Author: Jenny List

3275 Articles

A Tale Of Nuclear Shenanigans From Down Under

April 6, 2025 by 47 Comments

It’s likely that among the readers of this article there will be many who collect something. Whether it’s rare early LEDs or first-year-of-manufacture microprocessors, you’ll scour the internet to find them, and eagerly await mystery packages from the other side of the world.

There’s a tale emerging from Australia featuring just such a collector, whose collection now has him facing a jail sentence for importing plutonium. The story however is not so clear-cut, featuring a media frenzy and over-reaction from the authorities worthy of Gatwick Airport. [Explosions&Fire] has a rather long video unpacking the events, which we’ve placed below the break.

Emmanuel Lidden is an element collector, someone who tries to assemble an entire Periodic Table in their collection. He ordered a range of elements from an American element collectors’ supply website, including samples of plutonium and thorium. He seems to have been unaware he was committing any crime, with the microscopic samples available from legitimate websites with no warnings attached. The case becomes murkier as the Australian authorities flagged the thorium sample and instructed the courier not to deliver it, which they did anyway. Then a raid of the type you’d expect for the terrorists who stole the plutonium in Back To The Future was launched, along with that Gatwick-esque media frenzy.

We’re inclined to agree that the penalty likely to be meted out to him for buying a sliver of a Soviet smoke detector embedded in a Lucite cube seems overly steep, but at the same time his obvious naivety over dealing in radioactive materials marks him as perhaps more than a little foolhardy. It’s something over which to ponder though, have we managed to amass anything illegal disguised as outdated devices? Have you? Perhaps it’s something to discuss in the comments.

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An Amstrad PCW Receives A Bit Of Love

April 6, 2025 by 6 Comments

If Clive Sinclair’s genius in consumer electronics was in using ingenious hacks to make cheaper parts do greater things, then his Amstrad competitor Alan Sugar’s was in selling decade-old technology to consumers as new and exciting. His PCW series of computers are a great example, 1970s CP/M machines smartly marketed for late 1980s home offices. They were a popular choice at the time, and [Retro Recipes] has one. In  a video filmed in period standard definition he’s taking us through a repair to its Gotek drive, and then a RAM upgrade.

The repair and upgrade are fairly straightforward, the former being a failed OLED screen on the drive and the latter being the installation of a bank of DIP memory chips. The interest lies in how they cost-minimised a CP/M machine as a consumer product. The board relies heavily on custom chips as you might expect, and there’s a brief glimpse of one of those unusual 3″ floppy drives. The power supply is part of the monitor board as was often the case with Amstrad machines, and the whole thing is about as simple as it can be. The full video can be found below the break.

We’re guessing that particularly in the UK there will be plenty of PCWs still languishing in dusty attics, but surprisingly given their popularity at the time we see less of them that might be expected. There has been a significantly upgraded model on these pages though.

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A Low F Number Lens, From Scratch

April 6, 2025 by 52 Comments

The F-number of a photographic lens is a measure of its light-gathering ability, and is expressed as its aperture diameter divided by its focal length. Lenses with low F-numbers are prized by photographers for their properties, but are usually expensive because making a good one can be something of a challenge. Nevertheless [Rulof] is giving it a go, making an 80mm F0.5 lens with a Sony E-mount. The video below the break has all the details, and also serves as a fascinating primer on lens design if you are interested.

Rather than taking individual lenses, he’s starting with the second-hand lens from an old projector. It’s got the required huge aperture, but it’s by no means a photographic lens. An interesting component is his choice of diaphragm for the variable aperture, it’s a drafting aid for drawing circles which closely resembles a photographic part. This is coupled with the triplet from an old SLR lens in a 3D-printed enclosure, and the result is a lens that works even if it may not be the best. We know from experiences playing with lens systems that adjusting the various components of a compound lens like this one can be very difficult; we can see it has the much sought-after bokeh or blurred background, but it lacks sharpness.

Perhaps because a camera is an expensive purchase, we don’t see as much of this kind of hacking as we’d like. That’s not to say that lenses don’t sometimes make their way here.

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8 Pins For Linux

April 5, 2025 by 27 Comments

We’ve seen a Linux-based operating system made to run on some widely varying pieces of hardware over the years, but [Dmitry Grinberg]’s latest project may be one of the most unusual. It’s a PCB with 3 integrated circuits on it which doesn’t seem too interesting at first, but what makes it special is that all three of those chips are in 8-pin SOIC packages. How on earth can Linux run on 8-pin devices? The answer lies as you might expect, in emulation.

Two of the chips are easy to spot, a USB-to-serial chip and an SPI RAM chip. The processor is an STM32G0 series device, which packs a pretty fast ARM Cortex M0+ core. This runs a MIPS emulator that we’ve seen on a previous project, which is ripe for overclocking. At a 148 MHz clock it’s equivalent to a MIPS running at about 1.4 MHz, which is just about usable. Given that the OS in question is a full-featured Debian, it’s not running some special take on Linux for speed, either.

We like some of the hardware hacks needed to get serial, memory, and SD card, onto so few pins. The SD and serial share the same pins, with a filter in place to remove the high-frequency SPI traffic from the low-frequency serial traffic. We’re not entirely sure what use this machine could be put to, but it remains an impressive piece of work.

A Proper OS For The Sega Genesis/Megadrive

April 3, 2025 by 20 Comments

The console wars of the early 1990s had several players, but the battle that mattered was between Nintendo’s SNES and Sega’s Genesis, or Megadrive if you are European. They are both famous for their games, but in terms of software they can only run what’s on a cartridge. The Genesis has a Motorola 68000 on board though, which is capable of far more than just Sonic the Hedgehog. [EythorE] evidently thinks so, because here’s a port of Fusix, a UNIX-like OS, for the Sega platform.

As it stands, the OS is running on the BlastEm emulator, but given a Sega Saturn keyboard or a modified PC keyboard for the Sega, it could be run on real hardware. What you get is a basic UNIX-like OS with a working shell and the usual UNIX utilities. With 64k of memory to play with this will never be a powerhouse, but on the other hand we’d be curious to see it in a working cartridge.

Meanwhile, if the console interests you further, someone has been into its workings in great detail.

Header: Evan-Amos, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Weird Way A DEC Alpha Boots

April 3, 2025 by 46 Comments

We’re used to there being an array of high-end microprocessor architectures, and it’s likely that many of us will have sat in front of machines running x86, ARM, or even PowerPC processors. There are other players past and present you may be familiar with, for example SPARC, RISC-V, or MIPS. Back in the 1990s there was another, now long gone but at the time the most powerful of them all, of course we’re speaking of DEC’s Alpha architecture. [JP] has a mid-90s AlphaStation that doesn’t work, and as part of debugging it we’re treated to a description of its unusual boot procedure.

Conventionally, an x86 PC has a ROM at a particular place in its address range, and when it starts, it executes from the start of that range. The Alpha is a little different, on start-up it needs some code from a ROM which configures it and sets up its address space. This is applied as a 1-bit serial stream, and like many things DEC, it’s a little unusual. This code lives in a conventional ROM chip with 8 data lines, and each of those lines contains a separate program selectable by a jumper. It’s a handy way of providing a set of diagnostics at the lowest level, but even with that discovery the weirdness isn’t quite over. We’re treated to a run-down of DEC Alpha code encoding, and should you have one of these machines, there’s all the code you need.

The Alpha was so special in the 1990s because with 64-bit and retargetable microcode in its architecture it was significantly faster than its competitors. From memory it could be had with DEC Tru64 UNIX, Microsoft Windows NT, or VMS, and with the last of which it was the upgrade path for VAX minicomputers. It faded away in the takeover by Compaq and subsequently HP, and we are probably the poorer for it. We look forward to seeing more about this particular workstation, should it come back to life.

Monitor Your Smart Plugs On The Command Line

April 2, 2025 by 4 Comments

The plethora of smart home devices available today deliver all manner of opportunities, but it’s fair to say that interfacing with them is more often done in the browser or an app than in the terminal. WattWise from [Naveen Kulandaivelu] is a tool which changes all that, it’s a command-line interface (CLI) for power monitoring smart plugs.

Written in Python, the tool can talk either directly to TP-Link branded smart plugs, or via Home Assistant. It tracks the power consumption with a simple graph, but the exciting part lies in how it can be used to throttle the CPU of a computer in order to use power at the points in the day when it is cheapest. You can find the code in a GitHub repository.

We like the idea of using smart plugs as instruments, even if they may not be the most accurate of measurement tools. It takes them even further beyond the simple functionality and walled-garden interfaces provided by their manufacturers, which in our view can only be a good thing.

Meanwhile, for further reading we’ve looked at smart plugs in detail in the past.