Fairly serious hardware hackers and makers like to post lists of all the gear they use for whatever it is they do (mostly the big-name Youtubers and bloggers who do a lot of retrotech work and reverse engineering). That's all well and good, but I'm just a schmuck from Pittsburgh who likes to mess around with stuff. While cleaning up my office over the holidays I decided that maybe I should put one of those lists together because maybe it would help someone later. So, here is just about every tool that I have sitting on, under, around, or within …

The Hitachi corporation has come out with a new generation of RFID tags, and get this: They're about as large around as a human hair and 5 microns thick. In fact, they're unobtrusive to the tune of 0.05mm by 0.0.05mm in size. They're calling it RFID dust, and it's an order of magnetude smaller than the smallest RFID chips that Hitachi has on the market, the so-called mu-chips, which are only 0.4mm on a side. RFID dust doesn't have a lot of storage capacity, at most 128 bits of data, but they're so tiny, they could …