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Real-Time Chess: A Physical Board That Eliminates Turns

2025-03-29

Real-Time Chess: A Physical Board That Eliminates Turns

Tired of the long waits in turn-based chess? A developer has created a real-time physical chessboard that eliminates turns entirely. Each piece has an individual cooldown, enforced by electronics and electromagnets, preventing cheating. The project's PCB designs and firmware are open-source, but the author notes issues like inadequate power distribution and tight tolerances.

(github.com)

Hardware

Inko: A New Language for Building Reliable Concurrent Software

2025-03-27

Inko: A New Language for Building Reliable Concurrent Software

Inko is a new programming language designed for building concurrent software with confidence. It simplifies concurrent software development by offering deterministic automatic memory management, move semantics, static typing, type-safe concurrency, and efficient error handling, eliminating unpredictable performance, runtime errors, and race conditions. Inko compiles to LLVM machine code. Examples showcase a simple "Hello, world!" and a concurrent factorial calculation. Visit the Inko website for more information and installation instructions.

(github.com)

Development

Bambu Connect's X.509 Certificate and Private Key Extracted

2025-01-20

Bambu Connect's X.509 Certificate and Private Key Extracted

Following Bambu Lab's announcement of locking down network access to its X1-series 3D printers with new firmware, the X.509 certificate and private key from the Bambu Connect application have been extracted by hWuxH. This application was intended to be the sole method for third-party software to send print jobs to Bambu Lab hardware. The Bambu Connect app, a relatively simple Electron application, employed obfuscation and encryption, but not enough to deter determined users. The de-obfuscated main.js file reveals the certificate and private key used to encrypt HTTP traffic with the printer, the only obstacle preventing tools like OrcaSlicer from communicating with authentication-enabled Bambu Lab printers. Bambu Lab's next steps are unclear, highlighting the ineffectiveness of security through obfuscation alone.

(hackaday.com)

Hardware 3D printer security X.509 certificate private key leak

Goodbye RSI: My Journey with the Svalboard Keyboard

2025-08-02

Years of computer use led to RSI, prompting a quest for the perfect ergonomic keyboard. From Microsoft Ergonomic to Kinesis Advantage and Ergodox EZ, my search culminated in the Svalboard Lightly. Its infrared optical keys and magnetic feedback, coupled with QMK firmware and Keybard software, allowed unparalleled customization. While pricey and with a steep learning curve, the Svalboard's superior ergonomics and customizability dramatically improved my typing comfort and efficiency, making it a worthwhile investment for the discerning user.

(twey.io)

Hardware Ergonomic Keyboard

Small Docs: The Secret to Streamlined Tech Writing

2025-03-04

Just like small code commits are preferred in software development, small, focused documentation improves clarity, accessibility, and review efficiency. This article advocates for writing concise docs addressing a single idea, providing complete context, and avoiding oversimplification. Larger documents should be broken into smaller, self-contained parts. Effective organization, cross-linking, and regular maintenance are crucial to prevent information fragmentation. The ultimate goal is faster reviews, clearer communication, and less stress for everyone involved.

(bufferbuffer.com)

Development documentation management

SourceHut Updates Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

2025-06-24

SourceHut has updated its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, primarily improving the descriptions of how user data is stored, used, and shared with third parties. The update clarifies account security and adds detail on user access and control over their data. It also introduces restrictions on the use of automated tools to prevent abuse.

(lists.sr.ht)

Development

NOMARS: The Unmanned Surface Vessel Revolution

2025-03-10

The No Manning Required Ship (NOMARS) program has successfully completed construction of the USX-1 Defiant, a 180-foot, 240-metric-ton unmanned surface vessel (USV). Designed from the keel up without any human crew considerations, Defiant aims to revolutionize naval architecture. By eliminating the human element, NOMARS anticipates significant advantages in size, cost, reliability, hydrodynamic efficiency, sea-state survivability, and adversary resistance through stealth and tamper-proofing. Scheduled for sea trials in Spring 2025, Defiant promises a cost-effective path to a distributed USV fleet.

(www.darpa.mil)

Tech USV autonomous navigation naval technology

Linux Kernel Initial Commit SHA Collision Risk

2024-12-31

Kees Cook, a Linux kernel developer, discovered a kernel documentation commit whose ID shares the first 12 characters with the initial commit in the kernel's repository. This potential collision could break various tools relying on unique commit IDs. While not yet merged upstream, this commit serves as a test case to proactively address SHA collisions and prevent future widespread issues.

(lwn.net)

Development SHA collision

Adaptive Hashing in SBCL: Making Hash Tables Faster and More Robust

2025-05-11

A talk at the 2024 ELS focused on adaptive hashing, aiming to make general-purpose hash tables faster and more robust. Traditional hash table theory primarily concerns itself with asymptotic worst-case costs, neglecting the impact of constant factors on real-world performance. This research introduces an online adaptive approach, adjusting the hash function based on the actual key distribution to reduce collisions and improve cache utilization. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements in reducing expected comparisons and speeding up PUT operations, particularly with specific key distributions. SBCL's built-in hash tables now employ this technique, dynamically switching hash functions (including linear search, bit-shifting hash, and MurmurHash) based on collision counts and hash table size. For composite keys like strings and lists, a truncation strategy is used, dynamically adjusting the truncation length when too many collisions occur. This improvement enhances SBCL hash table speed in common cases and robustness in others.

(quotenil.com)

Development adaptive hashing lisp

US Fighter Jets Depicted on Russian School Wall Spark Controversy

2024-12-14

US Fighter Jets Depicted on Russian School Wall Spark Controversy

A new school in the Russian border town of Pechenga sparked controversy after images of F-16 fighter jets were painted on its walls. The images were quickly removed and replaced with Russian Su-57 jets. The school explained that the original drawings were of Su-27s, but the ambiguity led to the change. The incident, near the border with NATO members Norway and Finland, highlights regional tensions. A similar incident occurred at a naval base in Gadzhievo, where a US Los Angeles-class submarine was painted on a building before being replaced by a Russian submarine.

(www.thebarentsobserver.com)

Misc Russia military United States

Website Anti-Scraping Mechanism: Anubis v1.21.3

2025-08-17

This website utilizes Anubis, a countermeasure against aggressive web scraping by AI companies. Anubis employs a Proof-of-Work (PoW) system similar to Hashcash, making large-scale scraping significantly more expensive while having minimal impact on individual users. This temporary solution buys time for developing more sophisticated anti-scraping techniques, such as identifying headless browsers through font rendering analysis, ultimately aiming to protect legitimate users while deterring malicious scraping.

(code.ffmpeg.org)

Misc

Nintendo's Virtual Game Cards: Sharing Digital Switch Games Made Easy

2025-03-27

Nintendo's Virtual Game Cards: Sharing Digital Switch Games Made Easy

Nintendo unveiled Virtual Game Cards for the Nintendo Switch, launching late April. This new feature allows sharing digital games across multiple Switch consoles. Purchased digital games are stored as Virtual Game Cards, virtually loaded and ejected like physical cartridges. A single game can be played on up to two Switches simultaneously, and family sharing is enabled via local wireless, with a two-week lending period. This enhances digital game flexibility and convenience.

(venturebeat.com)

Game Nintendo Switch Virtual Game Cards Digital Game Sharing

Ruby 3.5: Six Times Faster Object Allocation via Class#new Inlining

2025-05-22

Ruby 3.5: Six Times Faster Object Allocation via Class#new Inlining

Ruby 3.5 achieves a significant speedup in object allocation, up to six times faster, by inlining the `Class#new` method. The article details this optimization, showcasing benchmark results, analyzing performance bottlenecks, and explaining the inlining technique. By eliminating method call overhead, reducing parameter copying, and improving inline cache hit rates, this optimization effectively addresses performance issues in Ruby object allocation, though it introduces minor backward compatibility concerns.

(railsatscale.com)

Development

Banksy's Trademark Battle: A Street Artist's Fight for His Name

2025-02-13

Banksy's Trademark Battle: A Street Artist's Fight for His Name

Anonymous graffiti artist Banksy is facing a legal battle over his trademark. Greeting card company Full Colour Black claims Banksy hasn't properly used his trademark, seeking its cancellation. Banksy denies this, stating he's used the trademark for merchandise sales. The April trial at the Intellectual Property Office marks a potential first public appearance for Banksy and his team. The case highlights the conflict between Banksy's artistic ethos and commercialization, questioning the limits of trademark rights in art.

(robbreport.com)

Misc Trademark Art Commercialization

OrioleDB: A High-Performance PostgreSQL Storage Extension

2025-07-19

OrioleDB: A High-Performance PostgreSQL Storage Extension

OrioleDB is a PostgreSQL storage extension that replaces the default Heap storage engine, dramatically improving performance. By redesigning core components like MVCC, page caching, and checkpoints, OrioleDB enhances throughput and predictability for transactional workloads while maintaining the familiar PostgreSQL user experience. Recent releases add support for non-B-tree index types, tablespaces, and fillfactor, along with query and index performance optimizations. Benchmarks using TPC-C and sysbench show significant throughput improvements over PostgreSQL's default Heap engine, with go-tpc tests demonstrating multiple times the tpmC.

(www.orioledb.com)

Development

Fujitsu's Monaka CPU: An ARMv9 Datacenter Beast with SVE2 and 3D Stacking

2024-12-14

Fujitsu's Monaka CPU: An ARMv9 Datacenter Beast with SVE2 and 3D Stacking

Fujitsu is set to launch Monaka, a new datacenter CPU slated for a 2027 release. This ARMv9-based processor boasts SVE2 extensions and utilizes 3D stacking, resembling AMD's EPYC architecture with a central IO die and disaggregated SRAM and compute units. Each Monaka CPU will pack up to 144 cores across four 36-core chiplets, all built on a 2nm process. The IO boasts 12 channels of DDR5 (potentially exceeding 600GB/s bandwidth), PCIe 6.0 with CXL 3.0 support, and air-cooling capability. Unlike its predecessor, A64FX, Monaka omits HBM support and targets the general datacenter market.

(chipsandcheese.com)

Hardware 3D Stacking

TubePen: Streamlining Video Highlighting and Annotation

2025-01-10

Tired of hunting for key information in lengthy videos? TubePen simplifies the process! This tool lets you easily highlight and annotate important segments of videos and share them with others. Think of it as a dedicated notepad for your videos, streamlining your learning, work, or entertainment. No more struggling with screenshots or timestamp notes; TubePen offers a clean interface and powerful features, letting you focus on the video content itself.

(www.tubepen.com)

Development

Native Windows Todo App in Pure C

2025-05-11

Native Windows Todo App in Pure C

A modern, native Windows todo application built with C and the Win32 API. It allows users to create, edit, delete, and mark todo items as complete, with persistent storage in AppData. Features include system tray integration and a native Windows look and feel. The application supports up to 100 todo items. The source code is open-source and includes build instructions.

(github.com)

Development Todo App

Campsite Open Source: A Monorepo Deep Dive

2025-01-14

Campsite Open Source: A Monorepo Deep Dive

The Campsite open-source project is a large monorepo containing the entire codebase for their application. While no longer actively maintained, it's a valuable resource for learning how Campsite works and forking for non-commercial projects. The project relies on numerous services, including S3, Pusher, Imgix, 100ms, and OpenAI, requiring extensive configuration for local setup. Detailed instructions are provided for local development, covering environment variable setup, service integration, and running the web app, marketing site, Storybook, and desktop app.

(github.com)

Development local development

Open Source Android Apps: Privacy, Security, and Customization

2025-03-10

Tired of intrusive ads and privacy concerns in closed-source apps? Open-source Android apps offer a refreshing alternative. Publicly available source code ensures transparency and security, allowing users and developers to examine the code for vulnerabilities and malicious elements. Open-source apps often prioritize user privacy, collecting less data and providing clear documentation on data usage. Furthermore, you can customize the app to fit your needs, and a strong community supports ongoing development and improvements.

(www.openapk.net)

Development open source apps

Topological Sort Algorithm Variant: Efficiently Handling Dependencies

2025-04-03

Topological Sort Algorithm Variant: Efficiently Handling Dependencies

This article presents an improved topological sorting algorithm based on Kahn's algorithm, but it treats nodes as sets instead of individual nodes. The algorithm iteratively finds the root sets of the graph, removes them, and repeats until the graph is empty. The order of the removed root sets forms a topological order, and nodes within the same root set are independent and can be processed in parallel. The algorithm can also detect cycles and return a partial topological ordering instead of completely aborting.

(github.com)

Development topological sort graph algorithm

LLM Performance on Advent of Code 2024: A Surprise

2024-12-30

LLM Performance on Advent of Code 2024: A Surprise

This post details an experiment testing several leading Large Language Models (LLMs) on the 2024 Advent of Code challenge. Surprisingly, the LLMs performed worse than expected, even underperforming the author. A simple framework was used, providing the models with the complete problem description and requiring executable Python code. Results showed frequent timeouts and exceptions, suggesting LLMs excel at solving familiar problems but struggle with novel ones. This limitation might stem from reliance on program templates, insufficient computational resources, or suboptimal prompting. The experiment highlights Advent of Code as a potential benchmark for evaluating coding agents.

(www.jerpint.io)

AI Coding Challenge

I Tracked Myself Using Leaked Geolocation Data: A Shocking Experiment

2025-02-02

I Tracked Myself Using Leaked Geolocation Data: A Shocking Experiment

A recent geolocation data leak from Gravy Analytics exposed over 2000 apps secretly collecting location data, often without developers' knowledge. To investigate, I installed a single game and used Charles Proxy to monitor network traffic. Even with location services disabled, the game leaked my approximate location and IP address via Unity Ads, Facebook, and other ad platforms. The data included surprisingly granular details like screen brightness and memory usage. Further investigation revealed the ease of purchasing datasets linking identifiers to personal information, enabling precise location tracking. This experiment highlights the alarming scale of data leakage in the mobile advertising ecosystem and the significant risks to user privacy.

(timsh.org)

Tech geolocation leak ad tracking

Major Breakthrough in Nuclear Clock Technology Promises Ultraprecise Timekeeping

2024-12-13

Major Breakthrough in Nuclear Clock Technology Promises Ultraprecise Timekeeping

An international research team led by scientists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder, has made a significant advance in developing a novel nuclear clock. Nuclear clocks use energy transitions within an atom's nucleus to measure time, promising greater accuracy and resistance to external disturbances compared to atomic clocks. The team used a specially designed ultraviolet laser to precisely measure the frequency of an energy jump in thorium nuclei and an optical frequency comb to count the cycles. This breakthrough paves the way for more precise navigation, faster internet speeds, and advancements in fundamental physics research, potentially even aiding in the detection of dark matter or verifying the constancy of nature's constants.

(www.nist.gov)

Tech nuclear clock ultraprecise timekeeping physics

Microsoft's Xbox ROG Ally: Entering the Portable Gaming Fray

2025-08-22

Microsoft's Xbox ROG Ally: Entering the Portable Gaming Fray

Microsoft's Xbox ROG Ally handheld console, developed in partnership with Asus, is making waves at Gamescom. Targeted at hardcore gamers, the Ally boasts familiar Xbox controls and aims to expand the Xbox ecosystem, encouraging existing Xbox and PC owners to play more, thus increasing engagement and spending. With the Switch 2's strong launch and the existing Steam Deck competition, Microsoft is vying for a piece of the portable gaming market and boosting Game Pass subscriptions. Sony, meanwhile, remains on the sidelines, offering only the streaming-focused PlayStation Portal. The Ally's release date is October 16th, but pricing remains undisclosed.

(sg.finance.yahoo.com)

Game Handheld Console

R0ML's Ratio: Avoid the Bozo Trap in Enterprise Software Licensing

2025-08-10

This article introduces a clever methodology for evaluating volume purchases: R0ML's Ratio. Using the example of buying thousands of clown noses, it explains how to calculate the ratio: divide the total purchase price by the full retail price of all units. A ratio under 1 indicates a good deal; above 1 means you've been had. This is especially crucial for software and SaaS licensing, where accurately estimating usage is key to avoiding losses from underutilization. The author suggests empowering employees with corporate cards for individual software purchases as a safer alternative.

(blog.glyph.im)

Development procurement strategy software licensing

Hacking Your Starlink Mini: Removing the Internal WiFi Router

2025-06-15

This guide details how to remove the integrated Wi-Fi router from a Starlink Mini 1 terminal, enabling Ethernet-only operation. This modification unlocks greater flexibility for advanced users with custom networking needs, embedded installations, or power-constrained environments. The guide provides a step-by-step disassembly process, PCB connector pinouts, a direct Ethernet connection schematic, network configuration instructions, and explanations of gRPC status codes for troubleshooting. Caution: This modification is only for the Starlink Mini 1, and removing the metal plate is strongly discouraged due to potential cooling and EMI issues.

(olegkutkov.me)

Hardware

Info Warfare: Truth and Digital Risks in the Next Conflict

2025-03-09

Info Warfare: Truth and Digital Risks in the Next Conflict

In war, truth is often the first casualty. In the next major conflict, virtually all information could be a victim. Over-reliance on digital communication exposes Western societies to significant risks, as seen in Ukraine's experience with Russia. Hacker groups (both military and criminal) have infiltrated television, the internet, and streaming radio, spreading disinformation, launching denial-of-service attacks, and jamming GPS signals, posing a serious challenge to societal narratives and stability.

(www.spectator.co.uk)

Tech information warfare digital risks

The Sackler Brothers and LSD: A Tale of Ideals and Profits

2025-01-30

The Sackler Brothers and LSD: A Tale of Ideals and Profits

This article unveils the little-known story of the Sackler brothers' involvement in early LSD research during the 1950s. Initially driven by the idealistic goal of curing mental illness, they actively participated in early LSD trials, attempting to link LSD research to their own hormonal imbalance theories. However, over time, their focus shifted to the commercial potential of pharmaceuticals, ultimately leading to infamy for developing and marketing OxyContin. The article highlights the conflict between idealism and profit motives, and the ethical and commercial considerations in technological advancement.

(resobscura.substack.com)

Tech Sackler Brothers Pharmaceutical Research

C++-style OOP in C: Kernel Services via Function Pointers

2025-08-27

C++-style OOP in C: Kernel Services via Function Pointers

This article details how the author implemented a virtual table (vtable) mechanism in their operating system kernel using C's function pointers and structs, mimicking object-oriented programming. This approach enables unified management of kernel services like starting, stopping, and restarting, and allows for flexible scheduling policy changes without extensive code modification. The author explains the implementation and application of vtables with examples of device drivers and service management, discussing the advantages and disadvantages. While the C syntax leads to slightly verbose code, this method enhances readability and maintainability, improving kernel flexibility and extensibility.

(oshub.org)

Development

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