windows

87 Articles

The Great Windows 11 Computer Extinction Experiment

June 29, 2021 by 292 Comments

There was a time when a new version of Windows was a really big deal, such the launch of Windows 95 for which the tones of the Rolling Stones’ Start me up could be heard across all manner of media outlets. Gradually over years this excitement has petered out, finally leaving us with Windows 10 that would, we were told, be the last ever version of the popular operating system and thence only receive continuous updates

But here we are in 2021, and a new Windows has been announced. Windows 11 will be the next latest and greatest from Redmond, but along with all the hoopla there has been an undercurrent of concern. Every new OS comes with a list of hardware requirements, but those for Windows 11 seem to go beyond the usual in their quest to cull older hardware. Aside from requiring Secure Boot and a Trusted Platform Module that’s caused a run on the devices, they’ve struck a load of surprisingly recent processors including those in some of their current Surface mobile PCs off their supported list, and it’s reported that they will even require laptops to have front-facing webcams if they wish to run Windows 11.

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Making A Kid-Friendly Computer As A Present: Or How To Be The Cool Aunt At Christmas

January 13, 2021 by 24 Comments

This article was meant to be finished up before Christmas, so it’ll be a little late whenever you’re reading it to go and prepare this for the holiday. Regardless, if, like me, should you ever be on the lookout for something to give a toddler nephew or relative, it could be worth it to look into your neglected old parts shelves. In my case, what caught my eye was a 9-year-old AMD laptop catching dust that could be better repurposed in the tiny hands of a kid eager to play video games.

The main issues here are finding a decent selection of appropriate games and streamling the whole experience so that it’s easy to use for a not-yet-hacker, all the while keeping the system secure and child-friendly. And doing it all on a budget.

This is a tall order, and requirements will be as individual as children are, of course, but I hope that my experience and considerations will help guide you if you’re in a similar boat.

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Hardware Keymapper Routes Through Raspberry Pi

December 3, 2020 by 19 Comments

There are a lot of keyboards to choose from, and a quick trip through some of the forums will quickly show you how fanatical some people can be about very specific styles or switches. [Crdotson] doesn’t seem to be too far down the rabbit hole in that regard, but he does have a keyboard that he really likes despite one small quirk: it’s built for Mac, and some of the modifier keys aren’t laid out correctly for Windows. Since Windows has limited (and poor) options for software keymapping, he took an alternative route and built a keymapper in hardware instead.

The build uses a Raspberry Pi as a go-between from the keyboard to his computer. The Pi watches the USB bus using usbmon, which allows inspection of the packets and can see which keys have been pressed. It then passes those keypresses through to the computer. His only modification to the keyboard mapping is to swap the Alt and Super (Windows) keys for his keyboard of choice, although using this software would allow any other changes to be made as well. Latency is only on the order of a few microseconds, which is not noticeable for normal use cases.

While we have seen plenty of other builds around that can map keyboards in plenty of custom ways, if you don’t have the required hardware for a bespoke solution it’s much more likely that there’s a Raspberry Pi laying around that can do the job instead. There are a few issues with the build that [crdotson] is planning to tackle, though, such as unplugging the device while a key is being pressed, which perpetually sends that keystroke to the computer without stopping. But for now it’s a workable solution for his problem.

Should You Build For Windows, Mac, IOS, Android, Or Linux? Yes!

October 1, 2020 by 36 Comments

The holy grail of computer languages is to write code once and have it deploy effortlessly everywhere. Java likes to take credit for the idea, but UCSD P-Code was way before that and you could argue that mainframes had I/O abstraction like Fortran unit numbers even earlier. More modern efforts include Qt, GTK, and other things. Naturally, all of these fall short in some way. Now Google enters the fray with Flutter.

Flutter isn’t new, but in the past, it only handled Android and iOS. Now it can target desktop platforms and can even produce JavaScript. We haven’t played with the system enough to say how successful it is, but you can try it in your browser if you want some first-hand experience.

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Fitting Snake Into A QR Code

August 17, 2020 by 18 Comments

QR codes are usually associated with ASCII text like URLs or serial numbers, but did you know you can also encode binary data into them? To demonstrate this concept, [MattKC] embarked on a journey to create a QR code that holds an executable version of Snake. Video after the break.

As you might expect, the version 40 QR code he ended up using is much larger than the ones you normally see. Consisting of a 171 by 171 grid, it’s the largest version that can still be read by most software. This gave [MattKC] a whopping 2,953 bytes to work with. Not a lot of space, but still bigger than some classic video games of the past.

To start, he first wrote Snake to run in a web browser using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which was able to fit in the available space. Modern browsers do a lot of the lifting with built-in features, and [MattKC] wanted more of a challenge, so he decided to instead create a Windows executable file. His first attempts with compiled C code were too large, which led down the rabbit trail of x86 Assembly. Here he found that his knowledge of Assembly was too limited to create a small enough program without investing months into the project. He went back to C and managed to compress his executable using Crinkler, a compressing linker commonly used in the demoscene. This shrunk the file down to 1,478 bytes.

Zbar, a command-line barcode reader for Windows was used to test the final Snake QR code. [MattKC] discovered a bug in Zbarcam that prevented it from reading binary data via a webcam input, so through the power of open source, he submitted a bug fix which is now integrated into the official release.

All the files are available for anyone to play with on [MattKC]’s website. The video below goes into a lot of detail on the entire journey. Since this project proves software can be embedded in QR codes, it means that malware could also be hidden in a QR code, if there is an exploitable bug somewhere in a smartphone QR reader app.

QR codes are an interesting tool with a variety of uses. Take a deep dive into how they work, generate a 3D printable version, or build a QR jukebox, if you want to learn more.

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ReactOS: Dipping A Toe In A Millennium-era Open Source Dream

April 27, 2020 by 57 Comments

Do you remember when trying a new OS meant burning a CD? Not merely downloading an ISO and mounting it on a USB drive, but taking a circle of polycarbonate and hoping you didn’t get a buffer underrun as the file you’d spent an entire day downloading was burned onto it. A couple of decades ago that was how we’d take a look at a new Linux distro, and at the time we considered it to be nothing short of incredible that such a thing was possible. One of the ISOs I remember downloading back then was an early version of ReactOS, a project with the lofty aim of creating an open-source equivalent of Windows NT. You might think that in the nearly two decades since then it would have become an irrelevance and its contributors moved on to other work, but no. ReactOS is very much still with us, and indeed has just seen a new release. Version 0.4.13 is the latest in a long line of incremental updates, and remembering those early ReactOS ISOs when I saw their announcement, I thought I’d give it a spin. The result was both a peek at the current state of the project, and a chance to think about the place of a Windows clone in 2020. Continue reading “ReactOS: Dipping A Toe In A Millennium-era Open Source Dream” →

Closed Ham Radio Peripheral Reveals Its Windows Secrets

February 16, 2020 by 25 Comments

The student radio society in Trondhjem owns a Flex 6500-radio, with its associated Maestro panel peripheral. This is a software defined radio, and the Maestro is a computer containing just enough of an embedded version of Windows to run its front-end software. Unfortunately for our Norwegian radio amateur friends it runs very little else, even to the extent of being unable to connect to public WiFi that requires a web log-in. This was particularly annoying as the student network does this and they’d had to create their own hotspot, so they’ve provided some details on how they were able to open it up a little to do a bit more.

At first they were cagey about the exact nature of the exploit they used to penetrate the device’s defenses, but since then they’ve published a second installment with full details. It involved gaining access to the filesystem and a terminal through a right-click menu from a web browser screen within the Maestro software, then using that access to change configuration such that it could be exposed across the network. From there they were able to treat it much as they would a normal Windows installation, including putting other software such as SmartSDR onto it.

This piece of work provides a fascinating insight into an embedded Windows device, and leaves us as usual surprised by the ease of the exploit. We’d say it’s something of a brave move for a company to ship a feature-limited product to radio amateurs of all people, a community that has been experimenting and finding whatever means  to extend the capabilities of their equipment for over a hundred years. Perhaps Flexradio’s eyes are on greater things.