a-ha

A 1953 US Navy training film explaining the basic mechanisms in mechanical fire control computers aboard ships. It shows how gears, differentials and cams solved mathematical problems in permanent mechanical form.

Feature-length documentary following DeepMind's AlphaGo program as it prepares for and plays the 2016 match against Go champion Lee Sedol. It covers the team, the games, and the emotional reaction of the Go world to an AI beating a top human.

A WIRED Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen, covering its hardware-prototyping culture and shanzhai copycat manufacturing. It looks at how the city's ecosystem evolved and what the rest of the world can learn.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

An Asianometry documentary-style video on the rise and collapse of China's dockless bike-share boom. It covers the startups, the heavy subsidies and the price wars.

Valve's two-hour documentary for Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, with team members discussing development, nearly running out of money, being hacked, the publisher lawsuit and the birth of Steam.

Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.

BBC Earth shows killer whales working as a pod to create waves that wash seals off ice floes, with the producer explaining how the crew captured behavior once thought a myth.

Footage from the Chasing Ice project of the largest glacier calving event ever filmed, at Greenland's Ilulissat Glacier in 2008. A 75-minute event is condensed to a few minutes of cameras watching ice collapse.

A 57-minute account of Clifford Stoll's tracking of a KGB-linked hacker through Lawrence Berkeley Lab computers in 1986, the story of The Cuckoo's Egg. It covers the FBI and Chaos Computer Club involvement.

A five-hour documentary history of the Super Mario 64 A button challenge, which aims to beat the game with as few A presses as possible. It covers the bugs and exploits discovered over the years.

Planet of the Humans, a full documentary by Jeff Gibbs presented by Michael Moore, arguing that the green movement has been co-opted by corporate and wealthy interests and that techno-fixes are not enough.

A clip from Channel 4's Inside Nature's Giants in which Richard Dawkins shows the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe during a dissection. The nerve takes a long detour down the neck and back up.

Ben Anderson's VICE documentary shows embedded reporting on Afghan security forces and US Marines in Helmand during the troop drawdown, exposing incompetence, drug abuse and corruption.

People Make Games explores VRChat, the social virtual world that many consider the metaverse people actually like, interviewing users and covering its communities and uncertain future.

A short Great Big Story piece about Hagoromo, a Japanese chalk brand so prized that mathematicians stockpiled it, with some reportedly dealing it on the side. It tells the quirky tale of a writing tool whose supply became scarce.

An Empire Files documentary by Abby Martin presenting a critical account of the Afghanistan War, from the CIA's role in the 1980s to the stalemate of the 2010s and 2020. It argues the war was driven by imperial interests.

The first episode of CuriousMarc's series restoring a real Apollo Guidance Computer, led by AGC expert Mike Stewart. They set up a makeshift lab in a Houston hotel room to open up a rare machine owned by a private collector.

A 2007 Channel 4 documentary by Martin Durkin arguing that human-caused global warming is overstated or a scam. It features contrarian scientists such as Richard Lindzen and promotes sunspot and cosmic-ray explanations for temperature change. Its claims are rejected by mainstream climate science.

A long Gamers Nexus investigation into how volatile US tariffs affect the computer hardware industry. It interviews manufacturers and sellers about costs, margins and why moving production to the US is hard.

A roughly 3.5-hour Gamers Nexus investigation into rising PC component prices, driven largely by AI data-center demand for memory and other hardware. It draws on interviews with industry figures to argue that personal computing and ownership are being eroded.

The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.

A short BBC clip narrated by David Attenborough showing crows in Japan using city traffic to crack nuts, dropping them at intersections and retrieving them when the light changes.

The 1993 BBC Horizon documentary on Richard Feynman, using interviews with colleagues and Feynman's own storytelling. It covers his life and work through to his final illness.

Channel 4's George Clarke visits a council estate in Vienna and is surprised by amenities such as swimming pools and private TV channels. It showcases Vienna's high-quality social housing.

Al Baydha project co-founder Neal Spackman gives a final update nine years in, explaining how desertification followed the loss of indigenous land management and how the land has changed since inputs stopped in 2016. It lists which species worked best.

The first part of Dmitry Vasyukov's four-part Russian documentary series about trappers and villagers living in the Siberian taiga. This episode follows spring life along the Yenisei, with hunting, fishing and subsistence in harsh surroundings.

A short BBC Earth clip from David Attenborough's Life of Birds showing a lyrebird imitating sounds, including a chainsaw and camera shutter, so accurately it is hard to tell from the real thing.

A 1966 NASA safety film teaching workers how to handle toxic rocket propellants such as hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. It explains the hazards of these corrosive, flammable and toxic chemicals and what to do after contamination.

Part one of a four-part upload of a BBC Horizon documentary featuring Richard Feynman, in which he talks about physics and looking at the world from another point of view.

A 1936 Chevrolet promotional drama, 'Master Hands', showing car manufacturing from foundry to finished vehicle in Flint, Michigan. It is a National Film Registry selection and a record of early mass production.

Alain de Botton's 2004 documentary based on his book Status Anxiety, running over two hours. It asks why people in rich societies are still unhappy, and examines how worries about success, snobbery and meritocracy drive that anxiety.

The first part of Adam Curtis' documentary series on Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, who invented public relations. It shows how Bernays used Freud's ideas to link mass-produced goods to unconscious desires and create modern consumer persuasion.

The full documentary 'The Internet's Own Boy' about programmer and activist Aaron Swartz, with interviews with family, friends and internet figures. It covers his work on access to information and the legal case preceding his death.

Rob Scallon explores a five-story pipe organ, the largest in the Midwest, with organist John Sherer. The half-hour tour covers most of the instrument and how it works.

A look inside Dr Abrasive's lab as he engineers a flash-card replacement for the Sega Saturn optical drive after cracking its CD protection 20 years on.

A WGBH/NOVA re-enactment of Clifford Stoll's hunt for KGB-linked hacker Markus Hess, based on his book The Cuckoo's Egg. It starts from a 75-cent accounting discrepancy at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

An episode of Tim Hunkin's The Secret Life of Machines that explains how a washing machine works, using models, cut-aways and animations. It was first aired in 1988.

The 1990 NOVA documentary follows astronomer Clifford Stoll as he tracks a hacker through military and research computer networks, a story that involved the CIA and KGB. It is based on The Cuckoo's Egg.

Veritasium tells the story of the XZ backdoor, how a patient attacker became maintainer and nearly compromised SSH on Linux systems. It also covers free software history and how encryption in SSH works.