Hardware Highlight: The Snag Nab-It

How is your knowledge of knots? Despite being an Eagle Scout, I would have to answer: very poor. While I’m confident that just about everyone knows the Overhand knot, the Reef knot (or Square knot), a shoelace knot (or more), and a Slip knot. As a Boy Scout, throw a Bowline into that mix. And yet, if I was tasked to tie a knot outside the context...

Introduction Back in 2013, Marc Scott wrote a great blog post: Kids can’t use computers…and this is why it should worry you. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it! In my opinion, Scott’s take was true in 2013, and even more true now, over a decade later. An arguably-too-brief summary of the post is: despite the...

I subscribe to the idea that in many cases, people don’t need new laptops. In fact, in the spirit of refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle as a means to help the world, one might argue that people not only don’t need new laptops, they shouldn’t get new laptops. I think this is particularly true in cases like mine, where most of my development...

Sometimes, you discover that someone manufactures a little piece of (non-computer) hardware that just perfectly solves a particular problem; plus, you can get for well less than $1. Today, I want to highlight one of my favorite examples of this type of discovery.

Some of you have likely heard of the Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB). It’s an expensive keyboard built for programmers, that has developed a small cult following of sorts over the years for some of its opinionated design choices (e.g., Topre switches). Eiiti Wada, the CS professor who collaborated on the design of the keyboard, is well known for...