Author: Tyler August

542 Articles

3 KB Solitaire Fits In QR-Code, Runs In DOS

August 12, 2026 by 16 Comments

In these days of hundred-gigabyte-and-more monster games, it can be nice to stop and remember what a human can do with assembly language and very, very little storage space. In this case, only 3 KB — yes, three kilobytes — to play TinySol, a tiny solitaire game for DOS that’s compatible with the common CGA/EGA/VGA graphics modes. [ClassicBits] even fits the 640×400 AT&T 6300 mode that was used for some GRiD computers in that 3 KB.

The “full” version is actually 3.5 KB. That extra half kilobyte gets you the ability to load and save games, plus mouse support. The 3 KB version you must play through to the end using only the keyboard, but if you’re hitting this on the minimal-supported-hardware target of the IBM 5150, you probably don’t have a mouse. The smaller build can still score the game, auto-finish, congratulate you on a win, and even automatically detect the correct graphics mode for you. It can also be launched from a QR code, which [LGR] demonstrates in a video embedded below. Check it out for a play demo, but it’s Klondike Solitaire. If you don’t know what to expect by this point, you must not have used a PC in the last 30 years.

Even smaller versions of TinySol are available if you know you’re only going to need, say CGA, but even with 360 KB floppies we’re not sure we’d feel the need to save a kilobyte. If it doesn’t fit on the floppy, just print it onto the sleeve as a QR code, like [ClassicBits] did with the floppies he was giving away at Vintage Computer Festival Southwest 2026. Well, technically that’s the “Tiny” version on the QR code, but we have faith there’s some visual code that could hold the 3 KB “medium” game.

[ClassicBits] takes care to point out that his game is 100% human-written, which is something you cannot guarantee even for retro assembly-language products. We’ve already seen that Claude can code for the Z80, which means the 8088 won’t escape it either. Of course these old machines have a lot to recommend them if you want to escape modernity and learn to code without the help.

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Titanic-esqe Telegraph Keeps Relationship Afloat

August 11, 2026 by 21 Comments

When people say the key to a happy, long-lasting marriage is communication, they generally mean the verbal kind: talking things out with your spouse, sharing your feelings, and all that lot. [Rich] AKA [Thumblegudget] took it another way, and built a engine-room telegraph for intramarital communication.

Now, this is less crazy than it sounds. Like the ship’s telegraph, which matched the position of an indicator on the bridge and in the engine room, [Rich]’ telegraph pairs an indicator in his office with one in the living areas of the house. He sets himself to “busy” and the arrow on the matching unit in the basement moves to that position. This naturally goes both ways, which allows his wife to point the needle to remind [Rich] that it may be time for hugs, dinner, or — most essentially for a brit — tea.

In operation each unit has a gimbal motor paired to a rotation sensor and an ESP32-S3 driving it. Thanks to that rotation sensor, the gimbal motor is programmed to lock itself into the positions on the wheel when you poke it, and the ESP32 wirelessly synchronizes the two units. A moving arrow might not be enough to get [Rich] to come down to dinner, so just like the ship’s telegraph you may remember from Titanic, [Rich]’s comes equipped with a bell to draw attention to itself.

Given [Rich]’s wife participated in the video and isn’t filing for divorce, it seems he may be onto something. Perhaps good communication doesn’t need to involve cumbersome human speech at all; maybe all a marriage needs is a telegraph like this and some paddles to send more complicated messages via Morse code.

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The countertop in its natrual habitat: a van.

Cotton-Fiberglass Composite Makes Lightweight RV Countertops

August 10, 2026 by 18 Comments

You’ve seen fiber-reinforced-plastic before, no doubt, but perhaps never quite like in this video by [Whitburn Studio]: it’s still got the usual resin, but instead of glass or carbon fibers, he’s using printed Japanese cotton to create strong, lightweight and good looking parts for the interior of his RV– specifically the countertops.

The technique is very similar to the sort of moldless composite work Burt Rutan pioneered in aircraft use. The fiber-reinforced plastic is formed around a positive ‘buck’ that remains inside the final part, adding stiffness and some backing. Unlike Rutan’s designs, which used pure Styrofoam inside, [Whitburn] is using a sandwhich of two layers of thin ply (3.6 mm) with XPS foam in between. Adding plywood means you don’t need many layers of fiber– again, that’s a decorative cotton, here– to get a surface that won’t dent into the styrofoam when you drop a coffee cup on it.

Indeed, with the plywood providing much of the strength, he’s only using a single layer of cotton and a second of fiberglass– though the glass fibers are really there to protect the pretty print from oopsies while sanding, rather than for their mechanical properties, by the sounds of it. Everything is held together with clear epoxy resin, which also fills the weave of the fabrics. Multiple coats of that are required to get the smooth, shiny surface he shows off at the end, but all that sanding and buffing really pays off. That’s also where you have to be really careful to avoid oopsies– go through the cotton and you have to start over.

Aside from the aesthetics, since this is going in a vehicle the weight is an important consideration– the bigger of the two counters he makes, pictured here, weighs in at only 2.4 kg or 5.2 lb including the cutout covering the sink. That’s pretty good all things considered– a lot lighter than a cement countertop, or even one made of DIY resin tiles.

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Even On The Red Planet, Hexagons Are The Bestagons

August 10, 2026 by 19 Comments

Though their pure Platonic Forms may only exist in the world of ideas, certain regular shapes can’t help but keep falling out of natural processes– case in point, the six-sided solid we call a hexagon, which is indisputably the bestagon. Don’t take it up with us– start an argument with the God of War, because its his planet that’s showing off six sided features, dubbed “polygonal fractures” which NASA’s Curiosity rover is currently crushing under tread in Valle Grande. Now, you might look at the photos and say– well, that’s clearly a dried mudflat. Evidence of water! No brainier, let’s all get Nobel Prizes. Not so fast.

Nothing in nature is ever single-sourced or that simple; if you live somewhere you get dried mud, you may have seen such hexagonal features, but ask anyone from the land of the ice and snow and they’ll tell you that freeze-thaw or frost heave can bring a field of rigolith’s inner Catan board out as well. Sure, we usually call it “dirt” here on Earth, but it’s rigolith by any other name. So NASA isn’t jumping the gun, and their announcement conservatively says that they aren’t sure how the polygonal features formed. Which is both fair enough and very interesting, as figuring it out is going to give some clues into what was going on in this part of Mars in the geologically recent past, especially since this vast field of grid tiles stretches as far as the camera can see. The consensus is that Mars was once “warm and wet” but that’s a relative term– how warm, and how wet, are very much up for debate.

Speaking of crushing hexagons under Curiosity’s wheels– did anyone think said wheels would last this long? They were already tweaking the traction control to extend their life nine years ago. Between it’s plutonium power and ongoing software updates, its a fair bet that Curiosity will outlast the late, lamented Opportunity who currently holds the endurance record at 15 Earth-years.

Transmitting Analog Video Via Frikkin’ Laser Beams

August 9, 2026 by 14 Comments

Transmitting analog video via photons is old hat: that’s how everything started, after all, back in the day with over-the-air TV. Up the frequency of those photons from radio to visible light, though? Well, now that’s rather interesting. [Daniel] aka [milar111]’s LYME 101– which doesn’t seem to stand for anything–laser-video transmitter/receiver pair was a strong contender in the recently-completed Frikken’ Laser Beams challenge, but somehow we missed putting it up on the blog.

The project is documented quite well on GitHub as linked above, as well as on Instructables, and Hackaday.io, and in a YouTube video we’ve embedded below so you can see it in action. In principle it’s pretty simple: a Raspberry Pi is used to generate the composite video signal, which modulates a red laser diode through a 2N2222 NPN transistor and some passives. The reciever is a BPW34 photodiode wired with reverse bias for speed and fed through a LM318N op-amp. To get +9V and -9V for this circuit, [Daniel] makes the easy hack of using a pair of 9V batteries for a noiseless dual supply. It hooks up to a CRT just fine, but a little finessing in the form of a terminator resistor and a DC bias pot on the transmitter were needed to get his USB capture card working with the signal.

It’s not the weirdest way we’ve seen people hack analog video signals– there’s no audio cassettes to be seen,  and the signal isn’t even SECAM, the oddest encoding— but that’s not a slight. Transmitting video with higher-than-normal-frequency photons might not be that weird, but it looks like a lot of fun.

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Whatever Happened To The Computer Of Tomorrow, Anyway? The Xerox Alto Story

August 9, 2026 by 42 Comments

You’ve almost certainly heard of the Xerox Alto, the machine that pioneered the desktop-mouse-keyboard interface and inspired Steve Jobs to produce the Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers. It wasn’t just having a desktop, though– so much of our modern computing paradigm was invented on these machines. Given that, why aren’t we all using Xerox clones instead of Apples or PCs descended from the IBM compatibles? [Ctrl+Alt+Fail] has a video that answers the question: whatever happened to the computer of tomorrow, anyway?

It goes through the whole story of the Alto, from its introduction at Xerox PARC in the 1970s to its demise. At the introduction, the engineers showed of the What You See Is What You Get word processor, networked the machines together to show off e-mail and that anyone could use the office laser printer. It all seems very familiar now, but at the time, it was a revolution. An expensive one. The monitor sitting on the desk wasn’t the computer, after all: that was a large filing-cabinet sized desk sitting underneath. Only about 2000 were ever built, so what happened?

It wasn’t just that the first units cost twelve grand USD to build in 1973 money– about 90 large today by CPI, or for the gold bugs that’s 96 oz or 2.7 kg. It wasn’t worth its weight in gold, but it was close. Still, that wasn’t the problem: later models would be cheaper. The problem was that Xerox refused to sell the thing in the 70s. They saw the potential of a paperless office, and it scared them. Sure, they could sell a computer, once. They wouldn’t get a monthly service fee, nor the cost of the toner, drums and other consumables the Alto wouldn’t need. So they sat on it, and let others like Steve Jobs who didn’t have an existing business empire to lose take their ideas and run with them.

It seems shortsighted, but Xerox had already lost millions on big iron computing around the same time the Alto came along, and every business decision after that was carefully weighed on its projected revenue. Compared to a copier that printed money for Xerox as surely as it printed paper, the Alto just didn’t look like it could pay for itself. It looked likely to lose them a lot of money, which, in fact the adoption of the personal computer ultimately did. Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s easy to play Monday Morning Quarterback and say these developments were inevitable and Xerox should have run out in front, but [Ctrl+Alt+Fail] does a good job of explaining the logic from the Xerox boards’ point of view, which makes the video very much worth a watch.

If you can’t get enough Alto, we can also point you to what it takes to restore one, what almost killed one, and why you shouldn’t mine bitcoin with one.

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Want Energy Efficiency? Dude, You’re Getting A Dell!

August 8, 2026 by 35 Comments

With a title like “Intel Just Matched Apple Silicon. Seriously.“, the latest video from [Jeff Geerling] makes some pretty bold claims. But as we’d expect from [Jeff], he’s got the benchmarks up on GitHub for both the MacBook Neo and Dell’s latest XPS 13 to back it up.

We’ve embedded the full video below, which has [Jeff]’s comparative review of the two laptops. The Mac wins on iGPU, sound, and not shipping Windows, while the Dell gets points for being able to load Linux and having a backlit keyboard. But the figure we were hoping to see is the efficiency. After all, it’s ARM’s ability to crank out gigaflops on fewer watts that won them the mobile market and got Apple interested in that architecture in the first place. If Intel is catching up, that’s news.

On [Jeff]’s version of the Top500 benchmark — the same HPL Linpak test used for Supercomputers — the MacBook cranked out 57.012 Gflops at 10.6W, for 5.38 Gflops/W while the Dell managed 127.91 Gflops at 20.6W, for 6.21 Gflops/W. That’s just astounding, considering the historical data all goes the other way. This Dell also beats out both M4 and M3 Mac Studios, only failing to the M4 Mac Mini at 7.57 Gflops/W. Even when not crunching big numbers, say at idle or web browsing, the XPS matches the MacBook sip for sip in energy efficiency.

Some people have been saying for a few years now that ARM’s observed advantages in power consumption have more to do with the chips themselves than the instruction architecture, and it looks like the Core 5 320 chip in this Dell proves them right when it comes to x86.

While you might think you need to code in Assembly or C to maximize those efficiency gains, your choice of language may not be as important as you think.

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