There’s a popular Sysadmin meme that system problems are “always DNS”. In the realm of security, it seems like “it’s always Unicode“. And it’s not hard to see why. Unicode is the attempt to represent all of Earth’s languages with a single character set, and that means there’s a lot of very similar characters. The two broad issues are that human users...

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: being able to build your own radios is the best thing about being an amateur radio operator. Especially low-power transmitters; there’s just something about having the know-how to put something on the air that’ll reach across the planet on a power budget measured in milliwatts. This standalone WSPR beacon...

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day it’s revealed that Skynet becomes self-aware in August of 1997, and promptly launches a nuclear attack against Russia to draw humanity into a war which ultimately leaves the door open for the robots to take over. But as you might have noticed, we’re not currently engaged in a rebellion against advanced combat robots. The...

If you’re like us, the oscilloscope on your bench is nothing special. The lower end of the market is filled with cheap but capable scopes that get the job done, as long as the job doesn’t get too far up the spectrum. That’s where fancier scopes with active probes might be required, and such things are budget-busters for mere mortals. Then again, something...

In the world of lambda calculus programming languages there are many ways to express the terms, which is why we ended up with such an amazing range of programming languages, even if most trace their roots back to ALGOL. Of the more unique (and practical) languages, Lisp and Forth probably range near the top, but what if you were to smudge both together?...

In the course of a career, you may run up against projects that get cancelled, especially those that are interesting, but deemed unprofitable in the eyes of the corporate overlords. Most people would move, but [Ron Avitzur] just couldn’t let it go. In 1993, in the midst of the transition to PowerPC, [Avitzur]’s employer let him go as the project they...