Kritik sah

As fun as mucking about with simulated environments in a laboratory is, at some point you have to do those field tests to demonstrate that your prototype actually works in the real world, under real conditions. This is what the [Plasma Channel] recently did for their fog harvesting system by setting it up in the Namib desert . We previously covered the atmospheric water harvesting attempts, using electrostatic precipitation to draw the moisture in the air onto the collectors where it can then be harvested. This is rather different from existing approaches with e.g. fine meshes and hoping that enough water molecules bump into your mesh, so theoretically it should be much more efficient. In the lab it worked well, but reality always has the last word. The Namib desert is at the top of the world’s most arid regions, competing with the Atacama desert. What it does have going for it is regular fog rolling in that lasts until sunrise, providing a good target for water harvesting. In...

This week Jonathan chats with Benjamin Samuels of Trail of Bits! The conversation focuses on Patch the Planet, a new initiative to help Open Source projects deal with the fallout from AI coding and vulnerability research. What’s the unexpected dichotomy driving the polarized response to LLMs? And what does the future look like for Open Source in the age of AI? Watch to find out! https://trailofbits.com/patch-the-planet/ https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/07/02/field-reports-from-patch-the-planet/ Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel ? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here . Direct Download in DRM-free MP3. If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode . Places to follow the FLOSS Weekly Podcast: Spotify RSS Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompet...

After just a little over 25 years of the Haiku project trying to keep the BeOS spirit alive, the team has now released Beta 6. The spicy details of what is now all better can naturally be found in the detailed release notes . Part of the size of these release notes is due to the previous beta release being two years ago, though nightly builds have kept Haiku users appeased in the meantime. The headline features that are new compared to the previous release include the ability to run the Firefox browser and derivatives, QEMU hardware virtualization using the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor (NVMM), improved POSIX and hardware compatibility, as well as many bug fixes. Unfortunately 64-bit ARM support still has to wait a bit longer. Naturally, such a joyful new release wouldn’t go unnoticed by [Action Retro], who decided to celebrate by installing this new release on a stack of old laptops that he bought for a dollar each. With system requirements starting at a Pentium II with 256 ...

The Claymore mine is a rather fearsome weapon of war, using explosives to blast a cone of shrapnel towards advancing enemies. It’s not really something you should try and build at home. An airsoft version, though, is altogether more appropriate. [RegiBlackwood] has developed a simple way to build exactly that. It’s a cheap and cheerful build, with the claymore housing itself built out of cardboard. Wooden dowels are used to stake it into the ground, just like the real thing. In the center of the housing sits a regular old mouse trap. Only, it’s been modified to hold a sling carrying a payload of BBs. The trap is also tweaked to make its spring more powerful, and to enable it to be triggered with the tug of a tripwire. When triggered, the mousetrap fires and hurls the sling forth, spewing a rain of BBs from the front of the device—ideally quelling the advance on your position. Built properly, it’s a fun piece of airsoft hardware that could really change the dyna...

In a recent video [Sqwerks] does a deep-dive into the problem of disintegrating plastic enclosures of Nintendo DS consoles. These original NDS handheld consoles have a metallic-like coating that appears to interact with the ABS plastic, causing yellowing as well as extreme brittleness and correspondingly broken hinges. Unsurprisingly, this causes the shell to essentially disintegrate the moment you try to disassemble them for something like a screen replacement. While somewhat the opposite of plasticizer migration into ABS from PVC insulation that we covered before , the underlying cause is probably similar, with the Transformers toy community having come to call it Gold Plastic Syndrome (GPS) based on the fact that it were mostly gold-colored parts on these plastic toys that seemed to be affected. Over time the additives used to add a cool metal sheen and swirls to the plastic appear to interact in a way that makes the ABS plastic very brittle. Although the underlying cause of GPS...

Want to feel the heat of nearby fire, explosions, or radiation? Or even just the gentle warmth and breeze of a sunny day in the wasteland? If you said yes, you’re in luck because [GingasVR] created an immersive heat mod and wind mod for the VR version of Fallout 4 that leverages economical smart outlets and game scripting to do just that. The heart of this hack lies in gluing two things that don’t normally go together. In this case [GingasVR] uses a bit of game scripting to control TP-Link HS100 or HS110 Smart Plugs, allowing virtual events to control things in the real world. An ordinary fan in a smart plug creates wind on demand, and heat comes from a 250 watt infrared heat lamp aimed toward the player. For heat, an IR lamp is the way to go because it’s highly directional, can be quickly cycled on and off, and responds rapidly. The range of immersive effects opened up by this is pretty compelling. Sunny weather yields a gentle glow of warmth, but nearby explosio...