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True-Spectrum Photography with Structural Color

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Although modern cameras can, with skill and good conditions, produce photographs nearly indistinguishable from the original scene, this fidelity relies on the limitations of human vision. According to the trichromatic theory, humans perceive light as a mixture of three colors, which can be recorded and represented by cameras, displays, and color printing; a spectrometer, however, can detect a clear distance between the three colors present in a photograph and the wide range of spectra in the original scene. By contrast, one of the earliest color photography methods, Lippmann plates , captured not just true color, but true spectra. A Lippmann plate, as [Jon Hilty] details , starts with a layer of photographic gel containing extremely fine silver halide crystals over the back of a glass plate. This layer is placed on top of a mirror, traditionally a mercury bath, and put in the camera. When light passes through the emulsion and reflects off the mirror, it interferes with incoming light...
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ReactOS Gets Unified Installer Image and a New Storage Stack

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Although the ReactOS project is in no rush to dethrone Windows as the desktop operating system of choice, this doesn’t mean that some real changes aren’t happening. Most recently two big changes got merged, the first pertaining to the separate boot- and live CD images that are now merged into a single image , and the second being a new PnP-aware ATA storage stack for ATA and AHCI devices, with NT6+ compatibility. Although there is still a separate live CD for now, this first change means that testing and installing ReactOS becomes easier, and that the old-school text-based installer may soon be on its way out as well. Having the new ATA storage stack in place will translate into much better compatibility with real hardware, including the ability to use more hardware to install on and boot from compared to the old UniATA driver. Combined, these two changes should bring the ReactOS installation and usage experience a lot closer to that of Windows, as well as many Linux dis...
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Hackaday Links: May 3, 2026

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Software that collects public data from the Internet and uses it to provide half-assed answers to your questions might seem like a modern craze, but today we bid farewell to a website that helped pioneer pretend conversations all the way back in 1997 — as of May 1st, Ask Jeeves is no more . Well, technically they dropped the “Jeeves” part back in 2006. Since then it’s just been Ask.com, but as the name implies the idea was more or less the same. Rather than the relatively rigid parameters and keywords required by traditional search engines, you could ask Jeeves questions about the world using natural language. Early advertisements showed the virtual valet answering arbitrary questions like “How many calories in a banana?,” which of course today seems commonplace and utterly unimpressive, but was a pretty wild for the 1990s. It might seem surprising that a site designed from day one to offer a human-like Q&A experience should fold right as such ...
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iPod Nano Gets Three Monitors

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Triple monitor workstations are pretty common these days, particularly for those wishing to maximise screen space for greater productivity. [Will It Work?] has put together a sillier take on this concept, however, hooking the diminutive iPod Nano up to three monitors instead. The 6th-generation iPod nano brought forth a new form factor – it’s the postage stamp-sized one that you could clip to your workout gear. It’s not typically what you’d call a productivity device, but there is a way to get more out of it. The trick is to grab a 30-pin Keyboard Dock, which allows access to the composite video signal from the iPod. It was originally designed for the iPad, but it works with the iPad nano too with a 30-pin spacer adapter – just don’t expect the keys to do anything. This setup also allows access to the 3.5mm four-pole jack, which handles audio input and output. With a bunch of additional cables and adapters, the iPod was able to be hooked up to three ...
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Building a C-3PO You Can Really Talk To

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C-3PO is one of the more famous movie robots out there. However, we don’t see a lot of replicas built, perhaps because in speech and mannerisms, he’s quite hard to replicate. Of course, that feat has become much more achievable with modern AI tech, as [Samuel Potozkin] demonstrates. We’re not looking at a full C-3PO build here, it’s just the head—but for the project’s purposes, that’s all that was really required. The build relies on a Raspberry Pi 5 as the brains of the droid. It’s running a mic hooked up to a real time speech to text engine, and that text is then sent to a large language model for interpretation. Responses are then generated, passed through a processing layer to capture C-3PO’s general tone and vibe, and then handed off to a text-to-speech synth to imitate the iconic voice, played via speaker. The end result is a C-3PO you can actually talk to, which is something that might have knocked a few socks off when the movie fi...
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Matching Transistors

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Transistors in some circuit configurations work together and, frequently, need to be matched. This is so common that you can sometimes find ICs that are just a pair of transistors made with the same piece of silicon, so they should be matched very closely by default. But with discrete transistors, two devices of the same type are not always identical. [Learn Electronics Repair] covers the topic and explains how to match devices in the video below. Depending on the circuit, the matching parameters may be different, but generally, the idea is that you want similar gains or matching saturation characteristics. The reason is that when you have multiple transistors working together, you don’t want one to do more work than the other device. This is inefficient and could drive the “better” component to fail. The same idea applies in bridge circuits, where you might match resistors or capacitors to make sure that, for example, two 10% resistors are very close to the same v...
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Let Twitch Chat Control Your LED Strings

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Once upon a time, someone set up a livestream wherein the messages from Twitch chat could control a game of Pokemon. Since then, we’ve seen Twitch control all sorts of things. If you’d like to have them play with some LEDs in your house, you might like this project from [pfeiffer3000]. The concept is simple enough. The heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller, which is easy to integrate with web services thanks to its onboard WiFi capability. It’s hooked upt o a string of WS2812B addressable RGB LEDs. The LEDs themselves are installed within table tennis balls to act as nice, spherical diffusers, and installed in a square frame made of PVC pipes. As for code, the rig uses the WLED library to drive the LED strings, and code from TwitchIO to interface with Twitch chat itself. It’s as simple as rigging up a bit of Python. With everything assembled, [pfeiffer3000] had an attractive LED grid that could be controlled directly by anyone watching their Twitch stre...
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