My Space

May 3, 2024 by Jenny List 29 Comments

If I could name one thing which has been the most transformative for our community over the last couple of decades, it would have to be the proliferation of hackerspaces. Ostensibly a place which provides access to tools and machinery, these organisations have become so much more. They bring together like-minded people, and from such a meeting of minds have come a plethora of high quality projects, events, and other good things.

Just What Is A Hackerspace?

A workshop with benches that have small vehickes in various stages of construction on them. — A Hacky Racer takes shape in the MK Makerspace workshop

Hackerspaces loosely come in many forms, from co-working spaces or libraries who have invested in a 3D printer and imagine themselves to be a hackerspace, through to anarchist collectives in abandoned warehouses who support their city’s alternative communities with technology. For me, hackerspaces must be community organisations rather than for-profit ones, so for the purposes of this article I’m not referring to closely-allied commercial spaces such as FabLabs.

So a good hackerspace for me is a group of tech enthusiasts who’ve come together, probably formed a non-profit association, and rented a dilapidated basement or industrial unit somewhere. The tools and machines inside aren’t shiny and new but they mostly work, and round that fridge stocked with Club-Mate you’ll find a community of friends, people who don’t think it’s odd to always want to know how things work. In a good hackerspace you’ll have found your place, and you can be much more than you would have been alone.

I visit plenty of hackerspaces across Europe as I wander the continent on an Interrail pass. I’m a member of three of them at the moment, though my main home in the UK is at Milton Keynes Makerspace. I’ve sat on recycled sofas drinking caffeinated beverages in more cities than I can count, and along the way I’ve seen close-up the many different ways a hackerspace can be run. I’ve seen spaces falling apart at the seams, I’ve seen ones a little too regimented for my taste, and others with too much of an emphasis on radical ideology, but mostly I’ve seen spaces that get it about right and I feel at home in. So perhaps it’s time to sit down and talk about what I think makes a good hackerspace. What is my space?

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Pssst… Wanna Buy An Old Supercomputer?

May 1, 2024 by Jenny List 87 Comments

If you spend your time plotting evil world domination while stroking your fluffy white cat in your super-villain lair, it’s clear that only the most high-performance in computing is going to help you achieve your dastardly aims. But computers of that scale are expensive, and not even your tame mad scientist can whistle one out of thin air. Never mind though, because if your life lacks a supercomputer, there’s one for sale right now in Wyoming.

The Cheyenne Supercomputer was ranked in the top 20 of global computing power back in 2016, when it was installed to work on atmospheric simulation and earth sciences. There’s a page containing exhaustive specs, but overall we’re talking about a Silicon Graphics ICE XA system with 8,064 processors at 18 cores each for a total of 14,5152 cores, and a not inconsequential 313,344 GB of memory. In terms of software it ran the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server OS, but don’t let that stop you from installing your distro of choice.

It’s now being sold on a government auction site in a decommissioned but able to be reactivated state, and given that it takes up a LOT of space we’re guessing that arranging the trucks to move it will cost more than the computer itself. If you’re interested it’s standing at a shade over $40,000 at the time of writing with its reserve not met, and you have until the 3rd of May to snag it.

It’s clear that the world of supercomputing is a fast-moving one and this computer has been superseded. So whoever buys it won’t be joining the big boys any time soon — even though it remains one heck of a machine by mere mortal standards. We’re curious then who would buy an old supercomputer, if anyone. Would its power consumption for that much computing make it better off as scrap metal, or is there still a place for it somewhere? Ideas? Air them in the comments.

Possibly The Cheapest Way To Film In Bullet Time

April 30, 2024 by Jenny List 19 Comments

When The Matrix hit the cinemas back in 1999 it started a minor revolution with its use of so-called “Bullet time” — a freeze-frame technique in which the action could move round a momentarily frozen subject. It’s filmed using an array of cameras in an arc, something which was pretty expensive back then but is now within the reach of almost anyone. Just how cheaply bullet time can be filmed is shown by [3DSage], who turned nine toy cameras into a budget bullet time rig.

The cameras themselves are what you might expect for the princely sum of nine dollars, but as he points out, their low-resolution video has a certain charm. Some iteration was required to produce the rig without fouling their flip-out screens, and he found that the video quality was far better than their still image quality. But eventually he was able to extract the required array of frames and stitch them together with a video interpolator for the required effect. His cat is a handsome creature from any angle, we can now reveal.

The video below the break has all the details, and while we couldn’t spot quite the same camera he used on our local version of the online shop he used, there seem to be plenty of similar cheap devices should you wish to try it for yourself. Either way, this cost much less than the previous budget bullet time contender.

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Squeeze Another Drive Into A Full-Up NAS

April 30, 2024 by Jenny List 14 Comments

A network-attached storage (NAS) device is a frequent peripheral in home and office networks alike, yet so often these devices come pre-installed with a proprietary OS which does not lend itself to customization. [Codedbearder] had just such a NAS, a Terramaster F2-221, which while it could be persuaded to run a different OS, couldn’t do so without an external USB hard drive. Their solution was elegant, to create a new backplane PCB which took the same space as the original but managed to shoehorn in a small PCI-E solid-state drive.

The backplane rests in a motherboard connector which resembles a PCI-E one but which carries a pair of SATA interfaces. Some investigation reveals it also had a pair of PCI-E lanes though, so after some detective work to identify the pinout there was the chance of using those. A new PCB was designed, cleverly fitting an M.2 SSD exactly in the space between two pieces of chassis, allowing the boot drive to be incorporated without annoying USB drives. The final version of the board looks for all the world as though it was meant to be there from the start, a truly well-done piece of work.

Of course, if off-the-shelf is too easy for you, you can always build your own NAS.

AI Can Now Compress Text

April 28, 2024 by Jenny List 42 Comments

There are many claims in the air about the capabilities of AI systems, as the technology continues to ascend the dizzy heights of the hype cycle. Some of them are true, others stretch definitions a little, while yet more cross the line into the definitely bogus. [J] has one that is backed up by real code though, a compression scheme for text using an AI, and while there may be limitations in its approach, it demonstrates an interesting feature of large language models.

The compression works by assuming that for a sufficiently large model, it’s likely that many source texts will exist somewhere in the training. Using llama.cpp it’s possible to extract the tokenization information of a piece of text contained in its training data and store that as the compressed output. The decompressor can then use that tokenization data as a series of keys to reassemble the original from its training. We’re not AI experts but we are guessing that a source text which has little in common with any training text would fare badly, and we expect that the same model would have to be used on both compression and decompression. It remains a worthy technique though, and no doubt because it has AI pixie dust, somewhere there’s a hype-blinded venture capitalist who would pay millions for it. What a world we live in!

Oddly this isn’t the first time we’ve looked at AI text compression.

The Z80 Is Dead. Long Live The Free Z80!

April 28, 2024 by Jenny List 27 Comments

It’s with a tinge of sadness that we and many others reported on the recent move by Zilog to end-of-life the original Z80 8-bit microprocessor. This was the part that gave so many engineers and programmers their first introduction to a computer of their own. Even though now outdated its presence has been a constant over the decades. Zilog will continue to sell a Z80 derivative in the form of their eZ80, but that’s not the only place the core can be found on silicon. [Rejunity] is bringing us an open-source z80 core on real hardware, thanks of course to the TinyTapeout ASIC project. The classic core will occupy two tiles on the upcoming TinyTapeout 7. While perhaps it’s not quite the same as a real 40-pin DIP in your hands, like all of the open-source custom silicon world, it’s as yet early days.

The core in question is derived from the TV80 open-source core, which we would be very interested to compare when fabricated at TinyTapeout’s 130nm process with an original chip from a much larger 1970s process. While It’s true that this project is more of an interesting demonstration of TinyTapeout than a practical everyday Z80, it does at least serve as a reminder that there may be a future point in which a run of open-source real Z80s or other chips might become possible.

This isn’t the first time we’ve featured a TinyTapeout project.

Photo Shows Real Spiders From Mars

April 27, 2024 by Jenny List 15 Comments

A cornerstone of early 1970s rock music culture was the British singer David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust persona, along with his backing band the Spiders from Mars. You can tell that the PR department at the European Space Agency were beside themselves with glee at the opportunity to reference them when their Mars Express spacecraft snapped a picture of some of the planets surface structures which bear a passing resemblance to Earth-bound spiders. We can’t blame them, we’d have done the same.

While these spiders are definitely not arachnid in origin, they are no less interesting. Over the Martian winter there form layers of carbon dioxide ice, which turn to gas under the influence of the Sun. This gas becomes trapped underneath layers of ice, until it forms sufficient pressure to burst through and escape. In doing so it brings up dark dust which settles along fissures in the ice, leading to the spider-like patterns when viewed from orbit.

So no life on Mars then, at least as yet. But it’s an interesting observation, and another little piece in the puzzle of understanding our planetary neighbor, as well as an excuse for a classic rock earworm. Meanwhile, this isn’t the first time we’ve reported on the ESA Mars probes.