Water Cooling The MacBook Neo Laptop To Double Gaming Performance

March 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

Recently [ETA Prime] felt a bit underwhelmed by the raw performance of his MacBook Neo when it came to running for extended periods under full load, such as when gaming. Thus the obvious solution is to mildly over-engineer a cooling solution that takes care of issues like thermal throttling.

The Apple MacBook Neo with its repurposed iPhone 16 SoC seems to have leaned hard into answering the question whether a smartphone can be a good general purpose personal computer. Ignoring the lack of I/O, it’s overall not a bad SoC for a laptop, but like when you try to push the CPU and GPU on a smartphone, they do get pretty toasty. Due to the minimalistic cooling solution in the MacBook Neo it’ll easily hit the 105°C thermal throttle limit.

Technically the ‘heatsink’ for this laptop is the aluminium case, as the SoC is coupled via a thermal pad to the case. This doesn’t leave a lot of space and the case will heat soak pretty fast, while also making retrofitting a cooling solution a challenge.

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Improving Soda By Turning It Into Mead

March 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 59 Comments

Test tasting soda mead. (Credit: Golden Hive Mead, YouTube)

You can certainly just chug down that bottle of soda you purchased, but if you accept the premise that the preparation of food and drink is just a subset of chemistry, and that chemistry is fun, then it naturally follows that using soda as the basis for brewing up some mead makes perfect sense. Thus the [Golden Hive Mead] blokes over on YouTube decided to create some Coca Cola flavored mead.

Mead is essentially just water mixed with honey that is left to ferment after adding yeast, resulting in what is also called ‘honey wine’, with an ethanol content of usually between 3.5% and 20%. Since soda is mostly water and comes with its own supply of sugar for yeast to feast on, this isn’t such a crazy choice in that respect. Just make sure to remove the carbonation, as the CO₂ makes the soda too acidic for the yeast to be happy.

Instead of straight honey, caramelized honey was used for extra flavor after which the brew was left to ferment for a while. For extra flavor notes aged oak, vanilla and cinnamon were added as well, to ensure that the fermentation didn’t erase those core notes of the coke. The result was apparently rather flavorful, with about a 10.5% ethanol content, receiving the full approval of both tame test tasters.

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Comparing The Power Usage Of 12 VDC And 240 VAC Kettles

March 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 41 Comments

If you have a 12 VDC power system, like the battery of a PV solar system or car, would it be more efficient to boil water for that cup of tea with that 12V straight from the battery, or use a 240 VAC mains kettle via a ~90% efficient inverter instead? That’s the question that [Cahn] decided to answer experimentally, using a bulky 3 kW inverter and a collection of electric kettles.

Although the used amount of 500 mL of water is boiled much faster in the 2,200 Watt mains kettle than in the 150 and 350 Watt low-voltage kettles, this obvious difference is somewhat irrelevant if you’re only concerned with efficiency. To measure the power used a Victron smart shunt was used with each run, keeping in mind that a perfect efficiency for heating 500 mL from room temperature to boiling is around 43-44 Wh.

With two runs per kettle, the 240 VAC kettle used 65-70 Wh. The first ‘150 Watt’ kettle pulled nearly 200 Watt to boil the water after about 20 minutes, using 62-64 Wh. The second ‘150 Watt’ kettle pulled around 180 Watt, took 23-25 minutes and used 68-74 Wh. Finally, the ‘350 Watt’ kettle drew over 420 Watt and used 50-56 Wh in just over 8 minutes.

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Reconstructed SC62015 Opcode Reference For Sharp Pocket Computers

March 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 3 Comments

Pocket computers like Sharp’s 8-bit computing marvels were a big part of the 1980s, providing super-portable processing power to anyone who wanted a bit more than what something like a scientific calculator could provide at the time. These days they are mostly just a collector’s item for retrocomputing enthusiasts, which also means that a lot of the knowledge about how to program the CPUs in them is at risk of being lost.

This is why [gikonekos] decided to combine as much knowledge they can glean from official documentation into a reference project on GitHub for the SC62015 equipped Sharp pocket computers like the PC-E550.

Generally you’d program in Sharp’s dialect of BASIC on these computers, such as the ‘PLAY3’ program that [gikonekos] recently unearthed from a November 1993 copy of ‘Pocket Computer Journal’ using which you can create polyphonic tunes. This only unlocks a small part of what the hardware can do, of course, so having a full opcode reference like this is important.

While still a work in progress, it’ll eventually contain the full opcode and register tables, addressing modes, instruction summaries and of course a full accounting of how all of this was reconstructed. As the original Sharp documentation wasn’t released to the public, providing these scans is also not a goal, especially not under any kind of free license.

A cursory search reveals an instruction table for the PC-E500 from 1995 by [Andrew Woods], so documenting this is not a new thing, although at the time these Sharp pocket PCs didn’t count as ‘retro systems’ yet.

Testing Severely Neglected VHS Tapes And CDs

March 25, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Check your tape for spider nests before rewinding. (Credit: Brady Brandwood, YouTube)

Physical media has a certain amount of durability associated with it, a quality which is naturally determined by the way that they’re stored. Generally this does not involve being abandoned on the porch of a dilapidated, abandoned house where the elements and any passing critter can have their way with it.

Exactly how playable would these VHS tapes and CDs still be? Whether it was out of a sense of burning curiosity, or for a similar reason that [Brady Brandwood] has a habit of adopting former seafood critters like lobsters as adorable pets, these items got recently collected and put to the test.

Normally VHS tapes are kept safely in a little sleeve or box in a dry, cool place, similar to CDs and DVDs. These particular items had however been left for at least a decade out in the open amidst the ransacked remains of abandoned homes. This meant that the VHS tapes were full of dirt and debris, and at least in one case with a spider nest that jammed up the thrift-store VHS/DVD combo player.

The CDs were cleaned and tried in a G5 iMac, with the obvious results there being that as long as the shiny layer with the data was intact, they worked fine. While a damaged disc tried to play somewhat, even the amazing audio CD error-correcting algorithms can not compensate for see-through gashes.

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You Can Now Run MS-DOS Applications On The Apple IIe

March 25, 2026 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

After a lot of debugging, [Seth Kushniryk] has managed to get the last issuess shaken out of his port of MS-DOS 2.0 to the Apple II, and has released the project to the public. If you have the requisite AD8088 or similar co-processor expansion card with onboard x86 CPU, this should be all you need to get started.

Although this co-processor card contains effectively a self-contained x86 system, its only I/O goes via the expansion bus, so it has to play nice with the 6502 CPU of the Apple II system. When we last reported on [Seth]’s efforts he had just managed to get MS-DOS 2.0 booting and basically in a barebones working state.

Since then he’s been working on the bridge program that provides communication between the 8088 on the card and the Apple II’s 6502, relocating it in RAM to enable high-resolution graphics, as well as other tweaks and optimizations. Also a lot of bug hunting, including an undocumented ProDOS constraint with a request count.

With all of this done it’s now possible to run basically any MS-DOS 2.0 compatible software, assuming it doesn’t try to write directly to video memory. This does limit the software selection somewhat, but back in the day it would probably have been amazing to have that 8 MHz 8088 purring along the 6502 to run both Apple and DOS software titles. Props to [Seth] for restoring this software functionality that had been lost to the ages.

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Testing Expensive Graphene-Reinforced Nylon Filament

March 24, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Although usually nylon (generally PA6) filament is pretty cheap, there are some more exotic variants out there, such as the PA12-based Lyten 3D graphene filament that comes in at a cool $150 for a 1 kg spool. Worse for [Dr. Igor Gaspar] here was that the company doesn’t ship to the EU, and didn’t respond to emails about obtaining a sample for testing. Fortunately he got a spool via a different route, so that he could test whether this is the strongest nylon filament or not.

The full name for this filament is PA1205, though it’s not certain what the ’05’ part stands for. PA12 is a less moisture-sensitive version of PA6, however. Among the manufacturer’s claims are that it’s the strongest nylon filament, as well as very lightweight and heat-resistant. Interestingly the datasheet recommends printing with an 0.6 mm nozzle, which is the only major deviation from typical nylon FDM filaments. Of course, printing with an 0.4 mm nozzle had to be tried.

With a standard PA-CF preset in Bambu Lab’s slicer the printing of test parts worked without issues, which was promising. With load testing the filament made a good showing compared to average PA filaments, though as with most fiber reinforced filaments it’s more brittle than the pure material. Compared to PA-CF this PA1205 was much less brittle than PA-CF, however. Overall it’s not a bad filament, but for the asking price it’s a tough ask.

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