation rather than static text analysis.
Essays
A detailed walkthrough of designing a four-layer debug board for the Russian RISC-V microcontroller K1921VG015, covering JTAG, ADC, I2C peripherals, NFC, CAN, UART, SPI interfaces, and lessons learned from the layout process.
Essays
The story of how Microsoft hired Anders Hejlsberg away from Borland, used his Delphi expertise to create C# and .NET, and ultimately displaced Delphi from the mainstream development world.
Essays
A detailed hardware teardown of the Siemens M55 mobile phone, exploring its Infineon E-Gold platform, PMB7850 SoC with C166S microcontroller and TeakLITE DSP, memory configuration, power management, display technology, and the curious firmware limitations that held back its capabilities.
Essays
The story of Murat Urtembayev, a Moscow State University graduate who in 1982 planted a logic bomb in the AvtoVAZ assembly line code — the first cybercrime in Soviet history — and why calling him a 'hacker' misses the point entirely.
Essays
A deep dive into the Ts20, the iconic Soviet analog multimeter that became the faithful companion of generations of radio hobbyists. The article covers its elegant circuit design, explains how a single microammeter is transformed into a milliammeter, voltmeter, and ohmmeter using precision resistor networks.
Hardware
A detailed engineering journey of building a custom addressable LED backlighting system for a three-monitor video wall with 2,315 pixels, covering power distribution, controller selection, custom WS2812b protocol implementation on STM32, and hard-won lessons about signal integrity and galvanic isolation.
Science
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have detected chemical signatures of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide — molecules produced exclusively by life on Earth — in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b. The findings reach 3-sigma statistical significance, representing the strongest evidence yet for potential biological activity outside our Solar System.