Author: Jenny List

3060 Articles

SerenityOS On Real Hardware

January 10, 2025 by 8 Comments

One of the problems facing any developer working on their own operating system is that of hardware support. With many thousands of peripherals and components that can be found in a modern computer, keeping up requires either the commercial resources of Microsoft or the huge community of Linux.

For a small project such as SerenityOS this becomes a difficult task, and for that reason the primary way to run that OS has always been in an emulator. [Sdomi] however has other ideas, and has put a lot of effort to getting the OS to run on some real hardware. The path to that final picture of a laptop with a SerenityOS desktop is long, but it makes for a fascinating read.

The hardware in question is an Intel powered Dell Chromebook. An odd choice you might think, but they’re cheap and readily available, and they have some useful debugging abilities built in. We’re treated to an exploration of the hardware and finding those debug ports, and since the USB debugging doesn’t work, a Pi Pico clone is squeezed into the case. We like that it’s wired up to the flash chip as well as serial.

Getting access to the serial port from the software turned out to be something of a pain, because the emulated UART wasn’t on the port you’d expect. Though it’s an Intel machine it’s not a PC clone, so it has no need. Some epic hackery involving rerouting serial to the PC debug port ensued, enabling work to start on an MMC driver for the platform. The eventual result is a very exclusive laptop, maybe the only one running SerenityOS on hardware.

We like this OS, and we hope this work will lead to it becoming usable on more platforms. We took a look at it back in 2023, and it’s good to hear that it’s moving forward.

It’s IP, Over TOSLINK!

January 9, 2025 by 19 Comments

At the recent 38C3 conference in Germany, someone gave a talk about sending TOSLINK digital audio over fiber optic networks rather than the very low-end short distance fibre you’ll find behind your CD player. This gave [Manawyrm] some ideas, so of course the IP-over TOSLINK network was born.

TOSLINK is in effect I2S digital audio as light, so it carries two 44.1 kilosamples per second 16-bit data streams over a synchronous serial connection. At 1544 Kbps, this is coincidentally about the same as a T1 leased line. The synchronous serial link of a TOSLINK connection is close enough to the High-Level Data Link Control, or HDLC, protocol used in some networking applications, and as luck would have it she had some experience in using PPP over HDLC. She could configure her software from that to use a pair of cheap USB sound cards with TOSLINK ports, and achieve a surprisingly respectable 1.47 Mbit/s.

We like this hack, though we can see it’s not entirely useful and we think few applications will be found for it. But she did it because it was there, and that’s the essence of this game. Now all that needs to happen is for someone to use it in conjunction with the original TOSLINK-over network fiber, for a network-over-TOSLINK-over-network abomination.

A Street For Every Date

January 8, 2025 by 6 Comments

Different cultures have their own conventions for naming locations, for example in the United Kingdom there are plenty of places named for monarchs, while in many other countries there are not. An aspect of this fascinated [Ben Ashforth], who decided to find all the streets in Europe named after auspicious dates, and then visit enough to make a calendar. He gave a lightning talk about it at last year’s EMF Camp, which we’ve embedded below.

Starting with an aborted attempt to query Google Maps, he then moved on to the OpenStreetMap database. From there he was able to construct a list of date-related street name across the whole of Europe, and reveal a few surprising things about their distribution. He came up with a routing algorithm to devise the best progression in which to see them, and with a few tweaks to account for roads whose names had changed, arrived at an epic-but-efficient traversal of the continent. The result is a full year’s calendar of street names, which you can download from his website.

Being used to significant Interrail travel where this is written, we approve of an algorithmically generated Euro trip. We’re indebted to [Barney Livingstone] for the tip, and we agree with him that 150 slides in a 5 minute talk is impressive indeed.

Continue reading “A Street For Every Date” →

38C3: It’s TOSLINK, Over Long Distance Fibre

January 8, 2025 by 12 Comments

If you’ve owned a CD player or other piece of consumer digital audio gear manufactured since the 1980s, the chances are it has a TOSLINK port on the back. This is a fairly simple interface that sends I2S S/PDIF digital audio data down a short length of optical fibre, and it’s designed to run between something like a CD player and an external DAC. It’s ancient technology in optical fibre terms, with a lowish data rate and plastic fibre, but consider for a minute whether it could be adapted for modern ultra-high-speed conenctions. It’s what [Ben Cartwright-Cox] has done, and he delivered a talk about it at the recent 38C3 event in Germany.

if you’ve cast you eye over any fibre networking equipment recently, you’ll be familiar with SFP ports. These are a standard for plug-in fibre terminators, and they can be had in a wide variety of configurations for different speeds, topographies, and wavelengths. They’re often surprisingly simple inside, so he wondered if he could use them to carry TOSLINK instead of a more conventional network. And it worked, with the simple expedient of driving an SFP module with an LVDS driver to make a differential signal. There follows a series of experiments calling in favours from friends with data centre space in various locations around London, finally ending up with a 140 km round trip for CD-quality audio.

It’s an interesting experiment, but perhaps the most value here is in what it reveals to us about the way optical networking systems work. Most of us don’t spend our days in data centres, so that’s an interesting technology to learn about. The video of the talk itself is below the break.

Continue reading “38C3: It’s TOSLINK, Over Long Distance Fibre” →

Toot-B-Gone, With The FartMaster 3000

January 7, 2025 by 19 Comments

Face it, we’ve all been there, in a crowded workshop building something, and horror of horrors, things are going to get a little… windy. Do you try to drop it quietly and hope nobody says the rhyme, do you bolt for the door, or can you tough it out and hold it in? Never fear, because [Roman_2798881] has got your back, with the FartMaster 3000.

No doubt born of urgent necessity, it’s a discreet wall-mounted fixture for a shop vac line which allows a casual activation of the shopvac as if some sawdust needed removing, and backing up for a safe disposal of any noxious clouds under cover of the vacuum’s whirring.

We have to admit, this one gave us something of a chuckle when we saw it in the Printables feed, but on closer inspection it’s a real device that by our observation could have been useful in more than one hackerspace of our acquaintance. There’s a square funnel in front of a piece of ducting, with a rotary valve to divert the vacuum in an appropriate direction to conceal the evidence.

Then simply turn it back to straight through, vac your pretend sawdust, and nobody’s the wiser. Unless of course, you also integrated a fart-o-meter.

One To Watch For In 2025: Tanmatsu

January 7, 2025 by 20 Comments

If you’ve used the Espressif series of processors, perhaps you’ll have heard of their upcoming ESP32-P4. This is an application processor, with dual RISC-V cores at 400 MHz, and save for a lack of an MMU, a spec sheet much closer to the kind of silicon you’d find in single board computers with pretensions towards being a mini-PC.

It was announced a year ago and there have been limited numbers of pre-release versions of the chip available to developers, but thus far there have been very few boards featuring it. We’re excited then to note that a P4-based board we’ve been watching for a while is finally breaking cover, and what’s more, you can now pre-order one.

The Tanmatsu (Japanese for “Terminal”) is an all-in-one palmtop computer for hackers, with a QWERTY keyboard and an 800×480 DSI display. It’s designed with plenty of expansion in mind, and it’s got space on board for a LoRa radio. The reason we’re interested is that it comes from some of our friends in the world of event badges, so we’ve seen and handled real working prototypes, and we know that its makers come from a team with a proven record in manufacture and delivery of working hardware. The prototype we saw had hardware that was very close to the final version, and an operating system and software that was still under development but on track for the April release of the device. It will be fully open-source in both hardware and software.

We liked what we saw and have pre-ordered one ourselves, so we’ll be sure to bring you a closer look when it arrives.

Thirty Years Later, The Windows 3.1 Video Driver You Needed

January 6, 2025 by 52 Comments

Over the course of the 1990s we saw huge developments in the world of PC graphics cards, going from little more than the original IBM VGA standard through super VGA and then so-called “Windows accelerator” cards which brought the kind of hardware acceleration the console and 16 bit home computer users had been used to for a while. At the end of the decade we had the first generation of 3D accelerator chipsets which are ancestors of today’s GPUs.

It was a great time to be a hardware enthusiast, but as anyone who was around at the time will tell you, the software for the drivers hadn’t caught up. Particularly for Windows 3.1 it could be something of a lottery, so [PluMGMK]’s modern generic SVGA driver could have been extremely useful had it appeared at the time.

As many of you will be aware, there is a set of VESA standardized BIOS extensions for video modes. There were generic VESA drivers back in the day, but they would only provide a disappointing selection of options for what the cards could do even then. The new driver provides support for all the available modes supported by a card, at all color depths. Windows 3.1 in true-color full HD? No problem!

It’s unexpected to see Program Manager and a selection of windows spread across so much real-estate, almost reminiscent of the uncluttered desktops from early ’90s workstations if you disregard the bright colors. We can’t help noticing it wins in one way over even the latest version of MacOS at these resolutions though, as anyone who has ever used a 4K screen on a Mac and found the menus remain miles away up in the top corner will tell you. Meanwhile if you’ve not had your fill of 16-bit Windows, how about sticking it in a ThinkPad BIOS?