1
Controlling the Taylor Swift Eras Tour wristbands with Flipper Zero
Many large concerts feature wristbands that light up on command. They are used to produce varied visual effects across a stadium. One compan...
John Graham-Cumming
The SidePulse Pro is a fun project that puts some LEDs in an "SD card format" to go into the side of a MacBook Pro. My MacBook Pro is very old and so it doesn't have an SD card slot, but my Mac Studio does. And since I like to live dangerously (and thought it would look cool), I stuck my newly received SidePulse Pro…
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Visit blog.jgc.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jun 2010 – Jan 2026
Hardware & Electronics 19Society, Policy & Culture 17Software Engineering 17Life, Learning & Writing 16History & Retro Computing 16Tools & Productivity 14
2
There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
So, I'm walking through a park when I see this thing lying on the ground: It's a disposable vape that someone has discarded because it's emp...
3
Retrieving 1TB of data from a faulty drive with the help of woodworking tools
So, a while ago I built a gaming PC with the following specification: Case Dan A4 v4.1 Motherboard Z690I Strix Gaming Pro...
4
Pimping my Casio with Oddly Specific Objects' alternate motherboard and firmware
Some time ago I bought a replacement motherboard for my classic Casio F-91W from Crowd Supply. The project keeps the original Casio LCD but...
5
Ambient bus arrival monitor from hacked Linksys WRT54GL
London's Transport for London has a wonderful service called Countdown that can give live bus arrival times. For example, here's a page s...
6
Making an old USB printer support Apple AirPrint using a Raspberry Pi
There are longer tutorials on how to connect a USB printer to a Raspberry Pi and make it accessible via AirPrint but here's the minimal one ...
7
Pimping My Casio: Part Deux
Close to three years ago I wrote about using Oddly Specific Objects' alternate "motherboard" to modify a classic Casio F-91W watch: Pimping...
8
Making a Ponyo boat
If you've seen the film Ponyo (or if you grew up in Asia) you may have seen a sort of toy boat powered by a very simple steam engine. This...
9
Long range WiFi antenna from Illy coffee can
I have a stack of half finished projects that I'm trying to complete. Happily, the first one was finished late last night: a long range Wi...
10
GAGA-2
Last April I sent a weather balloon up into the stratosphere after months of preparation. You can read all the details starting here . I c...
11
My foxhole radio
As a child I'd made a crystal radio set and had been meaning to make one again when I came across stories of foxhole or PoW radios made f...
12
Two ways to use an LED as a light sensor with Arduino
I needed to log when a light switched on and off during the night as part of debugging an oddly behaving movement sensor. To do that I built...
13
I Made a Rubbish Clock
With separate plastic, metal, paper, and glass recycling, composting, and pick up of all the rest, knowing which days to put out which bins ...
14
How to forcibly eject a CD/DVD from a MacBook Air USB SuperDrive
So you've got a DVD stuck in the external USB SuperDrive that connects to the MacBook Air? And you've tried hitting the magic Eject button ...
15
Using a Minitel 1B as a serial terminal
So you've got your hands on a late 1980s Minitel 1B (or something slightly later) and then you realize that the entire Minitel network shut ...
16
The inner beauty of a Tesla Stropkov DS 3600 telephone from the early 1980s
This is a DS 3600 analog telephone made by Tesla Stropkov in about 1982. It's still functional and to my mind it's absolutely beautiful. Bu...
17
Restoration of an IBM Thinkpad 701C Butterfly-keyboard laptop
Just over a year ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about the IBM ThinkPad 701c (the one with the lovely folding "butterfly" keyboar...
18
Childhood toys: 40 years on 2-XL works just fine
Sitting and literally gathering dust on a shelf has been my childhood 2-XL toy . A few years ago I turned it on and it seemed to work but th...
19
Repairing a tiny ribbon cable inside a 28 year old IBM ThinkPad 701c
I'm in the middle of turning two badly treated IBM ThinkPad 701CS machines (the ones with the lovely unfolding keyboard) into a single, wor...