Kritik sah

Well there’s your problem. (Credit: Bits und Bolts, YouTube) Recently [Bits und Bolts] stumbled over a pair of Dragon 3000 branded 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards in his unfixed cards pile, and decided that the best course of action was to not only fix them, but also run them in SLI for some sweet Unreal Tournament action. Naturally, these cards being in the broken cards pile meant that he first had to figure out why they were broken and fix all issues . The advantage of having two identical Voodoo 2 cards is of course that any missing components, like some resistors on one card, could be referenced on the other card. Beyond that it was mostly a matter of reflowing clearly corroded pins on the ICs and replacing damaged resistors and resistor arrays before the first tests could be run. Using the mojo utility it was easy enough to spot that there were still some lingering issues, with clear issues visible in 3D games as well. These were tracked down to a dodgy pin on one of the texture mapp...

Unlike on Mars where for decades we have had dozens of orbital and ground-based platforms zipping and scurrying about to prod at every bit of emitted radiation, rock type and twitch of dust devils in its thin atmosphere, for other planets and their moons we have to do a lot more speculative interpretation of data. Such was the case with the presumed existence of water plumes on Jupiter’s moon Europa. These now appear to have been a statistical fluke , per research by [L. Roth] et al. in  Astronomy & Astrophysics . As succinctly summarized in the article on this by [Javier Barbuzano] of  Sky and Telescope , the original 2013 finding of said water plumes by the same team was based on faint UV emissions from Europa’s southern hemisphere as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. However, in more recent captures these emissions were not detected again, leading them to reexamine their original analysis of the 2013 data. One of the main flaws was in the assumption of where ...

If you work with radio, the chances are that before too long you’ll be winding an inductor. At radio frequencies these won’t be big chunky transformer style chokes, but often air-cored affairs supported by their own rigidity. As grizzled old radio amateurs will tell you though, relying on such a coil for stability is a fool’s errand. It will shift inductance from the slightest movement, thermal expansion, or even sound. Luckily [ SolderSmoke] is here to remind us of the trusty fix , in the form of Q-dope, or a polystyrene solution that dries to form a rigid low-dielectric coating. Where this is being written it wasn’t on the market so it was more usual to use nail lacquer, but reading the piece it seems American hams swore by the stuff. That’s in the past tense because it seems it’s no longer on the market. Even there though help is at hand, because dissolving packaging polystyrene in solvent yields an acceptable substitute. There’s even an 11-...

A buckminsterfullerene, also known as a buckyball, is typically a fullerene consisting of sixty carbon atoms (C 60 ) arranged in a way that resembles a football-like sphere. Extending this arrangement to other types of atoms has until now however proven as illusive as finding non-carbon-based lifeforms. In a paper by [Hyun Wook Choi] et al. and published in  Chemical Science the discovery of boron buckyballs is detailed. There is also a soft-paywalled article in the  Chemical & Engineering News magazine for a higher-level perspective. The discovered boron-based buckyball ups the number of atoms to eighty, forming B 80 (boron fullerite) with a slightly larger diameter than C 60 at 0.85 nm versus 0.71 nm. Perhaps more interesting are the claims by the authors that boron fullerite may have more practical applications than its carbon-based cousin, mostly due to it being predicted to be a semiconductor with an 0.8 eV energy gap and better electron acceptance that provides interes...

No, we’re not talking about cultural appropriation of Japan’s most famous form of short poem–this is the other Haiku, the open-source descendant of BeOS, which now has a fully-native meshcore chat client called  Sestriere , thanks to the efforts of one [Atomozero]. Of course you’ll need a LoRa radio to act as a modem, but anything that speaks USB serial– which is any of the ESP32-based offerings on the market–should work. This is interesting in that we don’t see many desktop applications leveraging LoRa networks– meshtastic or meshcore– so for one to appear for the relatively-obscure BeOS derivative is just neat. It’s also a nice peice of work: the chat window is full featured, organizing your contacts, and communicating not just with text but emojis and reaction GIFs. GIFs seem a bit extravagant for LoRa bandwith, but apparently it works. There are also Codec2-based voice messages, another thing that we didn’t expect to...

As straightforward as the concept of taking battery packs out of an old electric or hybrid car and reusing them for home power storage sounds, this thought process skips a few essential steps. As argued by [Ed] in a recent video based on his own experiences with high-voltage Nissan Leaf batteries in a home PV system, the main problem is that you’re taking a battery out of a larger system including a lot of the management hardware and software. The referenced Battery Emulator project is an open source effort to create a suitable interface between these EV batteries, with the mentioned Nissan Leaf being just one example in the project Wiki, with the connection scheme shown in the top image. It’s also noted that the Leaf battery BMS is not designed to operate continuously, so they need to be restarted every day or so lest they become too inaccurate. These and other things are all solid reasons why you have to be absolutely certain that you want to integrate these high-volt...