The chip shortage and port blockages have driven up the average price, but higher-end models could still see steep discounts. …read more Source:: CNet

Zack Nelson decided to go back in time and add a suitably classic storage medium to a retrocomputing project, in the form of a cassette interface. Hackaday reports: The cassette player he had available was a Pearlcorder L400, which uses the smaller microcassette instead of the familiar audio tapes used in your Walkman or boombox….

You should free your iPhone from its case already. Mine occasionally wears a cover, but the majority of the time it’s caseless. Here’s why. …read more Source:: CNet

Rubik’s cubes are a popular puzzle — one found exciting or infuriating depending on your personal bent. [PuzzLEGO] has designed a LEGO Rubik’s cube, with the latest revision improving on flimsy earlier designs. The first step was to design a core that would allow the cube to rotate freely without being too loose. This involved…

NASA’s Perseverance rover has recorded up to five hours of sounds on the Mars, giving engineers a sense of how the Red Planet sounds different from Earth. Space.com reports: NASA now has a Perseverance rover website filling up with Martian audio, ranging from wind gusts to the sounds of rover driving as it seeks spots…

[Matterhackers] has a nice video tutorial on using vacuum forming to create plastic items. Sure, you have a 3D printer, but vacuum forming has some advantages if you are making thin and flexible items quickly. But don’t feel bad. The master item in the process is from a 3D printer. Like a mold, the forming…

Plus: Explore the limits of language models in bizarre research experiment, and more In brief A man was detained in Japan for selling uncensored pornographic content that he had, in a way, depixelated using machine-learning tools.… …read more Source:: TheRegister

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Tim De Chant: Over the last year and a half, as the pandemic has everyone turned to their screens, demand has surged for devices (phones and laptops) and cloud services (Netflix and Zoom), all powered by a range of advanced semiconductors. Manufacturers have raced…

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the military alliance of 30 countries that border the North Atlantic Ocean, this week announced that it would adopt its first AI strategy and launch a “future-proofing” fund with the goal of investing around $1 billion. VentureBeat reports: Military.com reports that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will join other…

Here at Hackaday we love the good kinds of hacks, but now and then we need to bring up a less good kind. Today it was learned that the NPM package ua-parser-js was compromised, and any software using it as a library may have become victim of a supply chain attack. What is ua-parser-js and…