Al Williams

AI in ecommerce and what retailers can learn AI spending is forecast to reach $40.74 billion by 2030.

If you used a serious computer pre-IBM PC, there was a fair chance its operating system was CP/M. CP/M was a staple among 8080 and Z80 computers and while there were other versions, we'll always associate CP/M with the Z-80. There was a CP/M made for the PC which used an 8088 (a hybrid 8-bit bus with a 16-bit 8086 core), but it was overwhelmed by MSDOS. However, there was another interesting version made for the 68000, and now [johnsonjh] has ported that over to create an early version of

Everyone talks about the weather. This is doubly true for sailors, where bad weather could mean a very bad day. So it isn't surprising that navies around the world have had a keen interest in weather forecasting. But how did you predict the weather before modern instruments, radar, and satellite images? Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy had great faith in “storm glasses,” a glass chamber containing some chemicals that he didn't invent, but did

PID controllers are everywhere. They regulate temperature, motor speed, power supplies, positioning systems, process equipment, and probably a dozen things within arm's reach of you right now.

You've probably heard of rubidium frequency standards, which are used where you need an extremely accurate time or frequency reference. [IMSAI] guy has a good explainer video about what's actually going on inside one of these standards . Much of the basic idea also applies to cesium standards.

Stepper motors are undeniably useful, but sometimes they need a bit of gearing to help perform their task. [Gjhudson2008] has a compact gearbox for NEMA 17 or 23 steppers that is mostly 3D printed . How compact? The gearbox, named VANTIX, is exactly the height of a standard NEMA 17 axle.

Sandboxing a Linux process usually means spending a lot of effort deciding what it isn't allowed to see. You might put it in a mount namespace, bind-mount a few directories into place, hide some others, add a chroot, and generally construct a carefully restricted version of the filesystem. But a new Linux kernel feature is about to change all of that. Instead of carefully hiding most of the filesystem, why not just take the filesystem away?

[Leaded Solder] took on an interesting challenge. The BBC, apparently, produced a game console known as the BBC Bridge Companion that connected to your TV and helped you learn to play Bridge back in 1985. At £200, we doubt many were sold new, but there were nine ROM cartridges available, presumably at an additional cost. [Leaded Solder] doesn't care about playing bridge, but decided to teach the computer

If you've ever worked with produce, you might know about grading. In addition to deciding if, say, a strawberry is good or not, they also have to sort them by color. Turns out, you don't care if one package of berries is a bit redder than another, but you do care if one package has too much color variation. [Pmalfa31] applied

For whatever reason, [Jeremy] wants to photograph bees in flight. This is one of those things that doesn't seem that hard until you try to do it. He's got the mechanical part that can move the camera as fast as the bee flies. But you still have to point the camera correctly. He considered quite a few methods of acquiring and tracking the bee, but he finally settled on a