Mysterious Files PH

Everyone knows that ultrasonic cleaners are great, but not every device that’s marketed as an ultrasonic cleaner is necessarily such a device. In a recent video on the Cheap & Cheerful YouTube channel the difference is explored, starting with a teardown of a fake one. The first hint comes with the use of the description ‘Multifunction cleaner’ on the packaging, and the second in the form of it being powered by two AAA batteries. Unsurprisingly, inside...

When you think about the dawn of modern computers, you often think about the work done in the UK and the US. But Australia had an early computer scene, too, and [State of Electronics] has done a series of videos about the history of computers down under. The latest episode talks about SILLIAC, a computer similar to ILLIAC built for the University of Sydney in the late 1950s. img alt="" class="wp-image-770337" data-attachment-id="770337" data-comments-opened="1"...

All the news that was fit to print. Image via Wikipedia In the 1982 movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High, a classroom of students receives a set of paperwork to pass backward. Nearly every student in the room takes a big whiff of their sheet before setting it down. If you know, you know, I guess, but if you don’t, keep reading. Those often purple-inked papers were fresh from the ditto machine, or spirit duplicator. Legend has it that not only did they smell...

When you think of attacking or defending computer systems, you probably think of software viruses and the corresponding anti-virus software. But MIT’s 6.5950 class teaches secure hardware design — how to attack and defend CPUs from bad actors. Interested? The course is open source, so you can follow along as long as you don’t mind not getting a grade. Browsing some of the lecture slides shows that the material isn’t as stuffy as you might imagine. A slide...

Macro pads are handy for opening up your favorite programs or executing commonly used keyboard shortcuts. But why stop there? That’s what [Jeroen Brinkman] must have been thinking while creating the Programmer’s Macro Pad. Based on the Arduino Pro Micro, this hand-wired pad is unique in that a single press of any of its 16 keys can virtually “type” out multiple lines of text. In this case, it’s a capability that’s being used to prevent the user from having...

This week, Jonathan Bennett chats with Bashonly about yt-dlp, the audio/video downloader that carries the torch from youtube-dl! Why is this a hard problem, and what does the future hold for this swiss-army knife of video downloading? Watch to find out! https://github.com/bashonly https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://discord.gg/H5MNcFW63r Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like...

Tattoos. Body paint. Henna. All these are popular kinds of body art with varying histories and cultural connotations, many going back centuries or even longer. They all have something in common, though—they all change how the body reflects light back to the viewer. What if, instead, body art could shine a light of its very own? This is the precise topic which [Katherine Connell] came to discuss at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon. Her talk concerns rethinking body...