Make a Tiny 9V Battery Power Switch From Parts of an Old 9V Battery

When you’re building your own custom electronics projects, a simple power switch isn’t always easy to find. If you have some DIY projects that use 9V batteries , this super small power switch is fairly easy to build and is mostly made from an old 9V battery. Read more…

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Make a Tiny 9V Battery Power Switch From Parts of an Old 9V Battery

Old Marconi Patent Inspires Tiny New Gigahertz Antenna

agent elevator writes Gehan Amaratunga and a group of engineers in England noted that the Guglielmo Marconi’s famous British patent application from 1900 had an interesting and little noticed detail. It depicted a transmitter linked to an antenna connected to a coil, which had one end dangling while the RF signal was fed to the middle of the coil. That detail inspired them to develop a way to reduce the size of a GHz antenna without significant transmission loss by using dielectrics as the radio wave emitting material instead of conductors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Old Marconi Patent Inspires Tiny New Gigahertz Antenna

Smart Lock Pioneer UniKey Raises $10m And Looks Outside The Home For Growth

 Way back in the year 2011 Phil Dumas’ company UniKey Technologies debuted its product on Shark Tank. It was a lock that used your smartphone as a key. Disruption! At the time smart locks were not really a thing yet UniKey plowed yet as the market exploded with similar products. Now, five years after its primetime debut, UniKey is announcing an oversubscribed Series A to charge forward… Read More

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Smart Lock Pioneer UniKey Raises $10m And Looks Outside The Home For Growth

Why You Should Periodically Replace Your Surge Protectors

A decent surge protector is an important piece of equipment in any office or entertainment center. They don’t last forever, though, so make sure you take the time and purge your surge on occasion to keep your electronics protected. Read more…

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Why You Should Periodically Replace Your Surge Protectors

Apple Declares Death To All The Ports

 Apple just announced its latest MacBook. It’s tiny. It makes the Macbook Air look like a Dell Inspiron circa 2002. But hopefully you’re not one of those jerks that actually uses the ports on the side of your computer. This MacBook only has a single USB-C and it does everything from charging, to sending video out and transporting data. It’s the only port on the computer… Read More

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Apple Declares Death To All The Ports

Voltera, The Electronics Printer, Launches To Much Fanfare

 One of our absolute favorites from the Hardware Battlefield just launched on Kickstarter and they are, if you’ll excuse the cliché, crushing it. The company appeared on our stage at CES 2015 and showed of an early working prototype. Now, however, they’re ready to take orders and start shipping. The printer is essentially a PCB maker. You put in a board, upload a circuit diagram, … Read More

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Voltera, The Electronics Printer, Launches To Much Fanfare

Jaasta: Is This E-Ink Keyboard (Finally) The End For Time-Honored Design Tradition?

There’s a certain respect afforded to the rare designer who has reached the highest levels of keyboard shortcuttery—a masterfulness attained only when the self and the software (be it CAD or Adobe) become one. Whilst effortless key stroke knowledge of a chosen tool can be achieved through years of dedicated daily practice—young devotees required to spend many consecutive days and nights in intimate communion with their keyboards in pursuit of perfection—only true touch typing demi-gods can commit multiple program key combinations to memory, laying down one set and picking up another in the time it takes to switch between screen. This ancient art and time-honored tradition (handed down across generations for millennia decades) could, however, be about to fade into insignificance. Jaasta is a promising customisable E-Ink auxiliary keyboard soon to run the gauntlet of a crowdfunding campaign. Whilst customizable keyboards are really nothing new (see ’05 , ’09 and ’13 ) this challenge to QWERTY conformity— simple and use-case driven in it’s vision; enabled by rapid developments in E-Ink technology—could be the most convincing yet. (more…)

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Jaasta: Is This E-Ink Keyboard (Finally) The End For Time-Honored Design Tradition?

Engineer Combines Xbox One, PS4 Into Epic ‘PlayBox’ Laptop

MojoKid writes We can finally stop arguing over which is the superior game console, the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. Quite frankly, it’s a pointless debate, and it took a self-taught engineer to put the argument to rest, which he did by combining both game systems into a 22-inch laptop. Meet the “PlayBox, ” a gaming laptop that’s equal parts Xbox One and PS4 rolled into one. The PlayBox wins the argument because it allows you to play games on either system, and when it comes down to it, the ability to play games is all that matters. Built for a “specific customer, ” the owner of this prototype system needn’t worry about exclusives since he now has a system that can play them all, and do it while taking up no more space than a single console. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Engineer Combines Xbox One, PS4 Into Epic ‘PlayBox’ Laptop

An Applied Investigation Into Graphics Card Coil Whine

jones_supa writes We all are aware of various chirping and whining sounds that electronics can produce. Modern graphics cards often suffer from these kind of problems in form of coil whine. But how widespread is it really? Hardware Canucks put 50 new graphics cards side-by-side to compare them solely from the perspective of subjective acoustic disturbance. NVIDIA’s reference platforms tended to be quite well behaved, just like their board partners’ custom designs. The same can’t be said about AMD since their reference R9 290X and R9 290 should be avoided if you’re at all concerned about squealing or any other odd noise a GPU can make. However the custom Radeon-branded SKUs should usually be a safe choice. While the amount and intensity of coil whine largely seems to boil down to luck of the draw, at least most board partners are quite friendly regarding their return policies concerning it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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An Applied Investigation Into Graphics Card Coil Whine

Samsung Announces The Galaxy A5 And Galaxy A3, Its “Slimmest Smartphones To Date”

 Samsung vowed to introduce more metallic devices when it revealed its disappointing Q3 2014 earnings yesterday, and it wasted no time doing so after announcing the Galaxy A5 and the Galaxy A3 — two metallic devices that it calls its “slimmest smartphones to date.” Read More

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Samsung Announces The Galaxy A5 And Galaxy A3, Its “Slimmest Smartphones To Date”