Author Archive

Right to Repair in Europe

“People want everything to be a lot more repairable than it is now.” While there’s still a long way to go, advocates say, European thinking on the topic appears years ahead of that in the United States. Specifically, Europe’s new regulations demand that manufacturers of washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, and displays (including televisions) make spare

Electrical meter hacking

There was an urban legend back in the days of mechanical electricity meters, that there were “lucky” appliances that once plugged in would make the meter go backwards. That was not practical. Even modern meters be fooled into doing strange things though, as a team at the University of Twente have demonstrated by making modern

CEEFORM Connectors

The CEE form, also known as CEEFORM, is an abbreviation of Certification of Electrotechnical Equipment. Ceeform is a certificate for electrical equipment. It was formerly published by a European body called Commission internationale de réglementation en vue de l’approbation de l’équipement électrique, which is now superseded by IECEE. The “cee” in ceeform socket and ceeform

SH-666 microphone

The microphone of the beast? Depends on the culture. We’ve all heard about the infamous number 666, which is rather cryptically referred to as the “number of the beast” in the New Testament, and has more recently become known as the number of the Antichrist. In the Bible, 666 is also the number of talents

DOS at 40

This day in history August 12,1981, MS-DOS is released. Now you know. MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Default user interface: Command-line (COMMAND.COM), text (DOS Shell) Final release: 8.0 (Windows Me) / September 14, 2000; 20 years ago Initial release date: 1981 Source model: Closed source; open source

Metaverse

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of those in the technology community have imagined a future state of, if not quasi-successor to, the Internet – called the “Metaverse”. Metverse is a vision of the future networking that sounds fantastical. The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space[1] including the sum of all virtual

WWW at 30

Today is the 30rd anniversary of the public release of the World Wide Web project thst had been under development since 1989. Its original homepage still exists! http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

ATX12VO STANDARD

The venerable ATX standard was developed in 1995 by Intel. It uses a power supply with many output voltages to motherboard. Ever since the original ATX PSU standard, the improvements have been gradual and never disruptive. Intel has been feeling some years that it is time to update the way PC motherboards. Starting in 2019,