IEEE Spectrum Geek Life Channel

Rapid and resourceful technological improvisation has long been a mainstay of warfare, but the war in Ukraine is taking it to a new level. This improvisation is most conspicuous in the ceaselessl...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine-hackers-war

All right, confession time. I don’t use my handheld ham radio for much more than eavesdropping on the subway dispatcher when my train rumbles to a mysterious halt in a dark tunnel. But even I c...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/quansheng-uv-k5-hacking

Sometimes extreme procrastination works in your favor. Procrastination certainly played a role in this month’s Hands On, which was 20 years in the making. So, too, did family, and place, and wh...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/vintage-audio-repair

Accurate timing is something that’s always been of interest to me. These days we rely heavily on time delivered to us over the Internet, through radio waves from GPS satellites, or broadcast st...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/diy-ocxo-quartz-clock

Note: This post was originally published on the author’s Github repository for this project. As described in the accompanying Hands On article , this project is a digital clock that uses a h...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ocxo-clock

Once upon a time, if you cracked open the pages of IEEE Spectrum you could spot full-page advertisements for analog computers , boasting of their ease of use and even—in the case of one model b...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/try-this-new-analog-computer

Many of us have gotten used to being able to dampen unwanted sound, thanks to the noise-cancellation technology found in, for example, Apple’s AirPods Pro earbuds . But this tech gets you only...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/hi-fi-ear-defenders

When the home computer revolution arrived, it filled my childhood with fascination and inspired me to study computer engineering. I wanted to design a microcomputer to my own specifications. But...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/dual-6502-z80-programmable-architecture

I HAVE ONLY ONCE felt an earthquake—in 1985, when a magnitude-4 temblor occurred just north of New York City. It wasn’t until I heard the news reports later that I realized the vibration tha...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/diy-seismometer

A group of hacker-activists in Nigeria, in the wake of setbacks in the conventional court system, have taken their appeal to a higher authority—the court of public opinion. And to bolster their...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/sensor-networks-nigeria-pollution-tracking

MY HOME OF Port Townsend in Washington is a community full of arty types and makers. Calls to participate in local cultural activities are not uncommon, but when I saw one for a pinhole-camera p...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-digital-pinhole-camera

EASTERN EUROPEAN Cold War–era computing has a poor reputation. The picture is one of a landscape littered with uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs, British ZX Spectrums , and other We...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/yugoslavia-diy-microcomputer

While driving home one night recently, I saw a spectacularly bright meteor flash across the sky in front of my car. A good-sized chunk of interplanetary detritus must have been on its way to a c...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/all-sky-camera

As I read the newest papers about DNA-based computing , I had to confront a rather unpleasant truth. Despite being a geneticist who also majored in computer science, I was struggling to bridge t...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/turing-meets-pacman

UPDATE: 16 FEB. 2024: The Flipper Zero continues to give authorities the heebie-jeebies about illicit electronic access in a way that we haven’t really seen since Blue Boxes entered mainstream...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/flipper-zero-hackers-delight

Brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, are having a bit of a moment: Big tech companies have invested in the development of these neurotechnologies—designed to connect brains to digital machinery...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/neurotechnology-diy

Last year for Hands On, I gutted a defunct TRS-80 Model 100. The goal was to upgrade its 24 kilobytes of RAM and 2.4-megahertz, 8-bit CPU but keep the notebook computer’s lovely keyboard and L...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/using-i2c-to-upgrade-a-tandy

RUSSIA’S INVASION OF UKRAINE and the skyrocketing fuel prices that ensued last year got me thinking about how to cut down on my consumption of gasoline. I thought briefly about purchasing a ca...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/mpguino

THERE IS CURRENTLY A lot of interest in AI tools designed to help programmers write software. GitHub’s Copilot and Amazon’s CodeWhisperer apply deep-learning techniques originally develope...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/infinite-pong-with-ai

ACCORDIONS COME IN MANY shapes. Some have a little piano keyboard while others have a grid of black and white buttons set roughly in the shape of a parallelogram. I’ve been fascinated by this ...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/two-commodore-64s-one-accordion

THIS MONTH WE’RE celebrating the launch of our second PDF collection of Hands On articles, which IEEE members can download from IEEE Spectrum’s website and share with friends. So we thought w...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/best-diy

NORMALLY, WHEN IT comes to radio-related projects, my home of New York City is a terrible place to be. If we could see and hear radio waves, it would make an EDM rave feel like a sensory depriv...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/passive-radar-with-sdr

LAST YEAR I picked up a Tandy Model 100 at the Vintage Computer Festival East for about US $90. Originally released in 1983, it was the forerunner of today’s notebook computers, featuring a g...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/upcycle-a-vintage-lcd

I’VE NEVER HAD an interest in pursuing game such as deer or grouse. Hunting was never my thing. But I do enjoy a good technical challenge. And I recently found a challenge that involves huntin...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/chasing-weather-balloons-with-sdr

THE SPACECRAFT THAT took men to the surface of the moon and back relied on computers that pushed the state of the art when they were built. Designed by MIT, the Apollo Guidance Computers came wit...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/weave-your-own-apollo-era-memory

One month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a group of more than 100 makers from all over Ukraine manufactured and supplied a number of 3D-printed products to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine-3d-printing

BEFORE FLAT SCREENS, before even cathode-ray tubes, people watched television programs at home thanks to the Nipkow disk . Ninety years ago in places like England and Germany, broadcasters trans...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/mechanical-tv

When the Ukrainian invasion began, the Internet Archive launched several efforts to capture the Ukrainian Internet. Its archivists launched a high-volume crawl through hundreds of thousands of w...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/internet-archive-ukraine

First released in 2005, the Arduino microcontroller turbocharged the maker movement. While more advanced boards have joined the Arduino line since, the basic Uno microcontroller remains popular...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/arduino-jolly

For a long time I owned a beloved Sansui Electric integrated amplifier. These audio amplifiers combine a preamplifier for boosting the sound signal and a power amplifier for driving the loudspea...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-web-enabled-high-quality-diy-audio-amp