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The Camera-Shy Hoodie
A DIY wearable project that uses infrared LEDs to hide the wearer's face from IR security cameras, documented with photo…
The Challenger Disaster
How Richard Feynman cut through NASA bureaucracy on the Challenger commission and showed the O-ring flaw with a glass of…
The Computer Genius the Communists Couldn't Stand
The story of Jacek Karpinski, who built a briefcase-sized computer in 1970s Poland that ran a million operations per sec…
The Curious Case of MD5
A curious investigation into why the International Criminal Court hashes digital evidence with MD5, and whether that old…
The Curious Case of the Raspberry Pi in the Network Closet
A detective story about finding a rogue Raspberry Pi hidden in an office network, tracing it with help from Reddit and c…
The Data Structures of Roads
A programming essay on how procedural road networks are represented in code, covering the data structures that make gene…
The Director of Toy Story Also Drew the BSD Daemon
A short bit of computing trivia revealing that John Lasseter, director of Toy Story, drew the BSD daemon mascot, with th…
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The distractions of social media, 1673 style
Historian Tom Standage shows how 17th century English coffeehouses were accused of wasting time and ruining productivity…
The Era of American Computer Magazines Has Drawn to a Close
A nostalgic look at the end of the American computer magazine, from buying Maximum PC at airport newsstands to what disa…
The Exact Location Where the Web Was Invented
A bit of web-history detective work that pins down the exact building and office at CERN where Tim Berners-Lee invented…
The First Apple Homepage
Kevin Fox digs up what may be Apple's earliest homepage from the early 1990s and walks through its screenshot, links and…
The Fractal Nature of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
A behind-the-scenes look at the visual effects of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, covering the fractal design of Ego and…
The Fraud Supply Chain
Patrick McKenzie's essay on how credit card fraud really works as an industry, with specialized firms selling stolen car…
The Fun Factor of the Video Game Uplink
A game-design essay on why Uplink, the hacking simulation, is so compelling, looking at its interface, pacing and sense…
The Game Boy Pocket SP
Allison Parrish recounts modding a Game Boy Pocket into a folding clamshell handheld she calls the Pocket SP, with photo…
The Gold Standard of Optimization: RollerCoaster Tycoon
A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon and the assembly-level tricks that let one developer make the classic park…
The GPT-3 Architecture, on a Napkin
A hand-drawn, step-by-step diagram tour of how GPT-3 turns words into predictions, covering embeddings, attention and la…
The Graphing Calculator Story
Ron Avitzur tells how, after his project was cancelled, he and a friend kept sneaking into Apple without jobs or badges…
The greatest program ever written
A game programmer's short ode to David Horne's 1K ZX Chess, a playable chess program squeezed into the tiny memory of a…
The History of Microsoft Flight Simulator
A visual walkthrough of every Microsoft Flight Simulator release since 1982, with screenshots showing how graphics and f…
The History of UTF-8 as Told by Rob Pike
Rob Pike's first-hand email recounting how he and Ken Thompson designed UTF-8 on a diner placemat in one evening in 1992…
The Infinite Jukebox, 10 Years Later
Paul Lamere looks back on building the Infinite Jukebox, the Music Hack Day toy that loops a favorite song forever by ju…
The Interface of Kai Krause's Software
A design-history essay on the famously strange, tactile interfaces of Kai Krause's Kai's Power Tools and Bryce, and why…
The Internet from Rocks
A long, friendly explainer that builds the whole stack from sand and transistors up through logic gates, CPUs, operating…
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