Author: Lewin Day

2766 Articles

Building A Tape Echo In A Coke Can Tape Player That Doesn’t Really Work

April 15, 2024 by 6 Comments

Back in the 1990s, you could get a tape player shaped like a can of Coca Cola. [Simon the Magpie] scored one of these decks and decided to turn it into a tape echo effect instead. It didn’t work so well, but the concept is a compelling one. You can see the result in the video below.

The core of the effect is a tape loop, which [Simon] set up to loop around a pair of hacked-up cassette shells. This allows him to place one half of the loop in the Coca-Cola cassette player and the other half in a more conventional desktop tape deck. A 3D-printed bracket allows the two decks and the tape loop to be assembled into one complete unit.

The function is simple. The desktop tape deck records onto the loop, with the Coca-Cola unit then playing back that section of tape a short while later. Hey, presto — it’s a tape delay! It’s super lo-fi, though, and the tape loop is incredibly fragile.

Continue reading “Building A Tape Echo In A Coke Can Tape Player That Doesn’t Really Work” →

Compaq Portable III Is More Than Meets The Eye

April 15, 2024 by 8 Comments

The Compaq Portable III hails from the 386 era — in the days before the laptop form factor was what we know today. It’s got a bit of an odd design, but a compelling one, and the keyboard is pretty nifty, too. [r0r0] found one of these old-school machines and decided it was well worth refitting it to give it some modern grunt.

The Portable III ended up scoring a mini-ITX build, with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and an AMD RX580 GPU. Cramming all this into the original shell took some work, like using a vertical riser to fit in the GPU. Hilariously, the RGB RAM sticks are a little bit wasted when the enclosure is closed.

For the purists out there, you’ll be relieved to know the machine’s original plasma display was dead. Thus, a larger modern LCD was fitted instead. However, [r0r0] did play around with software to emulate the plasma look just for fun.

It’s funny to think you could once score one of these proud machines for free at a swap meet.

Continue reading “Compaq Portable III Is More Than Meets The Eye” →

3D Printing A Cassette Is Good Retro Fun

April 15, 2024 by 9 Comments

The cassette is one of the coolest music formats ever, in that you could chuck them about with abandon and they’d usually still work. [Chris Borge] recently decided to see if he could recreate these plastic audio packages himself, with great success.

He kicked off his project by printing some examples of an open source cassette model he found online. The model was nicely accurate to the original Compact Cassette design, but wasn’t exactly optimized for 3D printing. It required a great deal of support material and wasn’t easy to customize.

[Chris] ended up splitting the model into multiple components, which could then be assembled with glue later. He then set about customizing the cassette shells with Minecraft artwork. Details of the artwork are baked into the model at varying heights just 1/10th of the total layer height. This makes it easy to designate which sections should be printed with which filament during his multi-colored print. And yet, because the height difference is below a full layer height, the details all end up on the same layer to avoid any ugly gaps between the sections. From there, it’s a simple matter of transferring over the mechanical parts from an existing cassette tape to make the final thing work.

It’s a neat trick, and the final results are impressive. [Chris] was able to create multicolored cassettes that look great. It’s one of the better uses we’ve seen for a multi-colored printer. This would be an epic way to customize a mixtape for a friend!

We’ve seen some great 3D printed cassettes before, too, like these retro reel-to-reel lookalikes.

Continue reading “3D Printing A Cassette Is Good Retro Fun” →

Analyzing The Code From The Terminator’s HUD

April 15, 2024 by 38 Comments

The T-800, also known as the Terminator, was like some kind of non-giving up robot guy. The robot assassin viewed the world through a tinted view with lines of code scrolling by all the while. It was cinematic shorthand to tell the audience they were looking through the eyes of a machine. Now, a YouTuber called [Open Source] has analyzed that code.

The video highlights one interesting finds, concerning graphics seen in the T-800’s vision. They appear to match the output of various code listings and articles in Nibble Magazine, specifically its September 1984 issue. One example spotted was a compass rose, spawned from an Apple Basic listing. it was a basic quiz to help teach children to understand the compass. Another graphic appears to be cribbed from the same issue in the MacPaint Patterns section.

The weird thing is that the original film came out in October 1984 — just a month after that article would have hit the news stands. It suggests perhaps someone involved with the movie was also involved or had access to an early copy of Nibble Magazine — or that the examples in the magazine were just rehashed from some other earlier source.

Code that regularly flickers in the left of the T-800s vision is just 6502 machine code. It’s apparently just a random hexdump from an Apple II’s memory. At other times, there’s also 6502 assembly code on screen which includes various programmer comments still intact. There’s even some code cribbed from the Apple II DOS 3.3 RAM Disk driver.

It’s neat to see someone actually track down the background of these classic graphics. Hacking and computers are usually portrayed in a fairly unrealistic way in movies, and it’s no different in The Terminator (1984). Still, that doesn’t mean the movies aren’t fun!

Continue reading “Analyzing The Code From The Terminator’s HUD” →

Heating Mars On The Cheap

April 8, 2024 by 78 Comments

Mars is fairly attractive as a potential future home for humanity. It’s solid, with firm land underfoot. It’s able to hang on to a little atmosphere, which is more than you can say about the moon. It’s even got a day/night cycle remarkably close to our own. The only problem is it’s too darn cold, and there’s not a lot of oxygen to breathe, either.

Terraforming is the concept of fixing problems like these on a planet-wide scale. Forget living in domes—let’s just make the whole thing habitable!

That’s a huge task, so much current work involves exploring just what we could achieve with today’s technology. In the case of Mars, [Casey Handmer] doesn’t have a plan to terraform the whole planet. But he does suggest we could potentially achieve significant warming of the Red Planet for $10 billion in just 10 years. Continue reading “Heating Mars On The Cheap” →

Giant Sails Actually Help Cargo Ships Save Fuel, And The Planet In Turn

April 2, 2024 by 81 Comments

Shipping is not a clean business. The global economy is fueled by trade, and much of that trade involves hauling product from point A to point B. A great deal of that product goes by water. Shipping it around uses a great deal of fuel, and creates a great deal of greenhouse gas emissions. It’s bad for the environment, and it’s costly for shipping companies.

Any gain in efficiency can be an edge in this regard, and beneficial for the planet to boot. Now, it appears that good old fashioned sails  might just be the tool that companies need to clean up their fleets. And it’s not some theory—real world numbers back it up!

Where The Wind Takes You

Sea transport has been branded as a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for about 3% of the total. Shipping companies in turn are under increasing pressure to innovate and adapt, both for the good of the planet and their own coffers. It’s perhaps a small blessing that saving fuel and slashing emissions go hand in hand, and companies are desperate for any technology that can deliver on those goals.

Enter the WindWings, a revolutionary “wind assisted propulsion” concept developed by BAR Technologies. In partnership with ocean freight firm Cargill, these radical sails were installed aboard the Pyxis Ocean, a Kamsarmax bulk carrier chartered from Mitsubishi. These aren’t the canvas and rope constructs of yore . Instead, they’re a set of towering metal sails that stand 123 feet tall, designed to harness the wind’s power and propel the massive bulk carrier across the oceans. Continue reading “Giant Sails Actually Help Cargo Ships Save Fuel, And The Planet In Turn” →

The Roller Ship Was Not An Effective Way To Cross The High Seas

March 27, 2024 by 25 Comments

Boats come in all shapes and sizes. We have container ships, oil tankers, old-timey wooden sailing ships, catamarans, trimarans, and all sorts besides. Most are designed with features that give them a certain advantage or utility that justifies their construction for a given application.

The roller ship, on the other hand, has not justified its own repeat construction. Just one example was ever built, which proved unseaworthy and impractical. Let’s explore this nautical oddity and learn about why it didn’t make waves as its inventor may have hoped.

Continue reading “The Roller Ship Was Not An Effective Way To Cross The High Seas” →