Spinning Magnets Do Your Dice Rolling For You

Dice are about the simplest machines possible, and they’ve been used since before recorded history to generate random numbers. But no machine is so simple that a little needless complexity ca…

Weird Things To Do With FPGAs

There’s an old joke about how can you find the height of a building using a barometer. One of the punchlines is to drop the barometer from the roof and time how long it takes to hit the groun…

Random Number Generator Is A Blast From The Past

Hackers love random numbers, or more accurately, the pursuit of them. It turns out that computers are so good at following our exacting instructions that they are largely incapable of doing anythin…

Roll The Radioactive Dice For Truly Random D&D Play

When you have a bunch of people gathered around a table for a “Dungeons & Dragons” session, you have to expect that things are not always going to go smoothly. After all, people who…

Random Robot Makes Random Art

For the price of a toothbrush and a small motor with an offset weight, a bristlebot is essentially the cheapest robot that can be built. The motor shakes the toothbrush and the bristle pattern allo…