Open Source
A two-year journey of a small two-person team designing and building an open-source electric bike from scratch in a garage — from an initial trike prototype through 3D printing failures to a final 50km/h, 100km-range e-bike built on a Greyborg Cromotor hub motor.
Payment Systems
A deep dive into the technical systems used to verify the authenticity of banknotes, covering human-readable security features, machine-readable markers, detection devices from simple UV lamps to advanced sorting machines, validation algorithms, and future technologies including RFID tags and quantum money.
Geoinformation Services
What really happens to international parcels in transit? The author sent a cheap phone inside a package to track its 48-day, 7000-kilometer journey — when the direct distance was only 1300 km.
Programming
A web developer recounts his experience attending 17 job interviews in a single week and shares lessons about what companies do wrong when hiring programmers.
Mathematics
On August 31, 2012, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki quietly published a 512-page proof of the famous abc conjecture online. The mathematical community was electrified — and then stumped, because nobody could understand it.
Career
A satirical dialogue illustrating the absurdity of tech hiring practices, where a skilled carpenter is rejected for lacking experience with the color brown.
Algorithms
The era of time travel hasn't arrived yet, but humanity has long tried to resolve the accompanying paradoxes. We examine three models of how time responds to a traveler's actions, and conduct an experiment with a virtual time machine built on Conway's Game of Life.
Circuit Design
A hands-on experiment disproving the claim that you can charge a smartphone from a 9V battery through a 7805 linear voltage regulator, with current and voltage measurements explaining why it fails.
DIY
How a simple hard drive replacement in a CNC woodworking machine required creating a custom solid-state drive, and the challenges we faced during its development.
Robotics
The story of how a user organized a crowdsourced search through NASA HiRise satellite imagery and found the Soviet Mars-3 lander — the first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars in 1971 — after it had remained unlocated for over 40 years.
Programming
A mathematical analysis of Android's graphical pattern lock security, calculating all 389,488 possible combinations — only to discover that a determined spouse can bypass even the most mathematically secure password.
Education
A 17-year-old from Ufa, Russia shares his complete journey of applying to MIT — from registration and SAT prep to interviews, essays, and the final decision letter.