America knew it as the Nintendo Entertainment System, but in Japan, it was the Family Computer (Famicom). It was more than just a home console—it was intended to actually do a whole lot more. All ...

Air hockey is one of those sports that’s both incredibly fun, but also incredibly frustrating as playing it by yourself is a ...

Sound! It’s a thing you hear, moreso than something you see with your eyes. And yet, it is possible to visualize sound with ...

While working on a project that involved super-thin prints, [Julius Curt] came up with selective ironing, a way to put designs on the top surface of a print without adding any height. For those ...

Phased-array radars are great for all sorts of things, whether you’re doing advanced radio research or piloting a fifth-generation combat aircraft. They’re also typically very ...

A friend of mine has been a software developer for most of the last five decades, and has worked with everything from 1960s ...

The early history of colour TV had several false starts, of which perhaps one of the most interesting might-have-beens was the CBS field-sequential system. This was a rival to the nascent system ...

Classic Mac OS was prized for its clean, accessible GUI when it first hit the scene in the 1980s. Back then, developers hadn’t even conceived of all the weird gewgaws that would eventually ...

Hacks are of all ages, with the Victorian-era Claymills Pumping Station being no exception. When its old Lancashire boilers ...

Modern-day receivers are miracles of digital audio and video processing, but compared to their more analog brethren, they can come with a host of new and fascinating faults. The Onkyo TX-SA806 and ...

Electrostatic motors are now common in MEMS applications, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin and spinoff C-Motive Technologies have brought macroscale electrostatic motors back. [via ...

Many of us have them, few of us really hack on them: well, here we’re talking about large home appliances. [Severin von Wnuck-Lipinski] and [Hajo Noerenberg] were both working on washing machines, ...