A very cool home project - you can build a working 555 timer chip out of individual transistors. It's one thing to know that ICs are made of transistors, it's another thing to assemble it by hand and then have it be usable. The very first PCB I made in school used a 555, so this is very cool.
I just love this story - The first streamer was a 12 year old on public access TV in 1993
Sep 30th: Black Mesa is a re-write of the original Half-Life game, on a modern engine with updated graphics, puzzles and game play. It's a fan-made conversion, that took years, but it's really good.
Sep 17th: If you read and enjoyed Bad Blood, the Theranos book, then you will probably want to listen to the "Final Chapter" podcast that talks about what's happened between then and now. The trial is just kicking off and the podcast is tracking that as it happens too.
Sep 17th: Can you fit a whole game into a QR code? Some Windows assembly goodness in this video.
I missed it at the time, but Nick Quaranto updated my 2011 Lego Carcassone post with a 5x5 version, back in 2014. Unfortunately the post now 404s, but the wayback machine has a copy.
With the latest update to the CDC recommendations for international travel (trdr: don't), I wanted to visualize the stats of different countries. I found this neat little webapp that lets you interactively assign colors, export the data as JSON and then build a static PNG:
Sep 13th: More on Havana Syndrome, courtesy of @matts - Science Vs have done a podcast episode on the phenomenon. Lots of good info in there, but their conclusion is a little disappointing
Sep 10th: I've been following the "Havana Syndrome" story for a few years, and it's just keeps getting weirder. The BBC had a good summary of what we know.
This is the personal website of Cal Henderson, Slack co-founder & CTO.
I give occasional talks, write code and sometimes articles.
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