Jenny List

European Correspondent and Contributing Editor at Hackaday

Engineer & tech journo. Hackaday contributing editor. Hackspaces, Trans Rescue, She/'Er. at JennyList at mastodon dot social at jennylist dot bsky dot social

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Articles

All You Need To Know About Photographic Lenses

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

If you have ever played around with lenses, you’ll know that a convex lens can focus an image onto a target. It can be as simple as focusing the sun with a magnifying glass to burn a hole in a piece of paper, but to achieve the highest quality images in a camera there is a huge amount of optical engineering and physics at play to counteract the imperfections of those simple lenses.
Bento Is An All-In-One Computer Designed To Be Useful

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

All-in-one computers in which the mainboard lurked beneath a keyboard were once the default in home computing, but more recently they have been relegated to interesting niche devices such as the Raspberry Pi 400 and 500. The Bento is another take on the idea, coming at it not with the aim of replacing a desktop machine, instead as a computer for use with wearable display glasses. The thinking goes that when your display is head mounted, why carry around a screen with your laptop.
Game Boy? NES? Why Not Both!

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

If you’re a retro Nintendo fan you can of course carry a NES and a Game Boy around with you, but the former isn’t very portable. Never fear though, because here’s [Chad Burrow], who’s created a neat handheld console that emulates both. It’s called the Acolyte Handheld, and it sports the slightly unusual choice for these parts of a PIC32 as its main processor. Unexpectedly it can use Sega Genesis controllers, but it has the usual buttons on board for portable use.
ESP32 Dashboard Is A Great Way To Stay Informed

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

The original ESP32 may be a little long in the tooth by now, but it remains a potent tool for connected devices. We were drawn to [Max Pflaum]’s ESP32 Dashboard as a great example, it’s an ESP32 hooked up to an e-paper display. The hardware is simple enough, but the software is what makes it interesting. This is deigned as a configurable notification tool, so to make it bend to the user’s will a series of widgets can be loaded onto it.
Capturing Screenshots Using A Fake Printer

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

If you have very old pieces of analogue test equipment with CRTs on your bench, the chances are they will all have surprisingly similar surrounds to their screens. Back when they were made it was common to record oscilloscope screens with a Polaroid camera, that would have a front fitting for just this purpose. More recent instruments are computerized so taking a screen shot should be easier, but that’s still not easy if the machine can’t save to a handy disk.
The PCB Router You Wish You Had Made

1 week ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

The advent of cheap and accessible one-off PCB production has been one of the pivotal moments for electronic experimenters during the last couple of decades. Perhaps a few still etch their own boards, but many hobbiest were happy to put away their ferric chloride. There’s another way to make PCBs, though, which is to mill them. [Tom Nixon] has made a small CNC mill for that purpose, and it’s rather beautiful.
Taking A One Handed Keyboard To The Next Level

2 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

When a wrist mounted keyboard floated past in the Hackaday feed, a mental image surfaced, perhaps something like a Blackberry keyboard mounted on a wrist cuff, maybe with some kind of display. It’s impressive indeed then to open the link and see [AdamLeBlanc]’s Schist01. It’s a wrist mounted keyboard, but with its bracket curving in front of the had to support a custom ergonomic chording keyboard, it’s definitely a break from the norm.
The Billionth Repository On GitHub Is Really Shitty

2 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

What’s the GitHub repository you have created that you think is of most note? Which one do you think of as your magnum opus, the one that you will be remembered by? Was it the CAD files and schematics of a device for ending world hunger, or perhaps it was software designed to end poverty? Spare a thought for [AasishPokhrel] then, for his latest repository is one that he’ll be remembered by for all the wrong reasons.
This Relay Computer Has Magnetic Tape Storage

2 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

Magnetic tape storage is something many of us will associate with 8-bit microcomputers or 1960s mainframe computers, but it still has a place in the modern data center for long-term backups. It’s likely not to be the first storage tech that would spring to mind when considering a relay computer, but that’s just what [DiPDoT] has done by giving his machine tape storage. We like this hack, in particular because it’s synchronous.
Let’s Buy Commodore! Well, Somebody Is.

2 weeks ago | hackaday.com | Jenny List

When a man wearing an Atari T-shirt tells you he’s buying Commodore it sounds like the plot for an improbable 1980s movie in which Nolan Bushnell and Jack Tramiel do battle before a neon synthwave sunset to a pulsating chiptune soundtrack. But here on the screen there’s that guy doing just that, It’s [Retro Recipes], and in the video below he’s assembling a licensing deal for the Commodore brand portfolio from the distant descendant of the Commodore of old.