Last #hackster news round-up of the week - the fourth, 'cos I skipped yesterday waiting for some delayed stuff to get published. First up, from Thursday, the announcement of #matter 1.5 - the latest version of the cross-vendor smart home standard, now supporting camera control. Assuming any […]

Still got a couple of pieces in the to-publish queue over on #hackster today, but it's getting late in the day here so I'll round up what's out there now - starting with one that actually went up late yesterday: a warning that so-called "agentic AI" (i.e. LLMs that just... do stuff) are "far […]

Had a bad start to the morning when my carbon monoxide alarm started beeping at 0500... to tell me that its ten-year sealed battery was running out, two years and 11 months after I bought it. Fair play, though: one quick email to Kidde and I've got a free replacement on the way.

It's been a bumper day for me over on #hackster, with eight articles published and another two waiting in the wings (plus a hush-hush one under embargo for tomorrow). First up, a *fantastic* #Arduino-powered 3D-printed #synth... for a three-year-old. Stick that in your busy box! […]

Oof, this does not sound good. I loved my original Pebble, and the Time I upgraded to, but if the (illegal in many jurisdictions) 30-day warranty(!) of the drop-shipped "new" Pebbles hadn't already put me off this would be the nail in the coffin. https://mastodon.social/@rebble/115568822307143535

Neglected to share the #hackster articles I wrote on Friday - busy end to the week, got side-tracked! - so here's a bumper crop for Monday. First, a guide to upgrading the Vilros PiDock 400 laptop-style docking station for the #raspberrypi 400 to support the newer and faster Raspberry Pi 500 […]

I've had more #hackster articles go live today, starting with some interesting research on spotting generative-AI faces - both wholly-synthetic and "deepfake." A five-minute training course considerably boosted peoples' ability to call the #aislop out - but the average users' performance was […]

Getting real deja-vu from the news that Valve's launching a mini-PC dubbed the Steam Machine... having done a group-test of the *original* Steam Machines for Linux User & Developer back in 2016. (They weren't great. Hopefully the new one's better!) #valve #steammachine #linux #gaming

I've another batch of #hackster articles to share, starting with a work-in-progress project to have a Parallax P2 microcontroller generate a valid digital TV transmission - without a hardware encoder. The proof-of-concept is already impressive, albeit limited to a looping six-second […]

Came across a great upcycling project based on a Siemens rotary-dial telephone. The author's clearly got an actual phone, there are various pictures of its innards. But the main post image? #aislop, an uncanny valley facsimile of the actual phone on a wooden desk which set my teeth on edge even […]

Another day, another batch of #hackster articles - starting with a bit of #science with a look at an "unawareable" smart cup that samples your sweat to measure your vitamin C levels as you drink. The twist? It's also *powered* by said sweat, thanks to a printed biofuel reactor […]

Ran a battery life benchmark on that repurposed Microsoft Surface I've been messing with (https://mastodon.social/@ghalfacree/115520393467963648) - my usual approach, a copy of Hackers (1995) on a loop, mid-brightness, until it dies. 12 years haven't been kind to those poor Li-ion cells: 2h35m […]

Got another batch of articles up on #hackster, starting with my favourite and something I'm rather excited about: @polpo's shiny new #picoide - a #raspberrypi RP2350-powered IDE hard drive and ATAPI CD-ROM emulator for classic computers. Want! […]

I've had a #Gemini capsule - as part of my Tilde Club account - for ages now, and never did anything with it. It will sit empty no longer! Instead, it'll serve as a home for text-only article copies - ad-free, graphics-free, HTML-free. No cookies, no […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Found a long-forgotten Surface Pro in the corner of the office. Despite being a Microsoft in-house design, it doesn't support Windows 11(!)... so it's now running Ubuntu. Battery life isn't fantastic after all these years, but it'll make a great reader for […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Trying to be better at posting more regularly, and what better way to train myself than a daily thread of stuff I've written? To start: a near-future-gazing piece which predicts price rises to come for the #raspberrypi and other single-board computers, thanks to the "AI" industry's insatiable […]

Had a trip to the local #library to renew my card, and snagged this '90s wonder from the withdrawn stock shelves for a donation. That's going in the office, that is!

Having a play around with @medium for the first time in years, by dusting off a 2012 article I originally had published in the much-missed Micro Mart: The Printer Ink Wars. Amazingly, absolutely nothing has changed in the 13 years since - except now I'd probably use HP rather than Lexmark as […]

There's a new #raspberrypi out today, the Raspberry Pi 500+ - an upgraded wedge-style Raspberry Pi 500 which doubles the RAM, populated the M.2 slot and adds a bundled 256GB SSD, and includes an RGB-backlit mechanical keyboard. My review's up now, if you're curious. (And if you're not curious […]

Huh, #microsoft just open-sourced #6502 #basic. Permissive MIT licence, even. https://github.com/microsoft/BASIC-M6502 #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #programming

Calling #psion and other #retrocomputing and #vintagecomputing #pda enthusiasts: doing an article about an OPL language server, and was hoping to get comment from someone who still writes OPL in the year 2025 - why, what do you use it for, would you find OPL autocomplete a help or a hindrance […]

Well, it's official: it's too hot to work.

I've been using Music on Console (MOC) for years now, but have been tempted to try something else for background playback while I work: kew. https://github.com/ravachol/kew Advantages over MOC: neat live visualisation, ASCII-rendered cover art (or actual […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Here's the article I was working on today, and the first I've written for The Register in a hot minute: a look at a new, generated-from-actual-1980s-hardware, 1.5-million-strong test suite for the Intel 286 and compatibles. In 2025. Yes. Emulator devs are a different breed, I tell you, and […]

Calling #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing and #emulator developers/enthusiasts/and so forth. I'm writing a piece about a new hardware-generated test suite for the 286: https://github.com/SingleStepTests/80286 and I'd love to include some comments. Will you use it, and if so how? Why has the 286 […]

Now the web is full to the brim with #ai slop, I'm turning to... other, more reliable information sources. Now, if you'll excuse me, Mind Maze awaits. #vintagecomputing #encarta #microsoftmultimedia

What the actual... We all know the tricks with the "serving suggestion" photos on #food packaging, right? Same ingredients, but prepared by a professional chef - and then often coated in something to make 'em shiny, cotton pad dipped in boiling water for […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I now have a workflow to produce PostScript or PDF presentations from Lotus Freelance Graphics 2.1 on Windows for Workgroups, for export to and use on more modern machines. ...now if I could only remember why I wanted that. #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing

Now that April Fool's morning is well and truly over, I'm pleased to confirm that @rc2014 isn't pulling your leg - well, not about the existence of the #rc2014 Mini II Picasso, at least. https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/114261521469282296 How do I know? Here's my hands-on review […]

Honestly, sometimes I marvel at the things I get paid to do... #retrocomputing #z80 #programming

Right, after the disappointment of that last scanner arriving broken (and filthy), it's time to get serious. I've found a more reputable seller and ordered a Fujitsu Fi-7160. No flatbed, but I'll keep my current SP-1425 for that, but it's got intelligent […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Finally, after ordering it on the 6th, got my second-hand document scanner. And it's broken. And filthy. And the power cable's... melted? "Good used condition" my backside. Now to work on getting my money back...

Had just scanned the last page of a magazine... when the desktop crashed. 300-odd pages. Rebooted... Simple Scan had autosaved! But it crashed when I scrolled to the end. Never seen it do that before. Reopened it, told it to export the files. It got to Page 302 before crashing again, which […]

Product photography morning today. Well, early afternoon, too. Always takes longer than you think. Microchip Curiosity Kit, which looks so similar to the Discovery Kit I thought they'd sent me the wrong thing at first. Different chip at the heart, though: a […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Today (well, last night, mostly), I have been investigating JPEG and JPEG-adjacent file formats. (Yes, I'm still tweaking my mag-scan PDF outputs.) Let's take a look at a baseline. The first image is a PNG, straight from the scanner at 300dpi. I'm pretty […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

PDF wranglers! I've got a question, and it's... niche, I think. I scan mags to images then use Tesseract OCR to produce a PDF with an invisible but searchable-and-selectable text layer. Works great. However, I want to produce some low-resolution PDFs. I can do this fine, but the lower […]

I am still very much on my magazine-scanning kick (https://mastodon.social/@ghalfacree/114069867420929055) - more so, in fact, as I've now taken possession of a bunch of '90s/'00s PC Pro mags I'm currently scanning. I had someone ask if I'd tried Genius Scan, or a similar smartphone scanner […]

Now that #firefox has removed the pledge not to sell its users' personal data and to protect their privacy (https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/114078711152286668) I'm giving @Vivaldi a whirl. Yes, it's Chromium-based, which isn't ideal. Yes, it's closed-source. No, you […]

I have a big ol' stack of magazines I'd like to scan for posterity, and am currently working on a flow for doing exactly that (or, rather, improving my existing workflow.) Question, though. For newsprint, as in this issue of ETI from 1980, what do people […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Started seeing the pernicious Gemini AI button appear in Google Docs, Sheets, and the rest of 'em? Got uBlock Origin? Here's the filter you need: ###docs-sidekick-gen-ai-promo-button-container

Got a deadline approaching with quite some rapidity, so today's been a photo-editing day. Now to put everything together! #photography #technology #fpga #riscv

When I head that @ArchiteuthisFlux was making a solderless jumper-wire-less breadboard, I figured it was a joke. When I heard he was running Doom on it - the breadboard itself, no external hardware required - I *knew* it was a joke. Yeah, wrong on both counts. Here's id Software's 1993 […]

In light of recent happenings over the pond, I'd like to make a few things clear: trans rights are human rights, trans men are men, trans women are women, non-binary people are neither or perhaps sometimes both or a mixture but whatever they're valid too, and sex is scientifically non-binary […]

The results of Raspberry Pi's RP2350 Capture-the-Flag contest are in: four winners, plus a fifth confirmed but probably-not-RP2350-exclusive vulnerability. All winners get the top $20k prize, and kudos to the company for making the results public. Sadly, two attacks have no known mitigation […]

The BBC has discovered the fact that you can DoS a Wi-Fi connection with a de-authentication attack, carried out on hardware no more complex than a cheapo microcontroller. For some reason, it's decided to focus on the fact that this can knock Ring Wi-Fi cams offline - rather than, y'know, all […]

Actually managed to have some time off over the holidays, for a change, but I'm back in the office today - and playing the usual game of new-year catch-up! Speaking of, my latest list of articles is up - everything I had published digitally in December 2024, including my review of the shiny […]

Bah. Bought a DVD drive to replace a failed one in the desktop, but it turns out it doesn't support raw reads - so dvdisaster just gets gibberish from it. Guess I'm in the market for another drive, then!

Merry Xmas to all who observe it, and a happy 25th of December to those who don't! (And have a great whatever-it-is to the contrarians working to a different calendar...)

Currently covering STMicroelectronics' STM32N6 launch, an 800MHz(!) Arm Cortex-M55 microcontroller with 1GHz(!!) Neural-ART in-house machine learning coprocessor. Seems like a heck of a bit of kit, but STMicro's claim that it's the first microcontroller to […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A very dark and rainy start to the week here, and an early one too - 'cos it's new #RaspberryPi day. Yes, again: this time it's the turn of the Raspberry Pi 500, a keyboard computer throwback to the 1980s with all of the power of the Raspberry Pi 5. Also […] [Original post on mastodon.social]