Hack a day

Speaking is much faster than typing, and while it’s an increasingly convenient way to interact with computers, it’s hardly private. Providing speech privacy in a way we haven’t seen before is this prototype tongue-reading system that uses machine learning and ultrasound to read...

Preservationists usually take great care to prevent fungi from appearing the world of art, but in the case of [Kexin Wang]’s Funguy project, the fungus itself is the art. It uses a laser diode to repeatedly trace an outline onto a dish of agar gel in which fungus is growing, and the photophobic ...

Vehicles long ago began to incorporate electronics and software, to the point that modern vehicles increasingly have a sort of architecture problem. The software end of things evolves ever more rapidly, but vehicles and their centralized architecture are poorly-suited to continuous updates. As a result, the automotive industry is moving away from static, hardware-defined desi...

Targeted towards refined female gamers unlike the savagery of the mainstream game consoles of the era, 1995’s Casio Loopy was a bit of an oddity of a game console. Despite being standard enough in its design and backed by the might of Casio, it saw only one year of active software development and hardware manufacturing ceased by the end of 1998. With only eleven titles releas...

As unique the Nintendo Wii U Gamepad may appear to be, at its core it’s pretty much just a tablet with game controls stuck on it. Now that the communication between the Wii U and the Gamepad have been fully reverse-engineered and poured into easy to use software, this opens the possibility of using other tablets with suitable controls on them for Wii U Gamepad purposes,