Kritik sah

We’re used to there being an array of high-end microprocessor architectures, and it’s likely that many of us will have sat in front of machines running x86, ARM, or even PowerPC processors. There are other players past and present you may be familiar with, for example SPARC, RISC-V, or MIPS. Back in the 1990s there was another, now long gone but at the time the most powerful of them all, of course we’re speaking of DEC’s Alpha architecture. [JP] has a mid-90s AlphaStation that doesn’t work, and as part of debugging it we’re treated to a description of its unusual boot procedure . Conventionally, an x86 PC has a ROM at a particular place in its address range, and when it starts, it executes from the start of that range. The Alpha is a little different, on start-up it needs some code from a ROM which configures it and sets up its address space. This is applied as a 1-bit serial stream, and like many things DEC, it’s a little unusual. This code lives in a conventional ROM chip with 8 da...

Everyone knows that ultrasonic cleaners are great, but not every device that’s marketed as an ultrasonic cleaner is necessarily such a device. In a recent video on the  Cheap & Cheerful YouTube channel the difference is explored, starting with a teardown of a fake one. The first hint comes with the use of the description ‘Multifunction cleaner’ on the packaging, and the second in the form of it being powered by two AAA batteries. Unsurprisingly, inside you find not the ultrasonic transducer that you’d expect to find in an actual ultrasonic cleaner, but rather a vibration motor. In the demonstration prior to the teardown you can see that although the device makes a similar annoying buzzing noise, it’s very different. Subsequently the video looks at a small ultrasonic cleaner and compares the two. Among the obvious differences are that the ultrasonic cleaner is made out of metal and AC-powered, and does a much better job at cleaning things like rusty parts. The annoying thin...

When you think about the dawn of modern computers, you often think about the work done in the UK and the US. But Australia had an early computer scene, too, and [State of Electronics] has done a series of videos about the history of computers down under. The latest episode talks about SILLIAC , a computer similar to ILLIAC built for the University of Sydney in the late 1950s. How many racks does your computer fill up? SILLIAC had quite a few. This episode joins earlier episodes about CSIRAC, and WREDAC. The series starts with the CSIR Mark I, which was the first computer in the southern hemisphere. The -AC computers have a long history . While you often hear statements like, “…in the old days, a computer like this would fill a room,” SILLIAC, in fact, filled three rooms. The three meters of cabinets were in one room, the power supply in another. The third room? Air conditioning. A lot of tubes (valves, in Australia at the time) generate a lot of heat. It is hard to put an exact...

All the news that was fit to print. Image via Wikipedia In the 1982 movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High , a classroom of students receives a set of paperwork to pass backward. Nearly every student in the room takes a big whiff of their sheet before setting it down. If you know, you know, I guess, but if you don’t, keep reading. Those often purple-inked papers were fresh from the ditto machine, or spirit duplicator . Legend has it that not only did they smell good when they were still wet, inhaling the volatile organic compounds within would make the sniffer just a little bit lightheaded. But the spirit duplicator didn’t use ghosts, it used either methanol (wood alcohol), isopropyl, or, if you were loaded, ethyl alcohol. Invented in 1923 by Wilhelm Ritzerfeld, ditto machines were popular among schools, churches, and clubs for making copies of worksheets, fliers, and so on before the modern copy machine became widespread in the 1980s. Other early duplicating machines include the mime...

The plethora of smart home devices available today deliver all manner of opportunities, but it’s fair to say that interfacing with them is more often done in the browser or an app than in the terminal. WattWise from [Naveen Kulandaivelu] is a tool which changes all that, it’s a command-line interface (CLI) for power monitoring smart plugs. Written in Python, the tool can talk either directly to TP-Link branded smart plugs, or via Home Assistant. It tracks the power consumption with a simple graph, but the exciting part lies in how it can be used to throttle the CPU of a computer in order to use power at the points in the day when it is cheapest. You can find the code in a GitHub repository . We like the idea of using smart plugs as instruments, even if they may not be the most accurate of measurement tools. It takes them even further beyond the simple functionality and walled-garden interfaces provided by their manufacturers, which in our view can only be a good thing. Meanwhile, ...

Somewhere in the universe, there’s a place that lists every x86 operating system from scratch. Not just some bootloaders, or just a kernel stub, but documentation to build a fully functional, interrupt-handling, multitasking-capable OS. [Erik Helin and Adam Renberg] did just that by documenting every step in The Little Book About OS Development . This is not your typical dry academic textbook. It’s a hands-on, step-by-step guide aimed at hackers, tinkerers, and developers who want to demystify kernel programming. The book walks you through setting up your environment, bootstrapping your OS, handling interrupts, implementing virtual memory, and even tackling system calls and multitasking. It provides just enough detail to get you started but leaves room for exploration – because, let’s be honest, half the fun is in figuring things out yourself. Completeness and structure are two things that make this book stand out. Other OS dev guides may give you snippets and leave you to assembl...

Macro pads are handy for opening up your favorite programs or executing commonly used keyboard shortcuts. But why stop there? That’s what [Jeroen Brinkman] must have been thinking while creating the Programmer’s Macro Pad . Based on the Arduino Pro Micro, this hand-wired pad is unique in that a single press of any of its 16 keys can virtually “type” out multiple lines of text. In this case, it’s a capability that’s being used to prevent the user from having to manually enter in commonly used functions, declarations, and conditional statements. For example, in the current firmware, pressing the “func” key will type out a boilerplate C function: int () { // ; return 0; }; // f It will also enter in the appropriate commands to put the cursor where it needs to be so you can actually enter in the function name. The other keys such as “array” and “if” work the same way, saving the user from having to enter (and potentially, even remember) the correct syntax. The firmware is kept as si...

This week, Jonathan Bennett chats with Bashonly about yt-dlp, the audio/video downloader that carries the torch from youtube-dl! Why is this a hard problem, and what does the future hold for this swiss-army knife of video downloading? Watch to find out! https://github.com/bashonly https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://discord.gg/H5MNcFW63r 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 contact the guest and have them 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 (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/1Z5eWgE

One of the most exciting trends we’ve seen over the last few years is the rise of truly personal computers — that is, bespoke computing devices that are built by individuals to fit their specific needs or wants. The more outlandish of these builds, often inspired by science fiction and sporting non-traditional layouts, tend to be lumped together under the term “cyberdecks”, but there are certainly builds where that description doesn’t quite stick, including the Cyber Writer from [Darbin Orvar] . With a 10-inch screen, you might think it was intended to be a portable, but its laser-cut Baltic birch plywood construction says otherwise. Its overall design reminds us of early computer terminals, and the 60% mechanical keyboard should help reinforce that feeling that you’re working on a substantial piece of gear from yesteryear. There’s plenty of room inside for additional hardware. The Cyber Writer is powered by the Raspberry Pi Zero W 2, which might seem a bit underpowered, but [Da...

Early photography lacked the convenience of the stable roll film we all know, and instead relied on a set of processes which the photographer would have to master from film to final print. Photographic chemicals could be flammable or even deadly, and results took a huge amount of work. The daguerreotype process of using mercury to develop pictures on polished metal, and the wet-collodion plate with its nitrocellulose solution are well-known, but as conservators at the British National Archives found out, there was another process that’s much rarer . The Pannotype uses a collodion emulsion, but instead of the glass plate used by the wet-plate process it uses a fabric backing. We know so much about the other processes because they were subject to patents, but pannotype never had a patent due to a disagreement. Thus when the conservators encountered some pannotypes in varying states of preservation, they needed to apply modern analytical techniques to understand the chemistry and selec...

Lord Vetinari from the Discworld series is known for many things, but perhaps most of all a clock that doesn’t quite keep continuous time. Instead, it ticks away at random increments to infuriate those that perceive it, whilst keeping regular time over the long term. [iracigt] decided to whip up a real world version of this hilarious fictional timepiece. The clock itself is an off-the-shelf timepiece purchased from Target for the princely sum of $5. However, it’s been deviously modified with an RP2040 microcontroller hidden away inside. The RP2040 is programmed to tick the clock at an  average  of once per second. But each tick itself is not so exact. Instead, there’s an erraticness to its beat – some ticks are longer, some shorter, in the classic Vetinari style. [iracigt] explains the nitty gritty of how it all works, from creating chaos with Markov chains to interfacing the RP2040 electronically with the cheap quartz clock movement. If you’ve ever wanted to build one of ...

Many of us know the basic Blink Arduino sketch, or have coded similar routines on other microcontrollers. Flashing an LED on and off—it doesn’t get much simpler than that. But how big should a blink sketch be? Or more importantly, how small could you get it? [Artful Bytes] decided to find out. The specific challenge? “Write a program that runs on a microcontroller and blinks an LED. The ON and OFF times should be as close to 1000 ms as possible.” The challenge was undertaken using a NUCLEO-L432KC Cortex-M4 with 256 K of flash and 64 K of RAM. We won’t spoil the full challenge, but it starts out with an incredibly inefficient AI & cloud solution. [Artful Bytes] then simplifies by switching to an RTOS approach, before slimming down further with C, assembly, and then machine code. The challenge was to shrink the microcontroller code as much as possible. However, you might notice the title of the video is “I Shrunk Blinky to 0 Bytes.” As it turns out, if you eliminate the digital co...