Bryan Cockfield

As technologies change and adapt, we're often left with seemingly useless junk that has nowhere to go. Certainly anyone still sitting on a pile of floppy disks feels this way sometimes, but odds are anyone who owns a mining ASIC or an NFT can attest to that as well. The trillions of dollars flowing into GPU-based data centers will likely become the next victim of this trend, so if you want to capitalize on the losses of some venture capitalist

One of the extra tools someone might need when working with surface-mount components is a solder paste stencil, which not only simplifies the application of solder paste to a PCB but increases accuracy. These metal stencils can cost an annoying amount of money and take time to get delivered, s

The lossy compression algorithm used by JPEG was useful for those on the early Internet not only because it enabled pictures to be shared easier, but because it allows a low-resolution version of the image to load first. This meant that users could make out the gist of an image before it finished downloading. This was a great feature for those on slow connections,

When the Internet first started gaining mainstream popularity in the late 90s, many optimists claimed that it would bring people together by reducing barriers to communication. That ideal hasn't exactly come to pass yet, as anyone who has been on the Nextdoor neighborhood social network can likely attest to. Before social media, neighbors weren't completely in the dark about their local communities, though. Besides word-of-mouth communication, there were also local access channels on cable TV, which had none of the downsides of modern social media.

For how useful USB thumb drives are for quickly toting around and copying files from one computer to another, they can be a bit of a security headache. Programs can be loaded on them with all kinds of malware; they can be obscured in some ways that are difficult to detect, and they can be set up to execute certain programs when they're plugged in. The general wisdom is to simply avoid untrusted USB devices completely, but that sort of abstinence-only policy rarely works in the real world. If, for some reason, an untrusted USB device absolutely needs to be used,

[Attoparsec] occasionally rides a bicycle for transportation, but with the major downside of doing this in North America, a place where bicycle infrastructure is generally neglected. From snow removal, maintenance, separation from cars, or even existing in the first place, the places bicyclists use are generally last to be cared for. One of these deficiencies is landscaping maintenance, with plant growth routinely extending into travel ways. Rather than continue to get hit in the face by tree branches,

As we've seen many times before, there's usually some way wrangle a bit more life out of what would otherwise be considered old and obsolete technology. Perhaps one thing that has been passed over by the masses a bit to early is older datacenter GPUs, which is understandable in one sense because of the rate NVIDIA is pumping out new ones,

A day at the beach can involve hauling a surprising amount of gear, from coolers, towels, blankets, chairs, and umbrellas, and if children are involved the amount of beach stuff needed seems to go nonlinear very quickly. Some turn to beach carts with large, low-pressure pneumatic tires, but even that seemed like too much work for [John] who

We've likely all looked at a simple problem in our lives and thought that it would be an easy fix, only to realize that the project is enormously more complicated than we first realized. Whether that's starting a home improvement project, doing a quick repair to a bicycle or car, or trying to install an obscure piece of software on a Linux machine, the amount of time we budget for these tasks often ends up woefully underestimated. [

While we've largely settled on analog sticks and digital buttons for controlling video games, there's all sorts of projects to create truly esoteric controllers that allow playing games in unique ways.