Author: Bryan Cockfield

1761 Articles

Concrete Clears Its Own Snow

March 24, 2024 by 26 Comments

Humans are not creatures well suited to cold environments. Without a large amount of effort to provide clothing, homes, and food to areas with substantial winters, very few of us would survive. The same is true of a lot of our infrastructure since things like ice, frost heave, and large temperature swings can all negatively impact buildings, roadways, and other structures. A team at Drexel University in Pennsylvania has created a type of concrete they hope might solve some issues with the material in cold climates.

Specifically when it comes to sidewalks and roadways, traditional methods of snow and ice removal such as plowing and salting are generally damaging to the surface material, with salting additionally being damaging to vehicles. Freeze-thaw cycles aren’t kind to these surfaces either. This concrete, on the other hand, contains a low-temperature liquid paraffin which releases heat when it has a phase change, from a liquid to a solid. By incorporating the material into the concrete, it can warm itself as temperatures drop, maintaining a temperature above freezing to melt ice and snow. The warming effect isn’t indefinite, but lasts a significant amount of time during testing.

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Generative AI Now Encroaching On Music

March 22, 2024 by 62 Comments

While it might not seem like it to a novice, music turns out to be a highly mathematical endeavor with precise ratios between chords and notes as well as overall structure of rhythm and timing. This is especially true of popular music which has even more recognizable repeating patterns and trends, making it unfortunately an easy target for modern generative AI which is capable of analyzing huge amounts of data and creating arguably unique creations. This one, called Suno, does just that for better or worse.

Unlike other generative AI offerings that are currently available for creating music, this one is not only capable of generating the musical underpinnings of the song itself but can additionally create a layer of intelligible vocals as well. A deeper investigation of the technology by Rolling Stone found that the tool uses its own models to come up with the music and then offloads the text generation for the vocals to ChatGPT, finally using the generated lyrics to generate fairly convincing vocals. Like image and text generation models that have come out in the last few years, this has the potential to be significantly disruptive.

While we’re not particularly excited about living in a world where humans toil while the machines create art and not the other way around, at best we could hope for a world where real musicians use these models as tools to enhance their creativity rather than being outright substitutes, much like ChatGPT itself currently is for programmers. That might be an overly optimistic view, though, and only time will tell.

Your Text Needs More JPEG

March 19, 2024 by 22 Comments

We’ve all been victims of bad memes on the Internet, but they’re not all just bad jokes gone wrong. Some are simply bad as a result of being copies-of-copies, as each reposter adds another layer of compression to an already lossy image format like JPEG. Compression can certainly be a benefit in areas like images and videos, but [Michal] had a bit of a fever dream imagining this process applied to text. Rather than let the idea escape, he built the Lossifizer to add JPEG-like compression to text.

JPEG compression uses a system similar to the fast Fourier transform (FFT) called the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to reduce the amount of data in an image by essentially removing some frequency information. The data lost is often not noticeable to the human eye, at least until it gets out of hand. [Michal]’s system performs the same transform on text instead, with a slider to control the “amount of JPEG” in the output text. The code for this script uses a “perceptual” character map, clustering similarly-looking and similarly-sounding characters next to each other, resembling “leet speak” from days of yore, although at high enough compression this quickly gets out of hand.

One of the quirks that [Michal] discovered is that certain AI chat bots have a much less difficult time interpreting this JPEG-ified text than a human probably would have, which provides a bit of insight into how some of these algorithms might be functioning under the hood. For some more insight into how JPEG actually works on images, we posted about a deep dive into the image format a while back.

Photoresistors Provide Air Gap Data Transfer, Slowly

March 19, 2024 by 50 Comments

One of the simplest ways of keeping a computer system secure is by using an air gap — that is, never actually connecting the system to the network. This can often include other peripherals like USB drives and other removable storage as well, so getting information to and from secure (or compromised) systems behind air gaps can often present a challenge. But assuming you have local access to the computer and your parts bin handy, these optical solutions from [Nikolay] can allow  data transfer to or from such off-line computers.

[Nikolay]’s specific use case for this project is to transfer small amounts of information to or from computers that may be compromised in some way, or computers that might otherwise be dangerous to connect to other equipment. There’s actually several methods described in the project, the first involves temporarily attaching a photoresistor to the computer’s screen which has been wired into the remains of a USB keyboard. A script running on the compromised machine translates data into a series of white and black squares. The sensors can detect these patterns much like playing Duck Hunt on an old CRT television and transmit the data across the air gap with reasonable certainty nothing harmful crossed with it.

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Super-Portable, Tunable VHF Antenna

March 16, 2024 by 6 Comments

Ham radio is having a bit of a resurgence these days, likely due to awards programs like Parks on the Air (POTA) and Summits on the Air (SOTA), which encourage amateur radio operators to head outside and “activate” at various parks and mountaintops. For semi-mobile operations like this, a low-power radio is often used, as well as other portable gear including antennas. In the VHF/UHF world, the J-pole is a commonly used antenna as well, and this roll-up tunable J-pole antenna is among the most versatile we’ve seen.

The antenna uses mostly common household parts which keeps the cost down tremendously. The structure of the antenna is replacement webbing for old lawn chairs, and the conductive elements for the antenna are made out of metallic HVAC tape which is fixed onto the chair webbing after being cut to shape. The only specialized parts needed for this is a 3D printed bracket which not only holds the hookup for the coax cable feeding the antenna, but is also capable of sliding up and down the lower section of the “J” to allow the antenna to be easily tuned.

As long as you have access to a 3D printer, this antenna is exceptionally portable and pretty easy to make as well. Although VHF and UHF aren’t too popular for POTA and SOTA, portable equipment like this for the higher frequency bands is still handy to have around when traveling or operating remotely. With the antenna situation sorted out, a DIY radio that can make use of it might be in order as well.

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Upgrading PC Cooling With Software

March 9, 2024 by 21 Comments

As computing power increases with each new iteration of processors, actual power consumption tends to increase as well. All that waste heat has to go somewhere, and while plenty of us are content to add fans and heat sinks for a passable air-cooled system there are others who prefer a liquid cooling solution of some sort. [Cal] uses a liquid cooler on his system, but when he upgraded his AMD chip to one with double the number of cores he noticed the cooling fans on the radiator were ramping quickly and often. To solve this problem he turned to Python instead of building a new cooling system.

The reason for the rapid and frequent fan cycling was that the only trigger for the cooling fans available on his particular motherboard is CPU temperature. For an air cooled system this might be fine, but a water cooled system with much more thermal mass should be better able to absorb these quick changes in CPU temperature without constantly adjusting fan speed. Using a python script set up to run as a systemd service, the control loop monitors not only the CPU temperature but also the case temperature and the temperature of the coolant, and then preferentially tries to dump heat from the CPU into the thermal mass of the water cooler before much ramping of cooling fans happens.

An additional improvement here is that the fans can run at a much lower speed, reducing dust in the computer case and also reducing noise compared to before the optimizations. The computer now reportedly runs almost silently unless it has been under load for several minutes. The script is specific to this setup but easily could be modified for other computers using liquid cooling, and using Grafana to monitor the changes can easily be done as [Cal] also demonstrates when calibrating and testing the system. On the other hand, if you prefer a more flashy cooling system as a living room centerpiece, we have you covered there as well.

Raspinamp: It Really Replicates Questionable Activities Involving Llamas

March 7, 2024 by 23 Comments

In the late 90s as MP3s and various file sharing platforms became more common, most of us were looking for better players than the default media players that came with our operating systems, if they were included at all. To avoid tragedies like Windows Media Center, plenty of us switched to Winamp instead, a much more customizable piece of software that helped pave the way for the digital music revolution of that era. Although there are new, official versions of Winamp currently available, nothing really tops the nostalgia of the original few releases of the software which this project faithfully replicates in handheld form.

The handheld music player uses a standard Raspberry Pi (in this case, a 3B) and a 3.5″ TFT touchscreen display, all enclosed in a clear plastic case. With all of the Pi configuration out of the way, including getting the touchscreen working properly, the software can be set up. It uses QMMP as a media player with a Winamp skin since QMMP works well on Linux systems with limited resources. After getting it installed there’s still some configuration to do to get the Pi to start it at boot and also to fit the player perfectly into the confines of the screen without any of the desktop showing around the edges.

Although it doesn’t use the original Winamp software directly, as that would involve a number of compatibility layers and/or legacy hardware at this point, we still think it’s a faithful recreation of how the original looked and felt on our Windows 98 machines. With a battery and a sizable SD card, this could have been the portable MP3 player many of us never knew we wanted until the iPod came out in the early 00s, and would certainly still work today for those of us not chained to a streaming service. A Raspberry Pi is not the only platform that can replicate the Winamp experience, though. This player does a similar job with the PyPortal instead.

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