Essays
A look at five overlooked HTML and CSS features: the form attribute for linking elements outside forms, validation control with novalidate, language-based styling with :lang(), the inset shorthand property, and mathematical constants in calc().
Essays
A team at LANIT turned a simple lighting automation task into Safety Alert — a computer-vision-based mobile device that detects safety violations on factory floors and warns workers in real time with voice alerts.
Reverse Engineering
The author bought a cheap children's camera for his 3-year-old, but the menu was too complex. He reverse-engineered the unknown HX3302B processor, identified it as a little-endian OpenRISC-1000, and patched the firmware to boot directly into camera mode.
Science
We interact daily with technologies we don't truly understand — and that gap between familiarity and comprehension is more dangerous than it seems. From fake bomb detectors costing lives in Iraq to NASA being unable to recreate its own moon rocket engine, the cost of technological illiteracy is very real.
Science
The remarkable story of the Soviet M-17 and M-55 stratospheric aircraft — originally designed as Cold War spy balloon interceptors, they set 25+ world records and were repurposed as flying laboratories studying Earth's ozone layer.
Essays
The story of the Elf, the only Soviet-era 8-bit game console, built on ZX Spectrum architecture in early 1990s Belarus — and why it couldn't survive the Dendy onslaught.
Programming
I took a job sweeping floors at a supermarket, then spent my free time converting the floor plan into a graph, writing a C++ simulated-annealing optimizer, and learning that optimizing the wrong metric is worse than not optimizing at all.
Programming
The original source code of the 1992 Russian MS-DOS game "Pole Chudes" (a Wheel of Fortune equivalent) was lost forever — so one developer reverse-engineered the entire binary and rewrote it in C, uncovering EGA graphics tricks, RLE sprite formats, AI cheating logic, and a word list encrypted with XOR. The reconstructed source is now open on GitHub.
Essays
A nostalgic memoir about growing up surrounded by Soviet encyclopedias, from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia to children's dictionaries — and how perforated index cards and magazine collections formed an analog knowledge base long before the digital age.
Essays
A senior engineer explains why experienced developers often choose silence over intervention when they spot doomed projects, introducing the concept of influence as a bank account that must be spent strategically.
Essays
An electronics engineer creates the 'Error Board' — a diagnostic PCB with intentional circuit errors — to identify passionate young engineering talent during job interviews, replacing ineffective traditional assessment methods.
Essays
A personal memoir of growing up in the late Soviet era and discovering the magic of computers through a ZX Spectrum clone — six games that changed everything.