Steam Announces It Is ‘No Longer Supporting Bitcoin’
“It has become untenable to support Bitcoin as a payment option.” Continue reading Steam Announces It Is ‘No Longer Supporting Bitcoin’
Tag Archives: Valve
Automated Chamber Passes Just the Right Gas
It sounds like an overly complicated method a supervillain would use to slowly and painfully eliminate enemies — a chamber with variable oxygen concentration. This automated environmental chamber isn’t for torturing suave MI6 agents, though; rather, it enables cancer research more-or-less on the cheap.
Tasked with building something to let his lab simulate the variable oxygen microenvironments found in some kinds of tumors, [RyanM415] first chose a standard lab incubator as a chamber to mix room air with bottled nitrogen. With a requirement to quickly vary the oxygen concentration from the normal 21% down to zero, he found that the …read more
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Spray Paint Goes DIY Virtual with a Vive Tracker
Here is a virtual spray painting project with a new and DIY twist to it. [Adam Amaral]’s project is an experiment in using the Vive Tracker, which was released earlier this year. [Adam] demonstrates how to interface some simple hardware and 3D printed parts to the Tracker’s GPIO pins, using it as a custom peripheral that is fully tracked and interactive in the Vive’s VR environment. He details not only the custom spray can controller, but also how to handle the device on the software side in the Unreal engine. The 3D printed “spray can controller” even rattles when shaken! …read more
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Superconference Interview: Alan Yates
In 2015, virtual reality was the future, which means we should all have it right now. One of the most technologically impressive VR sets is the HTC Vive, an amazing piece of kit that’s jam-packed with sensors and has some really cool tech going on inside it.
One of the developers of the HTC Vive and the ever-important ‘Lighthouse’ position sensors is [Alan Yates]. He’s of Valve and gave a talk at last year’s Superconference on Why the Lighthouse Can’t Work. Being able to determine the absolute position of the Valve’s headset is hard, but absolutely necessary for VR. Anything …read more
Classic IBM TR-2 Flip-Flop Reproduction
As useful as computers are, most of them have all the design charm of a rubber doorstop. Oh, for the heady early days of computing, when vacuum tubes ruled, hardware was assembled by hand, and engineers always wore a tie.
Looking to recreate an elegant bit of computing hardware from that more civilized age, [updatebjarni] built a reproduction of a 1948 IBM TR-2 flip-flop module — 1,250 of which once formed the memory of the IBM Model 604 Calculating Punch. Admittedly more of a high-speed adding machine than a computer, the 604 is still an important piece of computing history, …read more
In eSports, 30-Year-Olds Are Considered ‘Seniors’
Your old ass gets its own gaming age bracket. Continue reading In eSports, 30-Year-Olds Are Considered ‘Seniors’
After 19 Years, Germany Can Finally Murder Scientists in ‘Half-Life’
Uncensored version shows up on German Steam a week after Germany’s video game censorship body dropped Half-Life from its index. Continue reading After 19 Years, Germany Can Finally Murder Scientists in ‘Half-Life’
Restoring a Japanese Oscilloscope
Oscilloscopes have come a long way. Today’s scope is more likely to look like a tablet than an old tube-based instrument. Still, there’s something about looking into a glowing green tube, especially if you’ve done the work to resurrect that old hollow state device. [NFM] picked up a Kikusui OP-31C–a vintage Japanese scope at a second-hand store. He made a video of his restoration efforts that you can see below.
The scope actually powered up and worked the first time. Of course, unlike a modern scope, the OP-31C has to warm up before it will show up. However, the pots …read more
Dumpster Dive Speaker Results In Tube Amplifier
[Michael Wiebusch] found the leftovers of a wrecked vintage tube radio in a pile of electronics junk. Unfortunately, he could not recover any vacuum tubes in it. And to his dismay, it didn’t even have the output transformer, which he figured would have been useful in a guitar amplifier project. The output transformer is not easy to come by nowadays, so he was hoping to at least score that item for his future build. All he could dig out from his dumpster find was a pair of speakers and he ended up building nice Output-Transformer-Less Tube Guitar Amplifier around them. …read more
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Now You Can Watch the Nuclear Apocalypse Unfold in VR
It’s spectator mode only, but at least there’s more to look at besides maps and stats. Continue reading Now You Can Watch the Nuclear Apocalypse Unfold in VR