Kritik sah

You wake up in the middle of the night. Is it time to get up? Well, you can look at the nightstand clock. Unless your partner is in the way. Whoops. Even then, without your glasses, the time is just a fuzzball of light. You could ask Alexa, but that’s sure to wake your partner, too. The answer is a projection clock. In its modern form, it shoots a digital time display on a wall or ceiling with digits so large that you don’t need your glasses. If you can see the ceiling, you can tell what time it is. New Tech A modern invention, of course. No, not really. According to [Roger Russel], a UK patent in 1909 used an analog clock face and lightbulbs to project the clock face and hands on the ceiling. Unfortunately, [Roger’s] website is no more, but the Wayback Machine is on the job . You can see a device of the same type at the British Museum . A modern projection clock on the ceiling. In 1938, [Leendert Prins] filed for a patent on a similar projection clock . Sometimes known as “ceil...

You may or may not know, but printf is a Turing-complete language, once you exploit all the strange and wonderful format characters in it (especially %n). But who has time to write code as printf modifiers? Now, thanks to [sebsite], you can at least write in a slightly higher level assembly language and compile to printf . Practical? No. Cool? Undeniably. As an example, the page shows fizzbuzz written in the assembler: <pre><code>alias i, fizz, buzz ->fizz ([i] + 1) % 3 == 0 ->buzz ([i] + 1) % 5 == 0 ->i [i] + 1 ->exit [i] == 100 [i] if !![i] & ![fizz] & ![buzz] "Fizz" if [fizz] "Buzz" if [buzz] "\n" if [i]</code></pre> <pre> The alias keyword defines constants and, owing to default values, sets i to zero, fizz to one, and buzz to 2. The “arrow” statements store a result into a variable (so the first assignment sets the resulting value into fizz). You need C23 to compile the assembler. Good luck tr...

Many people who use water cooling in their computer systems like to go full-bore with ‘aquarium’ aesthetic, which includes adding a window to their cooling blocks so that they see the water flowing through the window from behind the case’s window. Traditionally PMMA acrylic is used for these windows, as it’s quite durable and easy to handle. Using glass offers some advantages over acrylic, but has its own disadvantages, most of all that it’s hard to process, but also that it’s known for shattering quite easily if pushed beyond its limits. This is why [der8auer] as a manufacturer of such water blocks has now spent a few years investigating the viability of using glass for this purpose. First and foremost is safety, with an early prototype glass water block suddenly shattering without clear cause. Although normally the water cooling loop is only expected to experience pressures of about 600 mbar, the new glass windows that are now entering mass-production had to be tested to their br...

We’ll start things off this week with some breaking news from NASA: just days after the space agency announced the Artemis II crew was preparing to blast off towards the Moon as soon as March 6th , a new problem with the Space Launch System rocket has pushed the launch back indefinitely. According to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman , problems encountered while loading helium into the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) necessitate rolling the massive rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for diagnosis and repair. The logistics of shuffling the vehicle 6.8 kilometers (4.2 miles) from the pad to the VAB is going to eat up at least a week, and sending it back the other way is naturally just as much of a production. Add in the time they’ll need to actually figure out what’s wrong with the ICPS and make the necessary repairs, and it’s easy to see why a March launch is almost certainly off the table. It’s frustrating to see the Artemis II mission get delayed this close...

Meshtastic has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance lately, as the off-grid, long-range radio text messaging protocol gains a ton of new users. It’s been used to create mesh networks in cities, during disasters and protests, in small groups while hiking or camping, and for search and rescue operations. Although it’s connected plenty of people together in all of these ways, [GreatScott!] wanted to put it to work connecting some computing resources instead. He has a garden shed that’s too far for WiFi, so Meshtastic was used to connect it instead . This isn’t a project to bring broadband Internet out to the shed, though; Meshtastic is much too slow for that. All he really wanted to do here was to implement a basic alarm system that would let him know if someone had broken in. The actual alarm triggering mechanism is an LED emitter-detector pair installed in two bars, one of which sends a 12V signal out if the infrared beam from the other is broken. They’re connected to a Heltec ESP...

Theoretically a belt drive makes for a great upgrade to a bicycle, as it replaces the heavier, noisy and relatively maintenance-heavy roller chain with a zero-maintenance, whisper-quiet and extremely reliable belt that’s rated at an amazing 20-30,000 km before needing a replacement. Of course, that’s the glossy marketing brochure version of reality, which differed significantly from what [Tristan Ridley] experienced whilst cycling around the globe. Although initially he was rather happy with his bike, its sealed car-like Pinion gearbox and Gates carbon belt drive system, while out in the wilds of Utah he had a breakdown when the belt snapped. When the spare belt that he had carried with him for the past months also snapped minutes later after fitting it on, it made him decide to switch back to the traditional bush roller chain . Despite this type of chain drive tracing its roots all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, they actually offer many advantages over the fancy carbon-fiber-...