Author: Zoe Skyforest

3791 Articles

How A British Engineer Homebrewed The Quietest Carbine

October 5, 2026 by 29 Comments

Hollywood has a lot to answer for when it comes to “silencers” on firearms. On screen, a suppressed pistol makes a pinging thud, and the bad guy in the next room flops to the floor. Real life is rather less cinematic. A suppressor takes the edge off the report, but it’s by no means quiet or silent. Hence why the term “silencer” is more of a colloquialism, and why “suppressor” is more appropriate.

Every so often, though, someone gets remarkably close to the movie version. The best-known example is probably the De Lisle carbine. A British commando weapon from the Second World War, it was cobbled together from bits and pieces and ended up being a stellar performer in the world of clandestine operations.

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Elgato Key Lights Get Matter Upgrade

October 1, 2026 by 3 Comments

[Michael H Thiesen] had a couple of Elgato Key Lights in his home streaming setup. The only problem was that they would stop responding regularly, requiring a power cycle to get them going again. He never quite pinned down where the problem lay; instead, he set about replacing the light controllers wholesale to provide more reliable functionality.

In place of the original controllers, a pair of ESP32-C3 boards were substituted in. The original design simply had a Realtek controller chip wired into a PCA9635 LED controller, so the swap was as easy as plucking one out and wiring the new microcontroller in its place. The capable ESP32-C3 offers native Matter support, which enabled the new controllers to join [Michael’s] Apple Home setup natively. Running a firmware coded in Rust, the controllers offer power, brightness, and colour-temperature control right in Apple Home. As a bonus, there was no need to use Homebridge to get the lights hooked up to the smarthome setup anymore, eliminating a dependency and a possible source of occasional failures.

Design files are on Github for the curious. We’ve featured other great Elgato hacks before, too, like this nifty capture card firmware hack. If you’re tinkering with your own smarthome hacks, be sure to let us know on the tipsline.

Drum Machina Go! As A New Music Tool For The Game Boy

October 1, 2026 by 7 Comments

The Nintendo Game Boy is quite possibly the most popular console in the international chiptune community. You might have seen musicians cranking out tunes with LSDJ or Nanoloop, but now there’s a new option for writing bangers on the DMG. It’s Drum Machina Go!, put together by [audiowanderer].

The original Game Boy has a four-bit audio engine with two pulse channels, one waveform channel, and a noise channel. To that end, DMGo! gives you those four channels to play with, each with a 16-step sequencer. There’s also an FX section, ADSR controls, and various filtering options to make your sound juicier, richer, or grainier, depending on your taste.

There are also helpful sync options via the link port, such as for use with other Game Boys, or you can use PULSE OUT sync to hook up to your Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators or KORG Volcas if you have them. There are also fun features like the MANGLING FX which lets you decay and destroy your musical creations live by playing with the D-pad and buttons.

If you’re eager to try a new way to compose on the Game Boy, you can throw it on a flash cart or in an emulator and start tinkering away.  We’ve featured other fun Game Boy music hacks before, too, like this nifty project that turns it into a MIDI sequencer.

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Archiving The World’s Oldest Webcam Feed

October 1, 2026 by 13 Comments

FogCam is the oldest webcam feed that’s still up and running. Installed at San Francisco State University, it’s been slowly uploading a new image to the web every 20 to 60 seconds or so since September 30, 1994. Very few of those images have ever been saved, but [Justin Earl] has come along to fix that with Fog-Bank.

[Justin] was eager to have top-notch coverage of the FogCam, so set up four separate catchers across three separate networks to scrape images from the feed. He runs one on his own server, one on his home machine, and two small programs running on Cloudflare. Each catcher reports the time it grabbed a fresh image from the site. FogCam has never replaced an image within 19 seconds, so as long as one of the catchers grabs an image at least every 18 seconds, [Justin]’s system should be archiving everything that’s being captured.

Currently the archive hosts over 169,000 images across 377 days, though the majority of that content is from a 2019 archive effort when it was believed the camera would soon be shut down. More stats are available, too.

It’s not the most interesting view in the world, but it’s neat to see such a project continue running long enough to celebrate its 32nd birthday this week. We’ve featured other neat webcam-related content before, too. Meanwhile, you can go check out the live feed if you want to peer through FogCam yourself. Continue reading “Archiving The World’s Oldest Webcam Feed” →

SDR– Lets You Patch Together Your Setup

October 1, 2026 by 15 Comments

It is often helpful to think of a radio as a series of interconnected functional blocks—hence the use of block diagrams to convey how a given radio operates. [Julian Haag] has brought this ethos to SDR–, a software-defined radio program where you can patch together your setup.

There are many software defined radio tools out there, with various interfaces and methods of configuration. [Julian] wanted to keep things intuitive and simple, and so built SDR– with an interface similar to that of a modular synth. You drop in blocks, like a radio, a demodulator, or a speaker, and then you link them together with patch cables to route the signals where they need to go.

[Julian] has populated the tool with plenty of useful decoders, too, so you can have lots of fun from the get go. You can play with things like ADS-B, POCSAG, SSTV, DAB, and RDS right out of the box. There’s also some fun passive radar and direction finding tools there too if you want to dive in. Files are on GitHub for the curious.

We’ve featured lots of neat SDR hacks over the years, like this neat real-time beamforming setup. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own radio experiments in the homelab, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.

Roman Telescope Saves Fuel, Doubles Mission

September 30, 2026 by 18 Comments

Contemplate the events that might end a space mission, and you might picture something dramatic: detonation on the pad, a dead guidance system, or micrometeoroids shattering delicate solar panels. More often, though, the ending is far more mundane. Plenty of perfectly healthy spacecraft have been retired simply because the fuel tanks ran dry. That’s why mission planners guard every kilogram of go juice so jealously, and why careful preparation in a mission is critical to long-term success.

Which brings us to NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Barely two weeks after its August 30 launch on a Falcon Heavy, the mission team announced that Roman now has enough fuel for at least 22 years of science operations. That’s well over double its original 10-year fuel budget. It’s a huge gain, so let’s explore how NASA pulled it off.

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Geothermal Cooling For New York’s Subways

September 29, 2026 by 26 Comments

You might think that if you dug some tunnels down into the ground where you could be out of the sunshine, that you might find them to be relatively cool and comfortable inside. Yet, fill those tunnels with trains and supporting equipment and millions of commuters, and you’ll instead find yourself sweltering in the heat.

New York’s subways are too hot for comfort, and have been for some time. Unfortunately, unlike any old regular building, you can’t just air condition a subway and call it done. Instead, authorities are looking for other solutions to beat the heat on the famous underground transit network.

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