MetaFilter posts tagged with hardware

The Future! Brought to you by generous geeks of the world.

mhjb — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:18:40 -0800

Foldable Display Tracking - more Wiimote magic from Johnny Lee Chung [previously].

Inside the World's Greatest Keyboard

Joe Beese — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:57:33 -0800

From the satisfying click of its keys to its no-nonsense layout and solid steel underpinnings, IBM's 24-year-old Model M is the standard by which all other keyboards must be judged. (previously)

Lego Construction Site

7segment — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:57:45 -0800

6x4x2 wheel configuration with Ackermann steering and hybrid live-axle suspension. Telescoping boom. Impressive 1kg lifting capacity.

Jennifer Clark builds amazing things with lego.

People doing strange things with electricity

funkiwan — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:59:04 -0800

Dorkbot is a "monthly meeting of artists (sound/image/movement/whatever), designers, engineers, students, scientists, and other interested parties who are involved in the creative use of electricity." Started in NYC in 2000 by Douglas Repetto, Director of Research at the Columbia University Computer Music Center as well as one of Wired's 10 Sexiest Geeks, there are now dozens all over the world. Past presenters have been featured here on the blue. For instance Jeff Han presented his multi-touch interface at dorkbot-nyc in April of 2006. Miru Kim presented her naked city spleen at dorkbot-nyc in October of 2006. Bummed that there's not one in your own city? Start your own! The NYC meetings (first Wednesday of the month) are very casual and draw an eclectic range of presenters. A great mix of software and hardware mixed with various artistic influences. Would love to hear how they are run in other cities if anyone's been.

Mark 13 - "no flesh shall be spared"

Artw — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 21:52:40 -0800

The Sea of Perdition - Children of the Kingdom - Black Tulips - Three short films by South African-born film director Richard Stanley. Stanley's career took off with Hardware (an unacknowledged adaptation the 2000ad story Shok!) and the apocalyptic African western/Horror movie Dust Devil, then hit the rocks with the doomed 1996 version of the Island of Doctor Moreau, from which he was fired and replaced by John Frankenheimer. Stanley hasn't directed a feature film since... though he now has two films in preproduction, Vacation and Bones of the Earth. The original script for Moreau can be read on his unofficial site, as well as the script for a sequel to Hardware. Richard Stanley's MySpace Blog is also very strange.

Failing Hard Drive Sounds

sveskemus — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 05:55:19 -0800

Failing Hard Drive Sounds. via

El Compa Vs The Cisco Kid

Artw — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:47:51 -0800

Would you like some Narco ballards with your network software?

HAL's iPod?

drfu — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:55:14 -0800

Inspired by the discussion of the remix of Nude, I dug up some other musical hardware (it seems that scanner engineers really like classical). Here's the earliest example of this silliness I could find.

640K ought to be enough for anybody

netbros — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:11:05 -0800

The History of Computing Project is a collaborative effort to record and publish the history of the computer and its roots. The site includes a chronological timeline, biographies of computing pioneers, a look at computing hardware through the years, as well as software and games. Having a 30-year career in the field, I am partial to mainframe computing. I started my career in 1973 working on this machine, and ended it on this one, with many in between. Other mainframe timelines: IBM mainframes Viking Waters Computer history: IBM 360/370/3090/390

SPLed beans

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:52:13 -0800

"Finding JTAG on the iPhone": a ten-step hardware unlock of the iPhone, allowing it to function with other carriers

John Arquilla interview re: the future of military technology and hardware

jason's_planet — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:52:36 -0800

“[O]ur military today oversees spending of about a billion and a quarter dollars every day. Most of that is misspent. Over this past quarter-century, we've reinforced an old industrial-policy military with hardware that makes increasingly less sense, spending most on things that provide the least return. The principal argument for that is: ‘We have to keep the big, old-style military because we might fight a big, old-style war one day.’ But in the future the bigger you are, the harder you're going to fall to ever-more accurate weapons.”

Can you hear me now?

Mitheral — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 09:22:02 -0800

LA6NCA's WW2 German Radio Collection Pictures and a little history on many WW2 German radios including a cute as a button spy radio and the Lichtsprechgerät 80, an incoherent light audio transceiver. Also featured are a few photo essays of the equipment in use (Enigma, Luftwaffe Signals unit redeploying). [dorian

Judy Patch's Guide to Computer Hardware

GuyZero — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:57:34 -0800

Judy Patch's Guide to Computer Hardware

Like Dorvak, only better

Mitheral — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 11:45:25 -0800

The Colemak keyboard layout. Colemak is a new alternative to the QWERTY and Dvorak layouts. Designed for efficient and ergonomic touch typing in English, Colemak places the 10 most frequent letters of English (A,R,S,T,D,H,N,E,I,O) on the home row. Z,X,C are preserved in their QWERTY positions for easy copy and paste operations. It gets rid of the Caps Lock and replaces it with Backspace so you no longer need to move your hand off the home position to correct errors. Available for Windows/Mac/Linux/Unix it works with all standard keyboards, including laptops. [via: Projects], [Previously]

Taking Open Source to the Next Level

PreacherTom — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 05:26:00 -0800

Taking Open Source to the Next Level Linux? Firefox? Bah! German Markus Merz scoffs at these posers. Instead, he steps up to offer the OScar project, whose goal is to develop and build an open source *car*. While not in the same class as a Range Rover or Hummer, they hope to make something more simple and functional. This isn't the only example of hardware-based open source projects. Others include Zero Prestige, which designs kites and kite-powered vehicles, and Open Prosthetics, which offers free exchange of designs for prosthetic devices.

Open-source hardware projects for the electronic artist

Blazecock Pileon — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 13:06:25 -0800

To work around the proprietary whims of digital audio software developers and laptop processor limitations during the mid- and late-1990s, a small band of technically-minded people, including the electronic musician Blitter, pulled together in the late 1990s to engineer the open-source OPEN DSP EZ-Kit platform, a 16-bit computer designed entirely with a focus on low cost and extensible control and DSP arithmetic capabilities. While this project and similar commercial offerings never seemed to gain the critical mass needed to sustain long-term interest, perhaps the new Arduino hardware project from MIT's Processing hardware group may gain a foothold with Processing and Pure Data audio software hobbyists and artists alike, allowing the creative community to extend, enhance and share inventive uses of new technology. Arduino's use has already begun in fascinating museum installations around the world, and has become a part of this year's SONAR and Ars Electronica festivals.

Buy now, pay later.

davehat — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 04:50:33 -0800

FlexGo™. Microsoft targets emerging markets with pay as you go and subscription models.

Wiring an Intelligent World

digaman — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 10:16:54 -0800

What is ubiquitous computing or "ubicomp," other than a geeky buzz-phrase for smart objects, "things that think"? In his provocative new book Everyware (freely excerpted here and here), interface designer and MeFite Adam Greenfield provides a thoughtful meditation on one of the digital world's most resonant hopes for the future, encompassing everything from pervasive RFID-chipping, Orwellian surveillance, and a humbly practical magic wand to a "coming age of calm technology."

A photo tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab

nakedcodemonkey — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 16:10:33 -0800

Welcome to Microsoft's Mac Lab.

My caps are backwards

cellphone — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 20:29:50 -0800

Bad Caps. A site dedicated to the faulty capacitors present in even highly-rated manufacturers' boards. There's a forum with individual boards dedicated to identifying specific boards with faulty caps.

Blogger Destroys Router

brownpau — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:20:56 -0800

Ah, remember the olden days when Blogger had to beg for money from users to get new hardware? These days, the hardware is begging Blogger -- FOR MERCY.

Laser-etched PowerBooks

nthdegx — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 05:47:11 -0800

Laser-etched PowerBooks.

New monitor technology brought to light

crocos — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 02:08:59 -0800

High Dynamic Range (HDR) imagery rendered in software is only half the story if your monitor can't actually display that full dynamic range. Bit-Tech has an excellent article on an actual HDR-capable display brought out by a crowd called Brightside Technologies (formerly Sunnybrook Technologies).

Needless to say, you want this. And it can be had, for the bargain price of $50000 USD.

Here's more on various HDR Display technologies. Brightside HDR is also covered at HardwareSecrets and Toms Hardware Guide. The Max Planck Institut has their take on HDR, Hyperfocal Design has a few good links if you're interested in trying your own hand at HDR content creation, and here's Brightside's own take on HDR and gaming.

The Pixel Reanimator

pmbuko — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:06:48 -0800

Bring dead LCD pixels back to life! Did you know you can often fix dead LCD pixels by forcing them to rapidly cycle through red, green, and blue? Neither did I, but the video linked here worked on one of my older screens after a few hours of looped playback. YMMV, but what have you got to lose?

Faberge Mice

dirtynumbangelboy — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:28:49 -0800

Because everybody needs a beautiful mouse.