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How The Widget Revolutionized Canned Beer

August 14, 2025 by 36 Comments

Walk into any pub and order a pint of Guinness, and you’ll witness a mesmerizing ritual. The bartender pulls the tap, fills the glass two-thirds full, then sets it aside to settle before topping it off with that iconic creamy head. But crack open a can of Guinness at home, and something magical happens without any theatrical waiting period. Pour it out, and you get that same cascading foam effect that made the beer famous.

But how is it done? It’s all thanks to a tiny little device that is affectionately known as The Widget.

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Smartphone Hackability, Or, A Pocket Computer That Isn’t

August 11, 2025 by 76 Comments

Smartphones boggle my mind a whole lot – they’re pocket computers, with heaps of power to spare, and yet they feel like the furthest from it. As far as personal computers go, smartphones are surprisingly user-hostile.

In the last year’s time, even my YouTube recommendations are full of people, mostly millennials, talking about technology these days being uninspiring. In many of those videos, people will talk about phones and the ecosystems that they create, and even if they mostly talk about the symptoms rather than root causes, the overall mood is pretty clear – tech got bland, even the kinds of pocket tech you’d consider marvellous in abstract. It goes deeper than cell phones all looking alike, though. They all behave alike, to our detriment.

A thought-provoking exercise is to try to compare smartphone development timelines to those of home PCs, and see just in which ways the timelines diverged, which forces acted upon which aspect of the tech at what points, and how that impacted the alienation people feel when interacting with either of these devices long-term. You’ll see some major trends – lack of standardization through proprietary technology calling the shots, stifling of innovation both knowingly and unknowingly, and finance-first development as opposed to long-term investments.

Let’s start with a fun aspect, and that is hackability. It’s not perceived to be a significant driver of change, but I do believe it to be severely decreasing chances of regular people tinkering with their phones to any amount of success. In other words, if you can’t hack it in small ways, you can’t really make it yours.

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VRML And The Dream Of Bringing 3D To The World Wide Web

August 7, 2025 by 15 Comments

You don’t have to be a Snow Crash or Tron fan to be familiar with the 3D craze that characterized the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular. From phrases like ‘surfing the information highway’ to sectioning websites as if to represent 3D real-life equivalents or sorting them by virtual streets like Geocities did, there has always been a strong push to make the Internet a more three-dimensional experience.

This is perhaps not so strange considering that we humans are ourselves 3D beings used to interacting in a 3D world. Surely we could make this fancy new ‘Internet’ technology do something more futuristic than connect us to text-based BBSes and serve HTML pages with heavily dithered images?

Enter VRML, the Virtual Reality Modelling Language, whose 3D worlds would surely herald the arrival of a new Internet era. Though neither VRML nor its successor X3D became a hit, they did leave their marks and are arguably the reason why we have technologies like WebGL today.

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What Happens When Lightning Strikes A Plane?

August 5, 2025 by 24 Comments

Lightning is a powerful force, one seemingly capable of great destruction in the right circumstances. It announces itself with a searing flash, followed by a deep rumble heard for miles around.

Intuitively, it might seem like a lightning strike would be disastrous for something like a plane flying at altitude. And yet, while damage is possible, more often than not—a plane will get through a lightning storm unscathed. Let’s explore the physics at play.

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Power Line Patrols: The Grid’s Eye In The Sky

July 29, 2025 by 18 Comments

Those of us who like to monitor air traffic with ADS-B aggregators such as FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange tend to see some interesting flight paths. I’m not talking about the truly ambitious pictures drawn by pilots, or even the more ribald ones, but rather flights that follow paths that seem to make little sense from either a commercial or leisure standpoint.

Most of these mystery flights have long straight stretches interrupted by occasional tight loops, and often cover great distances across rural and urban landscapes alike. A glance at the ADS-B data indicates that these flights are usually pretty close to the ground, and are often completed by helicopters. Occasionally, the registration of the aircraft will even indicate ownership by some “three-letter” federal agency.

Although mystery helicopters flying odd patterns in the sky seems like a good excuse to don a tinfoil hat and head to one’s bunker, chances are pretty good that these aircraft are engaged in a far less nefarious and far more useful endeavour: aerial transmission line patrols. These flights are key to keeping the transmission lines that form the backbone of the grid in tip-top shape, especially at a time of unprecedented growth in load and a shift in the generation profile away from fossil fuels towards renewables.

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The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics

July 23, 2025 by 187 Comments

It’s often said that what’s inside matters more than one’s looks, but it’s hard to argue that a product’s looks and its physical user experience are what makes it instantly recognizable. When you think of something like a Walkman, an iPod music player, a desktop computer, a car or a TV, the first thing that comes to mind is the way  that it looks along with its user interface. This is the domain of industrial design, where circuit boards, mechanisms, displays and buttons are put into a shell that ultimately defines what users see and experience.

Thus industrial design is perhaps the most important aspect of product development as far as the user is concerned, right along with the feature list. It’s also no secret that marketing departments love to lean into the styling and ergonomics of a product. In light of this it is very disconcerting that the past years industrial design for consumer electronics in particular seems to have wilted and is now practically on the verge of death.

Devices like cellphones and TVs are now mostly flat plastic-and-glass rectangles with no distinguishing features. Laptops and PCs are identified either by being flat, small, having RGB lighting, or a combination of these. At the same time buttons and other physical user interface elements are vanishing along with prominent styling, leaving us in a world of basic geometric shapes and flat, evenly colored surfaces. Exactly how did we get to this point, and what does this mean for our own hardware projects?

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A Field Guide To The North American Cold Chain

July 17, 2025 by 22 Comments

So far in the “Field Guide” series, we’ve mainly looked at critical infrastructure systems that, while often blending into the scenery, are easily observable once you know where to look. From the substations, transmission lines, and local distribution systems that make up the electrical grid to cell towers and even weigh stations, most of what we’ve covered so far are mega-scale engineering projects that are critical to modern life, each of which you can get a good look at while you’re tooling down the road in a car.

This time around, though, we’re going to switch things up a bit and discuss a less-obvious but vitally important infrastructure system: the cold chain. While you might never have heard the term, you’ve certainly seen most of the major components at one time or another, and if you’ve ever enjoyed fresh fruit in the dead of winter or microwaved a frozen burrito for dinner, you’ve taken advantage of a globe-spanning system that makes sure environmentally sensitive products can be safely stored and transported.

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