Essays
A four-year longitudinal study tracking the capacity degradation of 192 AAA batteries across eight brands, revealing surprising findings about which batteries maintain their charge and which ones leak during storage.
Essays
A comprehensive guide to creating three-dimensional paper models (papercraft), using the SR-71 Blackbird at 1:50 scale as a detailed example — covering mesh modeling in Blender, unfolding, and assembly techniques.
Essays
A brutally honest account of leading a development team at a major bank, where doing things right lost to office politics, and the reward for building a successful product was a forced resignation.
Essays
An experiment in scraping 43,000 articles and visualizing them as an Obsidian knowledge graph, revealing interesting patterns about authors, difficulty tags, and content clustering.
Essays
An exposé arguing that the SSL certificate industry built a billion-dollar business on artificial scarcity and fear, when free certificates from Let's Encrypt use identical encryption to paid alternatives costing up to $300 per year.
Essays
A deep dive into restoring a 1983 East German T-63 teletype — from understanding the five-bit Baudot code and purely electromechanical signal encoding to cleaning oxidized contacts, rebuilding the motor, and connecting the device to a modern PC via RS-232.
Essays
Greek fire was a closely guarded Byzantine weapon invented around the mid-7th century that could burn on water and terrified enemies for centuries. Its exact composition remains unknown to this day, though petroleum-based theories are most widely accepted.
Essays
A case study on reviving the ftape Linux kernel driver, unmaintained for 25 years, to work with modern kernels using AI-assisted development with Claude Code.
Essays
A comprehensive history of mobile device chargers, from the proprietary chaos of the 1990s through Mini-USB and Micro-USB standardization to the triumph of USB-C with Power Delivery.
Essays
A comprehensive exploration of sound effect creation for the ZX Spectrum — from the primitive one-bit beeper to the AY-3-8912 sound chip — including assembly code examples, the history of audio tools, and the author's AYFXEdit and BeepFX editors.
Essays
A solo developer documents his ambitious fan project to recreate Fallout 2 as a 3D game in Unity, maintaining the original isometric perspective and turn-based mechanics while implementing the SPECIAL system, combat, and inventory from scratch.
Essays
Despite rapid technological progress on Earth, spacecraft still rely on proven solutions from the 1990s. This article explores why space technology evolves so slowly, from radiation-hardened processors to real-time operating systems and the CubeSat revolution.