Radon Active
When you think about nuclear radiation, you often think about power plants, but it turns out there’s radioactive stuff all over the place: smoke detectors, granite counters, bananas, and potatoes …read more Continue reading Radon Active
Author Archives: Al Williams
Lillith Tells Your Future
Maybe you are old enough to remember Zoltar in an arcade, or perhaps you’re just a fan of the movie Big. Either way, maybe you’d like to build an animated fortune …read more Continue reading Lillith Tells Your Future
A 1982 Modem for $100
[Dave Farquhar] takes a walk down memory lane about the Commodore 1600 VICModem, perhaps the first phone modem to sell for less than $100. Commodore, of course, was famous for …read more Continue reading A 1982 Modem for $100
A Modern Smalltalk
In the history of object-oriented (OO) computer languages, Smalltalk has a special place. It wasn’t the first OO language, and it hasn’t spread as well as some others. But it …read more Continue reading A Modern Smalltalk
Robot Picks up Othello
Experience is a great teacher. Ask [Jeneus], who, in high school, tried to make a program that played Othello. It didn’t go well. But years later, the idea produced an impressive …read more Continue reading Robot Picks up Othello
An AI Chatbot for the Apocalypse
You don’t have to be a full-on “prepper” to at least occasionally wonder what would happen if civilization collapsed. One thing you probably couldn’t do is go on the Internet …read more Continue reading An AI Chatbot for the Apocalypse
Magnetic Lock Opens By Magic
Over on IEEE Spectrum, [Stephen Cass] has a project that would probably have seemed like a magic a few centuries ago. Imagine a box that uses a magnetic device to …read more Continue reading Magnetic Lock Opens By Magic
Hackaday Podcast Episode 392: Microscopes, Drones, and Other DIY Things
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams met to review the week in Hackaday. Turns out, it was a week for tiny things, cybersecurity, nostalgia, and projects that would have …read more Continue reading Hackaday Podcast Episode 392: Microscopes, Drones, and Other DIY Things
The Age of Altair
I recently got the Amazon Christmas toy book in the mail, and it is definitely the modern version of the Sears Christmas Wish Book for last century’s youth. Or at …read more Continue reading The Age of Altair
Visualize Regular Expressions with Marbles
If you are one of those people who visualize things physically better than in the abstract, then Regex Marble Run by [bottomless] might be for you. You enter a test …read more Continue reading Visualize Regular Expressions with Marbles