Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components

Product Information

UK visitors wait 2.5 hours to get through immigration at Heathrow https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45165222

Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/11/some-notes-on-mastodon/ (h/t Nelson Minar) How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) Cops accidentally record themselves admitting they harassed activist at rodeo owners’ request: “God, we’re gonna get sued” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgSfCxq0hdY Inductors typically consist of a coil of insulated wire wrapped around a core of magnetic material like iron or ferrite, a ceramic filled with iron oxide. Current flowing around the core produces a magnetic field that acts as a sort of flywheel for current, smoothing out changes in the current as it flows through the inductor. The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024The only downside to this book is the omission of mechanical keyboards, which is a missed opportunity for those (like me) who are interested in learning about the inner workings of these devices - specifically I would have loved to see a switch cross-section.

I did. The book is Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components, by Windell Oskay and Eric Schlaepfer, and it is a drop-dead gorgeous collection of photos of electronic components, painstakingly cross-sectioned and polished: None of the Above won the 2016 election https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/09/new-data-makes-it-clear-nonvoters-handed-trump-the-presidency/ Eric Schlaepfer was trying to fix a broken piece of test equipment when he came across the cause of the problem—a troubled tantalum capacitor. The component had somehow shorted out, and he wanted to know why. So he polished it down for a look inside. He never found the source of the short, but he and his collaborator, Windell H. Oskay, discovered something even better: a breathtaking hidden world inside electronics. What followed were hours and hours of polishing, cleaning, and photography that resulted in Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components (No Starch Press, 2022), an excerpt of which follows. As the authors write, everything about these components is deliberately designed to meet specific technical needs, but that design leads to “accidental beauty: the emergent aesthetics of things you were never expected to see.” WinCo: worker-owned grocery chain that pays benefits, pensions, living wages — and has lower prices than WalMart https://business.time.com/2013/08/07/meet-the-low-key-low-cost-grocery-chain-being-called-wal-marts-worst-nightmare/

Latest Comments

In case you're wondering if it's really possible to craft a malicious USB cable that injects badware into your computer and is visually indistinguishable from a regular cable, the answer is a resounding yes, and of course, Hak5 sells those cables, with a variety of USB tips:) ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing keynote (Minneapolis), Oct 16