IBM Made A Sound Card? Who Knew!

February 9, 2026 by No comments

Even in a field you think you know intimately, the Internet still has the power to surprise. Sound cards of the 1990s might not be everyone’s specialist subject, but since the CD-ROM business provided formative employment where this is being written, it’s safe to say that a lot of tech from that era is familiar. It’s a surprise then when along comes [DOS Storm] with a new one. The IBM Mwave was the computer giant’s offering back in the days when they were still pushing forward in the PC space, and sadly for them it turned out to be a commercial disaster.

The king of the sound cards in the ’90s was the SoundBlaster 16, which other manufacturers cloned directly. Not IBM of course, who brought their own Mwave DSP chip to the card, using it as both the sound card and the engine behind an on-board dial-up modem. This appears to have been its undoing, because aside from its notoriously flaky drivers, using both sound and modem at the same time just wasn’t a pleasant experience. To compound the problem, Big Blue resorted to trying to bury the problem with NDAs rather than releasing better drivers, so unsurprisingly it faded from view. Perhaps the reason it was unfamiliar here had something to do with it not being sold in Europe, but given that the chipset found its way into ’90s ThinkPads, we’d have expected to have seen something of it.

In the video below the break he introduces the card, and with quite some trouble gets it working. There are several demos of period games which sound a little scratchy, but we can’t judge from this whether they’d have sounded better on the Creative card. If you’d like to immerse yourself in the folly of ’90s multimedia, have a little bit of Hackaday scribe reminiscing.

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Why Haven’t Quantum Computers Factored 21 Yet?

February 9, 2026 by 4 Comments

If you are to believe the glossy marketing campaigns about ‘quantum computing’, then we are on the cusp of a computing revolution, yet back in the real world things look a lot less dire. At least if you’re worried about quantum computers (QCs) breaking every single conventional encryption algorithm in use today, because at this point they cannot even factor 21 yet without cheating.

In the article by [Craig Gidney] the basic problem is explained, which comes down to simple exponentials. Specifically the number of quantum gates required to perform factoring increases exponentially, allowing QCs to factor 15 in 2001 with a total of 21 two-qubit entangling gates. Extrapolating from the used circuit, factoring 21 would require 2,405 gates, or 115 times more.

Explained in the article is that this is due to how Shor’s algorithm works, along with the overhead of quantum error correction. Obviously this puts a bit of a damper on the concept of an imminent post-quantum cryptography world, with a recent paper by [Dennish Willsch] et al. laying out the issues that both analog QCs (e.g. D-Wave) and digital QCs will have to solve before they can effectively perform factorization. Issues such as a digital QC needing several millions of physical qubits to factor 2048-bit RSA integers.

A Working Intercom From Antique Telephones

February 9, 2026 by 4 Comments

Although it can be hard to imagine in today’s semiconductor-powered, digital world, there was electrical technology around before the widespread adoption of the transistor in the latter half of the 1900s that could do more than provide lighting. People figured out clever ways to send information around analog systems, whether that was a telegraph or a telephone. These systems are almost completely obsolete these days thanks to digital technology, leaving a large number of rotary phones and other communications systems relegated to the dustbin of history. [Attoparsec] brought a few of these old machines back to life anyway, setting up a local intercom system with technology faithful to this pre-digital era.

These phones date well before the rotary phone that some of us may be familiar with, to a time where landline phones had batteries installed in them to provide current to the analog voice circuit. A transformer isolated the DC out of the line and amplified the voice signal. A generator was included in parallel which, when operated by hand, could ring the other phones on the line. The challenge to this build was keeping everything period-appropriate, with a few compromises made for the batteries which are D-cell batteries with a recreation case. [Attoparsec] even found cloth wiring meant for guitars to keep the insides looking like they’re still 100 years old. Beyond that, a few plastic parts needed to be fabricated to make sure the circuit was working properly, but for a relatively simple machine the repairs were relatively straightforward.

The other key to getting an intercom set up in a house is exterior to the phones themselves. There needs to be some sort of wiring connecting the phones, and [Attoparsec] had a number of existing phone wiring options already available in his house. He only needed to run a few extra wires to get the phones located in his preferred spots. After everything is hooked up, the phones work just as they would have when they were new, although their actual utility is limited by the availability of things like smartphones. But, if you have enough of these antiques, you can always build your own analog phone network from the ground up to support them all.

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Upcycling An IPad Into A Touchscreen Display For Your PC

February 9, 2026 by 3 Comments
Installing an RPi Pico board like it's a modchip. (Credit: Tucker Osman, YouTube)
Installing an RPi Pico board like it’s a modchip. (Credit: Tucker Osman, YouTube)

Although generally iPads tend to keep their resale value, there are a few exceptions, such as when you find yourself burdened with iCloud-locked devices. Instead of tossing these out as e-waste, you can still give them a new, arguably better purpose in life: an external display, with touchscreen functionality if you’re persistent enough. Basically someone like [Tucker Osman], who spent the past months on making the touchscreen functionality play nice in Windows and Linux.

While newer iPads are easy enough to upcycle as an external display as they use eDP (embedded Display Port), the touch controller relies on a number of chips that normally are initialized and controlled by the CPU. Most of the time was thus spent on reverse-engineering this whole process, though rather than a full-depth reverse-engineering, instead the initialization data stream was recorded and played back.

This thus requires that the iPad can still boot into iOS, but as demonstrated in the video it’s good enough to turn iCloud-locked e-waste into a multi-touch display. The SPI data stream that would normally go to the iPad’s SoC is instead intercepted by a Raspberry Pi Pico board which pretends to be a USB HID peripheral to the PC.

If you feel like giving it a short yourself, there’s the GitHub repository with details.

Thanks to [come2] for the tip.

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Converting AC Irrigation Valves To DC Operation

February 9, 2026 by 19 Comments

Due to historical engineering decisions made many decades ago, a great many irrigation systems rely on solenoid valves that operate on 24 volts AC. This can be inconvenient if you’re trying to integrate those valves with a modern smart home control system. [Johan] had read that there were ways to convert these valves to more convenient DC operation, and dived into the task himself.

As [Johan] found, simply wiring these valves up to DC voltage doesn’t go well. You tend to have to lower the voltage to avoid overheating, since the inductance effect used to limit the AC current doesn’t work at DC. However, even at as low as 12 volts, you might still overheat the solenoids, or you might not have enough current to activate the solenoid properly.

The workaround involves wiring up a current limiting resistor with a large capacitor in parallel. When firing 12 volts down the line to a solenoid valve, the resistor acts as a current limiter, while the parallel cap is initially a short circuit. This allows a high current initially, that slowly tails off to the limited value as the capacitor reaches full charge. This ensures the solenoid valve switches hard as required, but keeps the current level lower over the long term to avoid overheating. According to [Johan], this allows running 24V AC solenoid valves with a 12V DC supply and some simple off-the-shelf relay boards.

We’ve seen similar work before, which was applied to great effect. Sometimes doing a little hack work on your own can net you great hardware to work with. If you’ve found your own way to irrigate your garden as cheaply and effectively as possible, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Height-Adjustable Key Caps

February 9, 2026 by 2 Comments

Now, we can’t call these LEGO key caps for obvious reasons, but also because they don’t actually work with standard LEGO. But that’s just fine and dandy, because they’re height-adjustable key caps that use the building block principle.

Height-adjustable keycaps in white, with tops removed to show the LEGO-like middles.
Image by [paper5963] via reddit
Now you could just as easily build wells as the dome shape pictured here, and I’d really like to see that one of these days.

In the caption of the gallery, [paper5963] mentions foam. As far as I’ve studied the pictures, it seems to be all 3D-printed material. If they were foam, they would likely be porous and would attract and hold all kinds of nastiness. Right?

[paper5963] says that there are various parts that add on to these, not just flat tops. There are slopes and curves, too. They are also designing these for narrow pitch, and say they are planning to release the files. Exciting!

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Living In The (LLM) Past

February 9, 2026 by 9 Comments

In the early days of AI, a common example program was the hexapawn game. This extremely simplified version of a chess program learned to play with your help. When the computer made a bad move, you’d punish it. However, people quickly realized they could punish good moves to ensure they always won against the computer. Large language models (LLMs) seem to know “everything,” but everything is whatever happens to be on the Internet, seahorse emojis and all. That got [Hayk Grigorian] thinking, so he built TimeCapsule LLM to have AI with only historical data.

Sure, you could tell a modern chatbot to pretend it was in, say, 1875 London and answer accordingly. However, you have to remember that chatbots are statistical in nature, so they could easily slip in modern knowledge. Since TimeCapsule only knows data from 1875 and earlier, it will be happy to tell you that travel to the moon is impossible, for example. If you ask a traditional LLM to roleplay, it will often hint at things you know to be true, but would not have been known by anyone of that particular time period.

Chatting with ChatGPT and telling it that it was a person living in Glasgow in 1200 limited its knowledge somewhat. Yet it was also able to hint about North America and the existence of the atom. Granted, the Norse apparently found North America around the year 1000, and Democritus wrote about indivisible matter in the fifth century. But that knowledge would not have been widespread among common people in the year 1200. Training on period texts would surely give a better representation of a historical person.

The model uses texts from 1800 to 1875 published in London. In total, there is about 90 GB of text files in the training corpus. Is this practical? There is academic interest in recreating period-accurate models to study history. Some also see it as a way to track both biases of the period and contrast them with biases found in data today. Of course, unlike the Internet, surviving documents from the 1800s are less likely to have trivialities in them, so it isn’t clear just how accurate a model like this would be for that sort of purpose.

Instead of reading the news, LLMs can write it. Just remember that the statistical nature of LLMs makes them easy to manipulate during training, too.

Featured Art: Royal Courts of Justice in London about 1870, Public Domain