Climate Change May Make Days Longer

July 31, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 31 Comments

For those who say there’s never enough time in a day, your wish for more time is getting granted, if ever so slightly. Scientists have now found a new source of our days getting longer — climate change.

You may have already been aware that the length of the day on Earth has been getting longer over time due to the drag exerted on our planet by our friendly neighborhood Moon. Many other factors come into play though, including the Earth’s own mass distribution. As the Earth warms and polar caps melt, the water redistributes to the Earth’s equator causing it to slow more rapidly.

In the worst-case scenario, RCP8.5, it would result in climate-related effects to planetary rotational velocity even larger than those caused by lunar tides. Under that scenario, the earth would probably be a less pleasant place to live in many other ways, but at least you’d have a little more time in your day.

While we’re talking about time, we wonder what ever happened to getting rid of Daylight Savings in the US? If you long for a simpler time, perhaps you should take up repairing mechanical watches and clocks?

A Look Inside The Super Nintendo Cartridges And Video System

July 31, 2024 by Maya Posch 22 Comments

Despite being effectively sold as a toy in the 1990s, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was pretty bleeding-edge as far its computing chops were concerned. This was especially apparent with its cartridges, such as in this excellent summary article by [Fabien Sanglard].

In addition to the mask ROM that stored the game data and (optionally) battery-backed SRAM to store save data, a wide range of enhancement processors existed that upgraded the base SNES system with additional processors for more CPU performance, enhanced graphics and so on. Imagine sticking a game cartridge in a PlayStation 4 today that boosted CPU speed by 5x and gave it a much better GPU, this was the world of SNES games.

On the other side of the video game cartridges was the video output system, which seems easy enough in today’s world of digital HDMI and DisplayPort output. In the 90s video output did however mean NTSC and SECAM/PAL, which means playing nice with frequencies, different resolutions (lines) and squeezing as much as possible into a single frame in a way that works with the game console’s rendering pipeline. As a result of this the PAL version of Super Mario World has a larger vertical resolution than the NTSC version (240 vs 224 lines), even if it’s still squashed into the same 4:3 format. For the physical video output side, European gamers were spoiled with an AV connector to (RGB) SCART output, while the rest of the world dealt with some variety of RF composite or S-video.

Although the SNES’s successor in the form of the N64 would not take cartridges to the same extremes, it was this flexible architecture that gave the SNES such an amazing game library.

AI Image Generator Twists In Response To MIDI Dials, In Real-time

July 30, 2024 by Donald Papp 29 Comments

MIDI isn’t just about music, as [Johannes Stelzer] shows by using dials to adjust AI-generated imagery in real-time. The results are wild, with an interactivity to them that we don’t normally see in such things.

[Johannes] uses Stable Diffusion‘s SDXL Turbo to create a baseline image of “photo of a red brick house, blue sky”. The hardware dials act as manual controls for applying different embeddings to this baseline, such as “coral”, “moss”, “fire”, “ice”, “sand”, “rusty steel” and “cookie”.

By adjusting the dials, those embeddings are applied to the base image in varying strengths. The results are generated on the fly and are pretty neat to see, especially since there is no appreciable amount of processing time required.

The MIDI controller is integrated with the help of lunar_tools, a software toolkit on GitHub to facilitate creating interactive exhibits. As for the image end of things, we’ve previously covered how AI image generators work.

A warehouse with concrete floors and at least four subway car rails running off into the distance. On the rails are dozens of R142 series subway cars with refurbished trucks in the foreground. People are visible on the floor moving a truck, and one man is in a bright yellow crane above everything watching what happens.

Overhauling Subway Cars Is A Big Job

July 30, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 6 Comments

Subway cars have a tough life. Moving people through a city efficiently underground every day and night takes a toll on the hardware. To keep things running efficiently, NYC rebuilds its cars every six years.

The enormous job of refurbing a subway car back to factory spec happens in one of two yards, either in Brooklyn or Manhattan. The cars are pulled off their 16,000 lb trucks, and treated to an overhaul of their “doors, windows, signage, seats, floor tiles and HVAC.” The trucks are inspected and wheels can be reground to true at the six year mark; they get all new wheels every 12.

Once everything is repaired, the shiny and like-new components are inspected and reassembled to go back out on the line. While it’s no small job, the overhaul shops can process over 1,000 cars in a year to keep things running smoothly. Before the overhaul program was introduced in the 1980s, NYC subway cars typically experienced failures every 16,000 miles, but between the scheduled maintenance and other advances that number has soared to an average failure rate every 140,000 miles.

For a somewhat less official use of underground spaces, how about this Parisian secret society? If you really want to bring the subway home, how about making an old subway seat into a chair? If you need something more light-hearted, you should really checkout this 90s subway safety video from LA.

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Making An Aluminium Foil Glider To Prototype Hydroforming

July 30, 2024 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

Hydroforming is a very effective way to turn a ductile metal like aluminium or stainless steel into a specific shape, either using a die or by creating a closed envelope in which the hydraulic fluid is injected. While trying to think of ways to create a hydroformed airplane without spending big bucks on having it done professionally – or learning to weld sheet metal together with waterproof welds along the seams – [Adrian Perez] decided that using plain aluminium foil as found in the average kitchen might be a good way to get his feet wet here. When stuck together with double-sided tape, the foil is both strong and light enough to be inflated like a party balloon and still fly better than a lead balloon (which do fly, albeit poorly).

The basic design for the initial Luma glider that he assembled is based around a Kline-Fogleman (KA) airfoil. This type of airfoil is mostly characterized by the simplicity of construction, having been devised in the 1960s for paper airplanes. It uses a stepped approach rather than a continuous airfoil and has seen mostly attention in hobby circles. Even if this Luma glider brings to mind the ill-fated Goodyear Inflatoplane, a hydroformed version of these foil prototype gliders would not have to rely on being inflated to function.

For small-scale prototypes, using low-cost aluminium foil or similar to test out shapes before committing to a design to be welded and hydroformed does seem like a useful approach.

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The Last Instrument To Get Auto-Tuned

July 30, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

Various decades have their musical signature, like the excessive use of synthesizers and hairspray in the 1980s pop music scene. Likewise, the early 2010s was marked by a fairly extreme use of autotune, a technology that allows sounds, especially vocals, to be shifted to precise pitches regardless of the pitch of the original source. In this dark era, a wide swath of instruments and voices on the charts were auto-tuned at some point, although we don’t remember this iconic instrument ever being featured among the annals of pitch-shifted pop music.

The auto-tuned kazoo created by [Guy Dupont] does its pitch corrections on-the-fly thanks to a built-in ESP-32-S3 microcontroller which, through a microphone inside the kazoo, listens for note of the musician’s hum and corrects it to the closest correctly pitched note. Once it identifies the note it outputs a kazoo-like pitch-corrected note from a small speaker, also hidden inside the instrument. It does this fast enough for live performances using the YIN fundamental frequency estimation algorithm. Not only can the kazoo be played directly, but thanks to the implementation of MIDI it can be used to control other synthesizers or be played through other means as a stand-alone synthesizer.

Much like the 80s, where the use of synthesizers relaxed from excessive use on nearly every instrument on every track throughout the decade to a more restrained use as the decade faded, so has autotune been toned down in most music to be more subtly applied. But like our enjoyment of heavily synthesized tunes outside the 80s like those by Daft Punk or The Weeknd, we can also appreciate something heavily auto-tuned outside of the 2010s like a stylized kazoo or a T-Pain-style guitar effects pedal.

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This Home Made Mac Has A Real CRT

July 30, 2024 by Jenny List 15 Comments

Cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions may no longer be in production, but its last bastion came in the form of extremely cheap little Chinese portable sets with a black-and-white tube. They’re now useless for broadcast TV, so can often be had for next-to-nothing. [Action Retro] has a video showing a Mac Classic clone using one, and with a built-in Raspberry Pi and a copy of RiscOS it almost makes a usable computer.

The video below the break is a little heavy on the 3D printer sponsor and the Mac case comes from a Thingiverse project, but it’s well executed and we’re grateful for being introduced to that original project. We’d have gone for a period-correct beige filament rather than the glow-in-the-dark green one used here.

We’re guessing that more than one reader will have a few of those TVs around the place, such is their ubiquity. Is it worth making this as a novelty item? It depends upon your viewpoint, but we can’t help liking the result even if perhaps it’s not for us. If RiscOS isn’t quite the thing, there’s an option a little closer to the real thing.

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