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4829 Articles

Death Of The Cheque: Australia Moves On

August 20, 2025 by 108 Comments

Check (or cheques) have long been a standard way for moving money from one bank account to another. They’re essentially little more than a codified document that puts the necessary information in a standard format to ease processing by all parties involved in a given transaction.

The check was once a routine, if tedious, way for the average person to pay for things like bills, rent, or even groceries. As their relevance continues to wane in the face of newer technology, though, the Australian government is making a plan to phase them out for good.

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How Laser Headlights Died In The US

August 18, 2025 by 140 Comments

Automotive headlights started out burning acetylene, before regular electric lightbulbs made them obsolete. In due time, halogen bulbs took over, before the industry began to explore even newer technologies like HID lamps for greater brightness. Laser headlights stood as the next leap forward, promising greater visibility and better light distribution.

Only, the fairytale didn’t last. Just over a decade after laser headlights hit the market, they’re already being abandoned by the manufacturers that brought them to fruition. Laser headlights would end up fighting with one hand behind their back, and ultimately became irrelevant before they ever became the norm.

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The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services

August 18, 2025 by 86 Comments

Open any consumer electronics catalog from around the 1980s to the early 2000s and you are overwhelmed by a smörgåsbord of devices, covering any audio-visual and similar entertainment and hobby needs one might have. Depending on the era you can find the camcorders, point-and-shoot film and digital cameras right next to portable music players, cellphones, HiFi sets and tower components, televisions and devices like DVD players and VCRs, all of them in a dizzying amount of brands, shapes and colors that are sure to fit anyone’s needs, desires and budget.

When by the late 2000s cellphones began to absorb more and more of the features of these devices alongside much improved cellular Internet access, these newly minted ‘smartphones’ were hailed as a technological revolution that combined so many consumer electronics into a single device. Unlike the relatively niche feature phones, smartphones absolutely took off.

Fast-forward more than a decade and the same catalogs now feature black rectangles identified respectively as smart phones, smart TVs and tablets, alongside evenly colored geometric shapes that identify as smart speakers and other devices. While previously the onus for this change was laid by this author primarily on the death of industrial design, the elephant in the room would seem to be that consumer electronics are suffering from a terminal disease: subscription services.

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For Americans Only: Estimating Celsius And Other Mental Metrics

August 14, 2025 by 194 Comments

I know many computer languages, but I’ve struggled all my life to learn a second human language. One of my problems is that I can’t stop trying to translate in my head. Just like Morse code, you need to understand things directly, not translate. But you have to start somewhere. One of the reasons metric never caught on in the United States is that it is hard to do exact translations while you are developing intuition about just how hot is 35 °C or how long 8 cm is.

If you travel, temperature is especially annoying. When the local news tells you the temperature is going to be 28, it is hard to do the math in your head to decide if you need a coat or shorts.

Ok, you are a math whiz. And you have a phone with a calculator and, probably, a voice assistant. So you can do the right math, which is (9/5) x °C + 32. But for those of us who can’t do that in our heads, there is an easier way.

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How The Widget Revolutionized Canned Beer

August 14, 2025 by 76 Comments

Walk into any pub and order a pint of Guinness, and you’ll witness a mesmerizing ritual. The bartender pulls the tap, fills the glass two-thirds full, then sets it aside to settle before topping it off with that iconic creamy head. But crack open a can of Guinness at home, and something magical happens without any theatrical waiting period. Pour it out, and you get that same cascading foam effect that made the beer famous.

But how is it done? It’s all thanks to a tiny little device that is affectionately known as The Widget.

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Design Review: LattePanda Mu NAS Carrier

August 12, 2025 by 17 Comments

It is a good day for design review! Today’s board is the MuBook, a Lattepanda Mu SoM (System-on-Module) carrier from [LtBrain], optimized for a NAS with 4 SATA and 2 NVMe ports. It is cheap to manufacture and put together, the changes are non-extensive but do make the board easier to assemble, and, it results in a decent footprint x86 NAS board you can even order assembled at somewhere like JLCPCB.

This board is based on the Lite Carrier KiCad project that the LattePanda team open-sourced to promote their Mu boards. I enjoy seeing people start their project from a known-working open-source design – they can save themselves lots of work, avoid reinventing the wheel and whole categories of mistakes, and they can learn a bunch of design techniques/tips through osmosis, too. This is a large part of why I argue everyone should open-source their projects to the highest extent possible, and why I try my best to open-source all the PCBs I design.

Let’s get into it! The board’s on GitHub as linked, already containing the latest changes.

Git’ting Better

I found the very first review item when downloading the repo onto my computer. It took a surprising amount of time, which led me to believe the repo contains a fair bit of binary files – something quite counterproductive to keep in Git. My first guess was that the repo had no .gitignore for KiCad, and indeed – it had the backups/ directory with a heap of hefty .zips, as well as a fair bit of stuff like gerbers and footprint/symbol cache files. I checked in with [LtBrain] that these won’t be an issue to delete, and then added a .gitignore from the Blepis project.

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