Maya Posch

Although you can do basic floating point format operations like addition and subtraction just fine on any CPU, having specialized hardware for it can provide a significant speed boost. Here Intel's 8087 was the first mainstream floating-point coprocessor to provide this option to a wide audience, with [Ken Shirriff]

Recently the [Chornobyl Family] got their hands on an ES-4001 control panel for a 1970s-era Soviet mainframe, with the intention to restore it to

The Chinese had been using large crossbows – akin to Greek and Roman ballistae – for warfare for many of the same reasons that European armies loved them. Their single, large arrow was …

The RepRapMicron (also µRepRap) is pretty much the microscopic take on what RepRap did for more macroscale manufacturing, with the most recent innovation being a UV print head, called the

Even though laptops from around the early 2000s came with just about every conceivable port on them, they still would often feature a somewhat unusual combined video output port. While at its core this was just a 4-pin analog S-video output, the three additional pins on the mini-DIN connector provided some more features. Of course, as [VWestlife] found out

With the topic of marble clocks having been quite well explored at this point, it raises the question of how easy it would be to take the basic principle and create a text display using black and white marbles. As [Ivan Miranda] found out in

In the world of silicon semiconductors, the process of creating transistors and similar structures involves various rounds of modifications and additions in order to create the requisite functional layers. A less involved approach would simply create these structures in-situ, with research the past years having focused on transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) monolayers to do exactly this. Recently [Seok Young Min] et al.

Infrared (IR) communication technologies are probably one of the most influential, yet also one of the least flashiest. The fact that IR communication tends to be highly directional and often limited to low data rate leads many people to scoff at it, deeming it barely worthy of more than making TV remotes work, perhaps along with some unloved industrial gear like the IR interface of electrical meters.

Learning a new natural language can be a daunting proposition at the best of times, with repetition and immersion generally considered to be the best ways to build up not only vocabulary but also that innate sense for grammar and cultural details that sneak into every spoken language. Flash cards are one way to help with vocabulary and sentence building, such as [Peter Hraska]'s

Recently [Rod Burlamaqui] released the arc-rebar project on GitHub , enabling Intel GPUs to work significantly more efficiently if the system's mainboard does not support resizable BAR. It does require a Debian or Ubuntu installation and of course a supported Intel GPU.