Author: Tyler August

559 Articles

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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Block, Shmock — Just Pump Water Over The Chip

August 7, 2026 by 27 Comments

If you’re water cooling a PC, it’s generally accepted that you need some interface between the coolant and the chips — a water block of copper or aluminum that carries the heat-removing fluid. What if you just…didn’t? That’s what [TrashBench] asked with his direct water cooling experiment. Instead of integrated pump or copper water block, he just epoxied a 3D printed pipe fitting onto his bare GPU and CPU.

The results are interesting: while the directly-cooled GPU outperforms the professional system by a decent margin, the same technique fails when applied to the CPU. It also leaks and nearly ruins his hardware, but those are the risks you take when doing mad science, and it’s nothing more epoxy can’t fix. In any case, the fact that directly exposing chips to liquid can cool them down isn’t exactly a revelation. People have been dunking computers in oil for years, but the fact that he sees such a difference between CPU and GPU is quite interesting. [TrashBench] has his own theory in the video, but what do you think is going on here?

In any case, if he continues his direct cooling experiments he’s still going to need a radiator, and if we may be so bold, we would like to recommend a giant metal snake.

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Music Is Back On Optical Disk In This Plex Server

August 7, 2026 by 23 Comments

Given that the no doubt totally sustainable build-out of data centers has sent both solid state and magnetic hard drive prices soaring, though, [WNY Over The Air] decided to take a look back at optical disks — specifically the high-density BDXL disks — and see how they do hosting the music library for his Plex server, among other things.

Price wise, well, it’s going to vary depending where you are in the world and exactly when you look. But Blu-ray pricing is looking competitive to hard drives again, and that even goes for the long-lasting, archival-quality “M-disks” that are supposed to last 1000 years in ideal conditions. Of course if you’re playing with LLM Agents, having your precious data on a Write Once Read Many medium like Blu-ray also has the advantage of keeping the agent from wiping it out, which [WNY] takes pains to point out.

That might be obvious, but what’s less obvious is that once the disk has had its metadata queued by his media-streaming Plex server the M-disk is plenty fast enough for streaming music with no noticeable lag. That load time does happen every time you load in a fresh disk, but how often would you be swapping out 100 GB of songs? Even with lossless formats like FLAC, that’s a few thousand tracks. If you’ve already got a Blu-ray drive and are hard up for storage, it might make sense right now to move your music to an optical disk while waiting for drive pries to normalize.

The window where this makes financial sense might not last long, and we’ll be back to wondering where to store our data. All we can say is that’s probably not going to be audio tape, as cool as a reel-to-reel would look in the server room.

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CNC’d, CNC-inspired Adjustable Wrench Won’t Round Your Bolts

August 6, 2026 by 40 Comments

We’ve probably all got one item in our toolboxes or chests that we really, really don’t like, but find too handy to toss. For [Someone Should Make That], that item was the bolt-rounding adjustable wrench. Rather than continuing to gripe about it, or alter his habits to make greater use of the full wrench set he also owns, he decided to build a better mousetrap. By mousetrap, we mean adjustable wrench.

It took a couple of iterations on-screen before he hits on a solution that seems to work quite well indeed. The problem [Someone] had with his adjustable wrench was one of physical slop: once adjusted, there’s just too much play in the mechanism, which results in rounded-off bolt heads. [Someone]’s CNC’d solution takes inspiration from the CNC machine that manufactures it: he’s using spring-loading in the adjustment screw akin to what you find in the anti-backlash nut on your CNC mill or 3D printer’s ball threads. The tension from the springs keeps the wrench tight to the bolt, and that keeps [Someone] from rounding them off. Speaking of 3D printers, he prototyped in plastic before machining, and the screw in the end product stayed that way. It would be interesting to see how well that holds up.

Not only do we appreciate that it’s solved a common problem many of us have, the ethos of “this angers me, so I shall hack it” is one we support 100%, so do give a watch unless you’re one of those people who absolutely can’t stand videos, even when they’re spring-loaded to have no slop. There’s some good tips for beginner CNC operators in there, too.

This isn’t the first time someone’s tried to reinvent this particular wheel, though the last version we liked was a ratchet.

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Only The Hottest Tunes Play On This Fire Organ

August 6, 2026 by 19 Comments

Most musical organs use air as their working fluid, but there’s nothing in the rule book that says they have to. Calliopes have used steam for 150 years now, while [Look Mum No Computer] has opted to go full pyromaniac and pump propane though the summer’s hottest new instrument.

Just like every steam or compressed-air organ we’ve heard, the tuning could use some work — though we have faith [LMNK] will get to that in due time — and just like the circus organs of yore, it sits upon a trailer for easy transport. That may or may not be to flee from fire marshals, because the whole point of the propane organ isn’t to waste flammable gas: it’s to burn it. The fire itself doesn’t make a sound; that’s the propane going through the copper organ pipes. Igniting it is just bonus, and what a bonus it is!

Said ignition is provided by regular spark plugs and ignition coils, like you’d find in any internal combustion engine. An earlier version used pilot lights, but those had an annoying habit of blowing out and were wasteful of propane to boot. This way the same MIDI signal that controls the gas valve can set the ignition off, and provide a light show to go with the sound. The video embedded below deals with building this new ignition setup, but he has other videos on the channel detailing other aspects of the construction. If you’re not so interested in that and just want a performance, jump right to 16:47 for the obligatory Toccata and Fugue.

Perhaps [LMNK] will write a theme tune for his museum of obsolete technology on this organ, with accompaniment from his rope-core drum machine, and effects on his tape delay synth.

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