Ding, dong; the office is dead. The real office is in your head. This is what I tell myself when working from home gets too weird, too stale, too impossible. By now, many of you know some version what I’m talking about. Our circumstances may vary wildly, but the outcome is the same: working from…
Read More “Office Life: The Old Gray Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be” »
With a seemingly endless list of shortages of basic items trotted across newsfeeds on a daily basis, you’d be pardoned for not noticing any one shortage in particular. But in among the shortages of everything from eggs to fertilizers to sriracha sauce has been a growing realization that we may actually be running out of…
When it comes to high-performance desktop PCs, particularly in the world of gaming, water cooling is popular and effective. However, in the world of datacenters, servers rely on traditional air cooling more often than not, in combination with huge AC systems that keep server rooms at the appropriate temperature. However, datacenters can use water cooling,…
Read More “The Weird World Of Liquid Cooling For Datacenters” »
The tech news channels were recently abuzz with stories about strange signals coming back from Voyager 1. While the usual suspects jumped to the usual conclusions – aliens !! – in the absence of a firm explanation for the anomaly, some of us looked at this event as an opportunity to marvel at the fact…
Read More “How Is Voyager Still Talking After All These Years?” »
Generally when we consider the many plants around us, we imagine them efficiently using the electromagnetic radiation from the Sun via photosynthesis in their leaves – pulling carbon-dioxide from the air, as well as water from the soil via their roots, and grow as quickly. as they reasonably can. In reality, the efficiency of this…
Read More “How To Make A Difference Through Plant Metabolism” »
Recently, I stumbled upon a cool write-up by [DHowett], about reprogramming a Framework laptop’s Embedded Controller (EC). He shows us how to reuse the Caps Lock LED, instead making it indicate the F1-F12 key layer state – also known as “Fn lock”, AKA, “Does your F1 key currently work as F1, or does it regulate…
There are many wonderful places we’d like to visit in the universe, and probably untold numbers more that we haven’t even seen or heard of yet. Unfortunately they’re all so far away. A best-case-scenario trip to Mars takes around six months with present technology, meanwhile, if you want to visit Alpha Centauri it’s a whole…
Read More “Laser Propulsion Could Satisfy Our Spacecraft’s Need For Speed” »
Here’s a scenario. You have a microcontroller that reads a number of items – temperatures, pressures, whatever – and you want to have a display for your Linux desktop that sits on the panel and shows you the status. If you click on it, you get expanded status and can even issue some commands. Most…
I hope last week’s introduction to bulk material handling got you all thinking up amazing hacks, and we’ll soon be reporting on DIY Cap’n Crunch Robots galore. This week we’ll look at how to measure particle sizes, separate particles, and even grind them up when you need to. Measuring Material Properties Last week we talked…
Stand by the shore and watch the waves roll in, and you’ll notice that most come in at roughly the same size. There’s a little variation, but the overwhelming majority don’t stand out from the crowd. On all but the stormiest of days, they have an almost soothing regularity about them. Every so often though,…
