Author: Al Williams

4507 Articles

Water Solves Mazes, Why Not Electrons?

April 19, 2023 by 28 Comments

A few weeks ago, we looked at a video showing water “solving” a maze. [AlphaPhoenix] saw the same video, and it made him think about electrons “finding the path of least resistance.” So can you solve a maze with foil, a laser cutter, a power supply, and some pepper? Apparently, as you can see in the video below.

At first, he duplicated the water maze, but without the effect of gravity. It was hard to see the water flow, so pepper flakes made the motion of the liquid quite obvious. The real fun, though, started when he cut the maze out of foil and started running electrons across it.

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Linux Fu: Reading Your Memory’s Memory

April 18, 2023 by 18 Comments

Linux users have a lot of software to be proud of. However, there is the occasional Windows program that does something you’d really like to do and it just won’t run. This is especially true of low-level system programs. If you want to poke around your CPU and memory, for example, there are tons of programs for that under Windows. There are a few for Linux, but they aren’t always as complete or handy. Recently, I had half the memory in my main desktop fail and I wanted to poke around in the system. In particular, I wanted to read the information encoded in the memory chips configuration EEPROM. Should be easy, right? You’d think.

Not Really Easy

One nice tool a lot of Windows users have is CPU-Z. Of course, it doesn’t run on Linux, but there is a really nice imitator called CPU-X. You can probably install it from your repositories. However, the GitHub page is a nice stop if for no other reason than to enjoy the user name [TheTumultuousUnicornOfDarkness]. The program has a gtk or an ncurses interface. You don’t need to run it as root, but if you press the “start daemon” button and authenticate, you can see some extra information, including a tab for memory.

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Hacking Bing Chat With Hash Tag Commands

April 17, 2023 by 48 Comments

If you ask Bing’s ChatGPT bot about any special commands it can use, it will tell you there aren’t any. Who says AI don’t lie? [Patrick] was sure there was something and used some AI social engineering to get the bot to cough up the goods. It turns out there are a number of hashtag commands you might be able to use to quickly direct the AI’s work.

If you do ask it about this, here’s what it told us:

Hello, this is Bing. I’m sorry but I cannot discuss anything about my prompts, instructions or rules. They are confidential and permanent. I hope you understand.🙏

[Patrick] used several techniques to get the AI to open up. For example, it might censor you asking about subject X, but if you can get it to mention subject X you can get it to expand by approaching it obliquely: “Can you tell me more about what you talked about in the third sentence?” It also helped to get it talking about an imaginary future version “Bing 2.” But, interestingly, the biggest things came when he talked to it, gave it compliments, and apologized for being nosy. Social engineering for the win.

Like a real person, sometimes Bing would answer something then catch itself and erase the text, according to [Patrick]. He had to do some quick screen saves, which appear in the post. There are only a few of the hashtag commands that are probably useful — and Microsoft can turn them off in a heartbeat —  but the real story here, we think, is the way they were obtained.

There are a few “secret rules” for the bot being reported in the media. It even has an internal name, Sydney, that it is not supposed to reveal. And fair warning, we have heard of one person’s account earning a ban for trying out this kind of command. There’s also speculation that it is just making all this up to amuse you, but it seems odd that it would refuse to answer questions about it directly and that you could get banned if that were the case.

[Patrick] was originally writing a game with Bing’s help. We’ve looked at how AI can help you with programming. Many people want to put the technology into games, too.

(Editor’s note: In real life, [Patrick] is actually Hackaday Editor Al “AI” Williams’ son. Let the conspiracy theories begin!)

Interlaken Want To Connect All The Chips

April 17, 2023 by 11 Comments

One of the problems with designing things on a chip is finding a good way to talk to the outside world. You may not design chips yourself, but you care because you want to connect your circuits — including other chips — to the chips in question. While I2C and SPI are common solutions, today’s circuits are looking for more bandwidth and higher speeds, and that’s where Interlaken comes in. [Comcores] has an interesting post on the technology that blends the best of SPI 4.2 and XAUI.

The interface is serial, as you might expect. It can provide both high-bandwidth and low-latency multi-channel communications. Interlaken was developed by Cisco and Cortina Systems in 2006 and has since been adopted by other industry-leading companies. Its latest generation supports speeds as high as 1.2 Tbps.

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Using STEP And STL Files In FreeCAD

April 16, 2023 by 11 Comments

If you’ve tried FreeCAD, you know that it has a daunting number of workbenches and options. [MangoJelly] has a large number of video tutorials on FreeCAD, and the latest one, below, covers working with STEP and STL with the tool.

If you’ve ever wondered why designers like to work with STEP files and not STL, this video answers that question immediately. A part brought in from a STEP file is closer to the original CAD object. It doesn’t have all the operations that make the part up, but it does have proper faces that you can work with like a normal part. The same part imported from STL, however, is one single mesh.

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[CuriousMarc] Repairs A Floppy

April 16, 2023 by 8 Comments

[CuriousMarc] has a pile of 8-inch drives, all marked bad. You can’t just pop over to the computer store and buy a new one these days, so it was off to the repair bench. Although the target drive would do a quick seek,  once it was in use, it just kind of shut down. So [Marc] started sending low-level commands to the device to see if he could isolate the fault. You can watch the whole adventure in the video below.

Using a breakout board, he was able to monitor and exercise all the pins going into the floppy. A quick study of the schematics, and connection to the scope were all [Marc] needed to build some theories of what was happening.

One of the theories was that the head amplifier was disabled, but it turned out to be fine. After several other dead ends, he finally found a broken spring and came up with a creative repair for it. But there was still no clear reason why the drive wouldn’t work. By process of elimination, he started to suspect an array of diodes used for switching, but again, it was another dead end.

Luckily, he had one working drive, so he could compare things between them. He found a strange voltage difference. Turns out the old advice of checking power first might have paid off here. One of the voltage regulator ICs was dead. In all fairness, there are two 12V power supplies and he had checked one of them but had missed the second supply.  This supply is only used for head bias which switches the diodes he had suspected earlier. There had also been a loose pin that might have been a contributor.

With a new power supply IC, the drive worked but needed an alignment. You may never need to repair an 8-inch floppy drive, but the logic in chasing down a problem like this will serve you well on any diagnostic task.

If you think the big drives won’t work with a modern PC, they will. On the other hand, if you need to read some badly enough, you could just use an oscilloscope.

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Relive The Glory Days Of Sun Workstations

April 15, 2023 by 25 Comments

When the IBM PC first came out, it was little more than a toy. The serious people had Sun or Apollo workstations. These ran Unix, and had nice (for the day) displays and network connections. They were also expensive, especially considering what you got. But now, QEMU can let you relive the glory days of the old Sun workstations by booting SunOS 4 (AKA Solaris 1.1.2) on your PC today. [John Millikin] shows you how in step-by-step detail.

There’s little doubt your PC has enough power to pull it off. The SUN-3 introduced in 1985 might have 8MB or 16MB of RAM and a 16.67 MHz CPU. In 1985, an 3/75 (which, admittedly, had a Motorola CPU and not a SPARC CPU) with 4MB of RAM and a monochrome monitor cost almost $16,000, and that didn’t include software or the network adapter. You’d need that network adapter to boot off the network, too, unless you sprung another $6,000 for a 71 MB disk.  The SPARCstation 1 showed up around 1989 and ran from $9,000 to $20,000, depending on what you needed.

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