Kritik sah

[Yeo Kheng Meng] has a problem: he likes Windows 98, but he also likes his 2020 ThinkPad, which only has an xHCI USB controller– you know, the kind needed for USB 3.0, something that post-dates Windows 98 by a full decade. Drivers? Finding none existed, he decided to do it himself, or at least guide the process of using  LLMs to produce drivers for Windows 98 and up. Some of you just stopped reading, but can you blame him for making a demonic pact for this project? Driver development isn’t really a one-man show, especially as a part-time hobby project you’re not sure anyone else will ever use. If you do want to use it, you can find the code on GitHub. It does work, though, he admits it might be buggy. Unlike purely vibe-coded projects, [Meng] intends to address bugs put forth in the repo, at least. If you want to know how he did it, check out the link to [Meng]’s blog– which is human-authored, we can tell– and the videos embedded therein. He demon...

Sometimes along comes a hack with a personal angle, and in a video showing Irish bog ore smelting, we find an appropriate follow up to a Hackaday expedition back in 2019. [Alec Steele] joined Irish Bloomery Iron, for a weekend with a medieval blast furnace . Our brush with bog ore came in a trip to Hack42 in Arnhem, the Netherlands, where a team of Dutch hackers built a furnace from firebricks in an attempt to do the same thing. The Dutch attempt ended with a lot of mixed slag and very little iron, and looking at how the Irish furnace was constructed we see some clues to their success. Their air injection using a perforated sheet of clay and the air blast injected to form a venturi is particularly interesting,as is the shape of the furnace. The iron bloom is lifted out through the top of the furnace rather than being tapped as molten iron, and we’re treated to it being worked into a usable bar of iron. Having spent a day with our Dutch friends doing the same work only to have s...

Although [Arkandas] disclaims any interest in being a ‘car guy’, this is somewhat ironic in light of the sheer amount of modding he has performed on a range of cars over the years, a recent misadventure involving a BMW Mini F56’s infotainment system replacement and some light ECU reprogramming included. What happened exactly is covered in a detailed breakdown in a blog post. The old iDrive infotainment system in the Mini. (Credit: Arkandas) One of the aspects that [Arkandas] disliked about this car was its iDrive infotainment system, itself a stripped-down version of the full-fat infotainment system in ‘real’ BMW cars, with a small screen and awkward UX. The idea was to replace this with a more full-featured modern system. Since the infotainment system does hook into the car’s CAN buses and other systems it has to be compatible, of course. This took some research before ultimately a fancy €700 aftermarket replacement was ordered from a Chinese sel...

A good rule of thumb is that everything that can interact with electromagnetic (EM) radiation is an antenna, which includes our mostly-salty-water-containing bodies and also raindrops and moisture in the air. This can be both a benefit or a curse, depending on whether you’re trying to broadcast a signal in rainy weather or operating a weather radar. Here it’s essential to understand what kind of antenna a raindrop really is to optimize for either scenario, which is where a video by [Marshall Bruner] provides a solid primer . The video focuses on the Rayleigh regime, which may be familiar from atmospheric Rayleigh scattering that also affects EM radiation in the visible spectrum, giving those of us gifted with retinas capable of color vision those nice blue skies. As the EM radiation passes through these little droplets in the air, their neutral alignment gets disrupted and causes them to turn into dipole antennae, moving along with the incoming frequency. The backscatter ...

As a company, NanoLeaf has been producing modular lights that can be easily snapped together into various geometric shapes for around a decade. Similar to the addressable LED light strips many of us are familiar with that also became popular around a decade ago, these modular lights are supposed to be easy to configure, customize, and program. But their controllers are notoriously finicky according to [Myrik] who found that a simple ESP32 could be used to replace them when they eventually fail . Part of the reason [Myrik] found this to be straightforward is that the company publishes their firmware and makes it essentially available to anyone. Whether or not this was purposeful is not clear; but in either case it only requires slight modification to run on the ESP32. When plugged into an existing string of panels, the panels themselves report their positions and orientations over a single data bus which the ESP32 has no problem interpreting. The ESP32 can also communicate its status o...

Heat pumps are great, because they pump heat around, and we often don’t want heat where it is. Need it somewhere else? Pump it! It’s great. It’s also a bit pricey if you’re buying new, but [Craftsman Chris] over on YouTube realized that the window air conditioning unit he found in a dumpster is, in fact, a heat pump. Normally it’s an air-source heat pump, but with a delightful series of hacks, he gets it automated and hooked into a ground loop in his latest YouTube video . The heat sink is provided by a bunch of PEX tubing [Chris] buried in his back yard. After experimenting with using the water loop for cooling directly, he realized that pumping heat out of his house into the cold ground would go much better with a heat pump. That’s where the window A/C came in. After cleaning and servicing it, it was time to convert it to dump heat into water rather than outside air. To do that, [Chris] welded up a tank made of scrap metal around the existing heat ...

One of the most fun challenges in paleontology is determining characteristics of long-dead species like their behavior and body temperature based on nothing but some fossils and traces that are usually millions of years old. Something that has long vexed the paleontological community for example has been the question whether non-avian dinosaurs like the well-known Tyrannosaurus rex was cold- or warm-blooded, and if the latter, what temperature this was. Cue a recent study by [Randon J. Flores] et al. in Science Advances in which they seek to answer this question. Although modern-day dinosaurs in the form of birds are all warm-blooded – meaning capable of regulating their body temperature – species like crocodiles, who also lived alongside non-avian dinosaurs, are cold-blooded and have to cycle between sun-basking and a cool dip in a nearby river to maintain their body temperature. By looking at the temperature-dependent formation of carbonate clumped isotopes in three ...