Ep 319: Experimental Archaeology, Demoscene Oscilloscope Music, and Electronic Memories

It's the podcast so nice we recorded it twice! Despite some technical difficulties (note to self: press the record button significantly before recording the outro), Elliot and Dan were able to soldier through our rundown of the week's top hacks.

We kicked things off with a roundup of virtual keyboards for the alternate reality crowd, which begged the question of why you'd even need such a thing. We also looked at a couple of cool demoscene-adjacent projects, such as the ultimate in oscilloscope music and a hybrid knob/jack for eurorack synth modules.

We also dialed the Wayback Machine into antiquity to take a look at Clickspring's take on the origins of precision machining; spoiler alert -- you can make gas-tight concentric brass tubing using a bow-driven lathe.

There's a squishy pneumatic robot gripper, an MQTT-enabled random number generator, a feline-friendly digital stethoscope, and a typewriter that'll make you Dymo label maker jealous. We'll also mourn the demise of electronics magazines and ponder how your favorite website fills that gap, and learn why it's really hard to keep open-source software lean and clean. Short answer: because it's made by people.