In 2025, The Philly Maker Faire Finds Its Groove

The first Philadelphia Maker Faire was extremely impressive, and seemed poised to be one of the premier maker events on the East Coast. Unfortunately, it had the misfortune of happening just a few months before COVID-19 made such events impossible. Robbed of all its momentum, the event tried out different venues after the shadow of the pandemic was gone, but struggled to meet the high bar set by that inaugural outing.

But after attending the the 2025 Philadelphia Maker Faire this past weekend, I can confidently say the organizers have moved the needle forward. This year marks the second time the event has been held at the Cherry Street Pier, a mixed-use public space with an artistic bent that not only lends itself perfectly to the spirit of Maker Faire but offers room for expansion in the future. The pier was packed with fascinating exhibits and excited attendees, and when the dust settled, everyone I spoke to was thrilled with how the day went and felt extremely positive about the future of the Faire.

Providing coverage of an event like this is always difficult, as there’s simply no way I could adequately describe everything there was to see and do. The following represents just a few of the projects that caught my eye; to see all that the Philadelphia Maker Faire has to offer, I’d strongly suggest you make the trip out in 2026.

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Which Browser Should I Use In 2025?

Over the history of the Web, we have seen several major shifts in browsing software. If you’re old enough to have used NCSA Mosaic or any of the other early browsers, you probably welcomed the arrival of Netscape Navigator, and rued its decline in the face of Internet Explorer. As Mozilla and then Firefox rose from Netscape’s corpse the domination by Microsoft seemed inevitable, but then along came Safari and then Chrome. For a glorious while there was genuine competition between browser heavyweights, but over the last decade we’ve arrived at a point where Chrome and its associated Google domination is the only game in town. Other players are small, and the people behind Firefox seem hell-bent on fleeing to the Dark Side, so where should we turn? Is there a privacy-centric open source browser that follows web standards and doesn’t come with any unfortunate baggage in the room? It’s time to find out. Continue reading “Which Browser Should I Use In 2025?”

Supercon 2024: Quick High-Feature Boards With The Circuit Graver

These days, if you want to build something with modern chips and components, you probably want a custom PCB. It lets you build a neat and compact project that has a certain level of tidiness and robustness that you can’t get with a breadboard or protoboard. The only problem is that ordering PCBs takes time, and it’s easy to grow tired of shipping delays when you don’t live in the shadow of the Shenzhen board houses.

[Zach Fredin] doesn’t suffer this problem, himself. He’s whipping up high-feature PCBs at home with speed and efficiency that any maker would envy. At the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, he was kind enough to give a talk to explain the great engineering value provided by the Circuit Graver.

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Ditto That

A ditto'd school newsletter from 1978.
All the news that was fit to print. Image via Wikipedia

In the 1982 movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High, a classroom of students receives a set of paperwork to pass backward. Nearly every student in the room takes a big whiff of their sheet before setting it down. If you know, you know, I guess, but if you don’t, keep reading.

Those often purple-inked papers were fresh from the ditto machine, or spirit duplicator. Legend has it that not only did they smell good when they were still wet, inhaling the volatile organic compounds within would make the sniffer just a little bit lightheaded. But the spirit duplicator didn’t use ghosts, it used either methanol (wood alcohol), isopropyl, or, if you were loaded, ethyl alcohol.

Invented in 1923 by Wilhelm Ritzerfeld, ditto machines were popular among schools, churches, and clubs for making copies of worksheets, fliers, and so on before the modern copy machine became widespread in the 1980s. Other early duplicating machines include the mimeograph, the hectograph, and the cyclostyle.

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Australia’s Steady March Towards Space

The list of countries to achieve their own successful orbital space launch is a short one, almost as small as the exclusive club of states that possess nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union was first off the rank in 1957, with the United States close behind in 1958, and a gaggle of other aerospace-adept states followed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Italy, Iran, North Korea and South Korea have all joined the list since the dawn of the new millennium.

Absent from the list stands Australia. The proud island nation has never stood out as a player in the field of space exploration, despite offering ground station assistance to many missions from other nations over the years. However, the country has continued to inch its way to the top of the atmosphere, establishing its own space agency in 2018. Since then, development has continued apace, and the country’s first orbital launch appears to be just around the corner.

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The Everlasting Hunt For The Loch Ness Monster

When a Loch Ness Monster story appears at the start of April, it pays to check the date on the article just to avoid red faces. But there should be no hoax with this one published on the last day of March, scientists from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre were conducting underwater robotics tests in Scotland’s Loch Ness, and stumbled upon a camera trap lost by Nessie-hunters in the 1970s. Just to put the cherry on the cake of a perfect news story, the submarine in question is the famous “Boaty McBoatface”, so named as a consolation after the British Antarctic Survey refused to apply the name to their new ship when it won an online competition.

The Most Extreme Instamatic in The World

An NOC scientist holds the camera in its container
Sadly the NOC haven’t released close-ups of the inner workings of the device.

The camera trap has survived five decades underwater thanks to a sturdy glass housing, and appears to be quite an ingenious device. A humble Kodak Instamatic camera with a 126 film and a flash bulb is triggered and has its film advanced by a clockwork mechanism, in turn operated by a bait line. Presumably because of the four flash bulbs in the Kodak’s flash cube, it’s reported that it could capture four images. The constant low temperature at the bottom of a very deep loch provided the perfect place to store exposed film, and they have even been able to recover some pictures. Sadly none of then contain a snap of Nessie posing for the camera.

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On Egyptian Pyramids And Why It’s Definitely Aliens

History is rather dull and unexciting to most people, which naturally invites exciting flights of fancy that can range from the innocent to outright conspiracies. Nobody truly believes that the astounding finds and (fully functioning) ancient mechanisms in the Indiana Jones and Uncharted franchises are real, with mostly intact ancient cities waiting for intrepid explorers along with whatever mystical sources of power, wealth or influence formed the civilization’s foundations before its tragic demise. Yet somehow Plato’s fictive Atlantis has taken on a life of its own, along with many other ‘lost’ civilizations, whether real or imagined.

Of course, if these aforementioned movies and video games were realistic, they would center around a big archaeological dig and thrilling finds like pot shards and cuneiform clay tablets, not ways to smite enemies and gain immortality. Nor would it involve solving complex mechanical puzzles to gain access to the big secret chamber, prior to walking out of the readily accessible backdoor. Reality is boring like that, which is why there’s a major temptation to spruce things up. With the Egyptian pyramids as well as similar structures around the world speaking to the human imagination, this has led to centuries of half-baked ideas and outright conspiracies.

Most recently, a questionable 2022 paper hinting at structures underneath the Pyramid of Khafre in Egypt was used for a fresh boost to old ideas involving pyramid power stations, underground cities and other fanciful conspiracies. Although we can all agree that the ancient pyramids in Egypt are true marvels of engineering, are we really on the cusp of discovering that the ancient Egyptians were actually provided with Forerunner technology by extraterrestrials?

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