Figure showing the simulated path of gas released in GEO to the magentosheath.

An Orbital StormWall Could Mitigate The Next Carrington Event

June 17, 2026 by Tyler August 40 Comments

The Carrington Event was the most intense geomagnetic storm ever recorded. In September 1859, auroras were visible as close to the equator as Columbia and some telegraph stations were severely damaged by current induced in the lines. If a similar event occurred today, with a lot more more wiring to pick up current than just an embryonic telegraph network, the results would almost certainly be cataclysmic.

Various modifications to the grid have been proposed to avoid another storm of that magnitude bringing on a new dark age, but a recent paper in the journal Space Weather proposes a more radical solution: using the sun’s energy to create a massive barricade in space.

Time evolution of a simulated geomagnetic storm, with and without the StormWall.

While the authors of the paper refer to this concept by the compelling name StormWall, it’s not a physical wall. It’s actually just gas, likely of alkali metal atoms, to be deployed by solar-powered satellites.

To oversimplify, the proposal is to release lots and lots of neutral gas in Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO), in what the researchers call “artificial mass loading” — the neutral gas would of course be ionized by the storm, but in so doing could absorb up to 50% of the incoming energy of the geomagnetic storm, frustrating its coupling to Earth’s magnetosphere. As a bonus, it would protect not just terrestrial assets like the power grid, but everything in a lower orbit than the mass load: everything from communication satellites in GEO to the International Space Station. Assuming its hasn’t been reduced to debris laying at the bottom of Point Nemo by then, anyway.

In simulations, the StormWall required 384,048 kg of gas, which is not exactly trivial. But even accounting for tanking, the researchers estimate that would only take about six launches of SpaceX’s Starship. Though that does assume its GEO capabilities end up being roughly equivalent to the massive vehicle’s projected 100-tons-to-Mars payload capacity.

It’s certainly an interesting hack to solve a problem that has caused a lot of worry these past decades. If you’re interested in learning more about the record-setting geomagnetic storm, we have a piece about the 1859 Carrington Event that should give you plenty of anxiety about the frailty of our modern infrastructure.

Smart Bulb WiFi Server Hosts “Banned” Literature

June 16, 2026 by Tyler August 51 Comments

Let’s stop for a moment and pause to consider the smart bulb. Imagine going back 20 years and telling yourself that people will be putting computers capable of acting as web servers into light bulbs just so they can control them from their telephone instead of hitting the switch. The whole thing seems crazy — but its great, because it enables hacks like this one where [RickOOOOOO] takes a commercially-available ESP32 smart bulb, and hacks it into a local file server and digital library for banned books.

The word “banned” gets bandied about a lot — but assured, there’s nothing getting served up by [RickOOOOOO]’s bulb that’s going to help somebody will ill-intent build an improvised explosive device. No, at least as conceived here, it appears to be full of easily-available e-books that were pulled from school libraries in the USA, which may-or-may not meet your personal definition of ‘banned’. Whatever you want to call them, we appreciate the idea that a student could hypothetically replace one of the bulbs at school with a hacked version serving up that sort of content. a bulb in such a school with a bulb hacked to host that sort of content–in minecraft, naturally.

In any case, the hardest part of the hack was carving the ESP32C3 in the bulb out of the IoToreo bulb enough to access it. Unfortunately having done so, [Rick] wasn’t able to get an SDcard interface soldered on, so he’s stuck with just 4MB for books and webserver. That means only a few epubs can fit on the bulb, but it’s better than those books being unavailable.

Like the solarpunk message board we featured recently, which also ran on an ESP32, the bulb broadcasts a public network that uses a captive portal to take you to the web interface of the library. From there, users can browse books– including learning from where they were banned and why–and admins can access a password-protected control panel. One neat work-in-progress feature on the control panel is that the bulb can still be used as a smart bulb, so you can try and match the light to its surroundings. In Minecraft, because of course we would never encourage kids to change light bulbs. Perish the thought!

Speaking of Minecraft, you can run a server on a lightbulb, too. Or DOOM, because of course even the light bulbs run DOOM now. What a time to be alive!

Image of an elf projected by the laser scanner

2026 Frikkin Lasers Contest: Glow Engine Is Like An Open Air Slow Scan CRT

June 16, 2026 by Tyler August 10 Comments

Slow-scan CRTs were never exactly common compared to their faster cousins, but given the popularity of Slow Scan TV (SSTV) amongst hams and NASA broadcasts, many of you are probably familiar with them. The slow scan rate of SSTV meant it required much less bandwidth, but in the early days you needed a CRT with a long-persistence phosphor to hold onto the image. [AJRussell]’s Glow Engine works much the same, with one key difference — instead of cathode rays, he’s using a frikkin laser beam.

In this case, the phosphor is Strontium Aluminate, the same stuff that gives most glow-in-the-dark toys and filament its kick. Energized by a 405 nm laser of questionable wattage, the phosphor will glow for several seconds, allowing the creation of an image. So while this is a laser projector, it works more like a CRT than most galvo projectors, which rely on Persistence of Vision to create an image. Here it’s persistence of fluorescence.

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Custer’s Revenge: EVTOL Drone Brings Back Channel Wings

June 15, 2026 by Tyler August 7 Comments

You have to be a pretty big aviation nerd to know about [Willard Ray Custer] and his channel wing concept, but if you are, you’ll be giddy to hear about the semicircular profile of the HopFlyt Cyclone drone’s tandem wings. If you’re not quite that much of a nerd, please keep reading, because it’s a really neat concept that never — er — quite got off the ground.

[Custer]’s idea was pretty simple, and born of a shift in reference frame — he realized that only the relative wind over the wing mattered, not the airspeed of the entire aircraft. The same idea drives every blown-wing short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL) project from the DHC-7 turboprop airliner to the An-72 cargo jet: air from the engines washes over the wings, creating lift. Where [Custer] went further is that rather than blowing air over a straight wing, he wrapped the wing under the propeller in a semicircle to maximize the area of lower pressure — and thus lift — creating the “channel wing” that bears his name.

Theoretically, an aircraft with channel wings and powerful enough engines might be able to do vertical takeoffs just from the blown lift, but none of [Custer]’s prototypes demonstrated that — just excellent short-field capability. The HopFlyt drone would be the same, except that, being a tandem, it has double the channel wings of [Custer]’s more-conventional designs, and it’s also a tilt-wing to boot. In that mode, the added low-speed lift from the channel wing makes transitions easier than they otherwise would be — which isn’t anything to sneeze at, since transitioning from vertical to horizontal flight has always been the real bane of VTOL projects.

They’re claiming a reduced fuel burn of 10% in hover and transition thanks to the extra lift from the channel wings. You can see their prototype in action in the demo video embedded below. We once featured a project that went even further, blowing air across a special hollow wing for propulsion and blown lift. The easiest eVTOL project still starts with a quadcopter, though.

Continue reading “Custer’s Revenge: EVTOL Drone Brings Back Channel Wings” →

Wooden Piano Keys Hold Your Less-Wooden, Not-Piano Keys

June 15, 2026 by Tyler August 18 Comments

There are many ways to deal with keys: a bowl next to the entryway, a junk drawer, or you can just leave them in your pockets and hope you remember to check on Laundry Day. [Inventive Robin] has come up with his own, unique take on the key holder concept: he’s got piano keys to hold his car keys, CNC’d out of some nice hardwoods.

Of course, it’s not just a fake one-octave piano with hooks glued to it; that wouldn’t be quite enough to catch our fancy. There’s a mechanism hidden under the “white” keys– made of maple– that lowers the brass hooks when you press the, er, wooden actuator, so you can retrieve your, uh, lock-openers. Keys, that is. They’re both keys, of different sorts, because English is a wonderful language. In any case, pressing the maple key a second time lifts the brass hook, trapping the likely metal key hanging on it.

The mechanism was carved from acetyl sheet on the same Shapoko CNC machine that handled the wood, and was assembled with purchased metal rods, springs, and some plastic standoffs. It’s very satisfying to watch it work unenclosed, so check out the build video embedded below to see that in action– jump to 4:46 if you don’t want to get the whole design brief.

It’s not the most complex of hacks, but it’s beautifully done inside and out, and [Robin] is clearly happy with the result. It’s nice enough that visitors might want to photograph the key holder, but perhaps have them do it sans keys– those photos could potentially be a security risk.

Continue reading “Wooden Piano Keys Hold Your Less-Wooden, Not-Piano Keys” →

A wooden doll with a long nose that has nothing to do with Disney

Bavarian Court Tells Gemini It Can’t Be A Real Boy Until It Tells The Truth

June 14, 2026 by Tyler August 63 Comments

Does anyone like Google’s AI summaries? If so, they weren’t on the Judge’s bench in a specific Bavarian courtroom recently, where it was ruled that yes, Google is liable for the hallucinations of its search engine AI.

This was a civil case brought by a pair of Munich companies, both of whom were wrongfully slandered by LLM hallucinations. Google took the position that this information must have existed somewhere, and like presenting links to libelous websites — something they have no obligation to avoid — they should not be held accountable for what the summary at the top of the search results says.

Continue reading “Bavarian Court Tells Gemini It Can’t Be A Real Boy Until It Tells The Truth” →

yserver screenshot demonstrating compiz comptibility

Why Not Yserver? It’s Xserver, But Rust-y.

June 14, 2026 by Tyler August 21 Comments

If you’re not into Wayland as a display manager, it seems like your options are slowly dwindling. Xorg isn’t exactly a hotbed of activity, and the one fork everyone knows about is best known as a political lightning rod. Luckily, Rust developers can apparently never see a tool without pulling it into their heavily oxidized bucket of crabs, so we now have another option: the creatively named yserver, released under the MIT license by [joske].

The name, yserver, for the record, is just a placeholder name, but we rather like the simple logic of “Y comes after X” — sure, you could call it X12, but that could imply continuity, and this is a clean break. It’s also not a full reimplementation of the huge, sprawling mess that Xorg has become over the decades. It can’t launch multiple screens and thus lacks full multi-monitor support. So, for now, it may be too bare-bones for some people’s use cases.

As it uses Vulkan, it is limited to relatively modern hardware, but has been tested on Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple chips. The target kernel is good old Linux, but the docs do cover compiling for FreeBSD; just be aware that that’s very much a secondary target. FreeBSD users are probably used to that, though.

On Linux, a standalone DRM/KMS yserver can successfully run not just window managers but full desktops — specifically MATE, Cinnamon, and XFCE, as they’re not on the Wayland bandwagon. It even supports Compiz, in case you missed the cube and wiggly window animations. You can also use yserver via Xwayland or even Xorg. Speaking of Xorg, [joske] has run the X.Org X Test Suite (xts5) against this proposed successor, and it currently scores 66.2%, which seems pretty good considering the project explicitly does not plan to copy all of Xorg’s functionality.

Aside from multiple screens, one thing that would have been neat to see is support for the Asterinas rust-based Linux-compatible kernel — though if that project achieves full Linux compatibility, that may be a non-issue. Even if you aren’t an oxidization enthusiast, you might find reasons to be happy to see more competition in the display-manager market — after all, Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User. If Xorg really is destined to the slow death critics predict, perhaps yserver could cover the holdouts.