[Fmilburn] was having fun with his grandkids, playing around with a small Radio Shack solar panel, some supercapacitors and a Zener diode when the kids eventually moved on to blowing bubbles with their grandmother. To regain their interest he got an inexpensive battery powered, soap Bubble Blaster and converted it to run on the solar…

There’s a world of worthy phones out there that you might never get to see. …read more Source:: CNet

A sloop-of-war, a WWII destroyer, a Cold War-era submarine, plus more tanks, lifeboats and historical buildings than you can shake a mast at. This is the Chatham Historic Dockyard and here’s a look around. …read more Source:: CNet

Someday Elon Musk might manage to pack enough of us lowly serfs into one of his super rockets that we can actually afford a ticket to space, but until then our options for experiencing weightlessness are pretty limited. Even if you’ll settle for a ride on one of the so-called “Vomit Comet” reduced-gravity planes, you’ll…

Slashdot reader datavirtue writes: I’ve tried a lot of phones for extended periods of time. Some of these have included the Samsung S4, S5, S8+, Note 4, S7, iPhone 5, and Huawei Honor 8. I have stayed away from Apple… My favorite phone was the Nokia 920 Windows phone for its fluid performance and simplicity…

The probe will race closer to the sun than we’ve ever been before to learn more about the solar flares that disrupt our technology. …read more Source:: CNet

There are a lot of good reasons to think fondly of the Nintendo GameCube. Metroid Prime and Rogue Leader knocked it out of the park. The Game Boy Player was cool. There’s even something to be said for having a convenient carrying handle on a system designed for couch multiplayer. But if you ask anyone…

The “world’s greatest comedian,” according to someone who knew funny. …read more Source:: CNet

David Gerard has concerns about the Joint Photographic Experts Group (the ISO working group handling the JPEG standard for image compression). “They seem to think they can advance the cause of DRM for JPEG images…with a bit of applied blockchain.” He bases that charge on the fact that the JPEG committee organized a special session…

Although there are a few exceptions, FPGAs are predominantly digital devices. However, many FPGA applications process analog data, so you often see an FPGA surrounded by analog and digital converters. This is so common that Opal Kelly — a producer of FPGA tools — launched the SYZYGY open standard for interconnecting devices like that. [Armeen]…