The Kentucky Cave Wars, And Going Viral In 1925

April 16, 2026 by No comments
Floyd Collins, the unfortunate star of this post. (Public Domain)

Information, it seems, flows at the speed of media. In the old days, information traveled with people on ships or horses, so if, say, a battle was won or lost, it could be months or even years before anyone back home knew what happened. While books and movable type let people store information, they still moved at the speed people moved. Before the telegraph, there were attempts to use things like semaphores to speed the flow of information,  but those were generally limited to line-of-sight operations. Carrier pigeons were handy, but don’t really move much faster than people.

The telegraph helped, but people didn’t have telegraph stations in their homes. At least not ordinary people. But radio was different. It didn’t take long for every home to have a radio, and while the means of broadcasting remained in the hands of a few, the message could go everywhere virtually instantly. This meant news could go from one side of the globe to the other in seconds. It also meant rumors, fads, and what we might think of today as memes could, too.

You might think that things “going viral” is a modern problem, but, in reality, media sensations have always been with us. All that changes is the number of them and their speed.

One of the earliest viral media sensations dealt with William Floyd Collins, an unfortunate man who was exploring caves during the Kentucky Cave Wars.

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Emergency Bolt-Action Launcher For EpiPens

April 16, 2026 by 1 Comment

Imagine you and your friend are enjoying a nice sunny day, and BAM — they start to have a severe allergic reaction to who knows what. You have an EpiPen, but your friend is on the other side of a field! The solution? Obviously [Emily The Engineer] has only one option: build an entire EpiPen launcher!

Starting off the life-saving project, [Emily] prototyped with a 3D printed blank and a simple solenoid-controlled glorified potato cannon. This proved effective, as one would expect of such a project after successful tests on a human subject. However, there was one simple problem: what if you missed your initial shot?

To ensure no possible failed missions, a bolt-action magazine was retrofitted onto the device. Additionally, an air compressor placed in a mobile backpack carrier allows for repeated mobile use. Official testing was done on ballistic gel before a “war game” scenario played out involving an anaphylactic friend. As one would assume, this went perfectly, ignoring the time delay of having to wait for the compressor to build up enough pressure…

Anyways, even if you won’t be using this EpiPen launcher anytime soon, there are some actual DIY medical miracles you can look into! Something that’s a tad less insane to hack together than an EpiPen gun would be a splint. That is exactly what you can learn about here!

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Trying To Build Your Own Consumer-Grade Router In 2026

April 16, 2026 by 4 Comments

Although we have many types of networking equipment with many unique names, at their core they can usually be reduced to just a computer with some specific peripherals. This is especially the case for something like a router, a device found in just about any home these days. Certain consumer-grade routers may contain something special like a VDSL modem, but most of them just have a WAN Ethernet jack on one end and one or more LAN-facing Ethernet ports.

All further functionality is implemented in software, including any firewall, routing and DHCP features. What this means is that any old PC with at least two Ethernet ports or equivalent can be a router as long as you install the appropriate software.

In this article we’ll be taking a look at what consumer-level options there exist here today, ideally something so simple that the average home user could set it up with a bit of coaching.

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A Raspberry Pi Zero-based camera in a nice yellow case. There's a yellow lanyard, too.

Optocam Zero’s Pictures Look One Hundred

April 16, 2026 by 5 Comments

Yeah, we know, there’s a camera on your phone that does this and that. But these days its become trendy to turn towards older digital cameras in place of smartphones, and we can tell you from experience, that the joys of having a dedicated photographing contraption are many.

There’s plenty of cheap digital cameras on the secondhand market, but instead of fending off the clothes bros and other reseller types at the thrift store, stay home and build [Doruk Kumkumoğlu]’s Optocam Zero. Inspired by the Kodak Charmera and the like, [Doruk] aimed for something that’s playful, enjoyable, and intuitive to use.

Optocam Zero uses an auto-focus camera module and features eight photo filters. The screen dims when inactive to preserve battery life, but it can be charged back up with USB-C, and you can use it for the duration. And unlike my young adult camera, you don’t have to take out the SD card to see the pictures, just use the custom hotspot interface to transfer them.

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Robot Bird Decoys Work For Good

April 16, 2026 by 1 Comment

Usually, you think of bird decoys as being a tool to lure birds to an untimely encounter with a hunter. However, [Interesting Engineering] has a story about robotic bird decoys in Grand Teton National Park that are helping restore the dwindling number of sage grouse in the park.

While some decoys are static, others are motorized to replicate mating rituals. The goal: lure real birds to safer areas to breed. Particularly, they want the birds to avoid areas around the Jackson Hole Airport. The robots are built with help from local students and robotics teams. While some of the construction is made of fabric and foam, actual bird feathers are also used.

The robots mimic lekking behavior, a courtship ritual where male grouse do repetitive motions combined with recorded mating calls. This attracts other grouse and, of course, results in chicks who will be raised nearby.

Assuming the effort is successful, the same technique could help other areas where restored areas are difficult to repopulate. You can find more pictures on the Park’s Instagram, and the title picture is from that collection.

Usually, when we see something like this, the robot is trying to remove something dangerous to the endangered plant or animal, not attract them.

Cooking A Raspberry Pi FireWire HAT With Backfeeding

April 15, 2026 by 6 Comments

Recently [Jeff Geerling] has been tinkering with FireWire in order to use some older gear, which includes the use of a Raspberry Pi HAT called the Firehat. This provides a 6-pin FireWire port courtesy of the VIA VT6315N PCIe-to-FireWire chipset. As is typical with USB gear today as well, some FireWire gear requires more power than a port can provide, requiring the use of a powered hub. Unfortunately the use of a powered FireWire hub caused a bit of a conflagration event on [Jeff]’s desk.

Part of the issue appears to be that this Firehat board was designed as a companion to the Equip-1 DV capture device, with no attention paid to the idea that someone might be backfeeding power from an attached hub. As a result the VIA chip cried uncle and let out the magic smoke.

With this Firehat board taking its name clearly a bit too literal, [Jeff] will be reporting his findings to the developers, in the hope that perhaps some diodes or another solution against backfeeding can be added to the final design. Fortunately he was sent this board for testing prior to public release, so this definitely shows a clear flaw that can now be corrected.

We hope that [Jeff] has a good HEPA air filtration setup in his office to get rid of the acrid magic smoke, as it’s not meant to be enjoyed for long periods.

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Haiku Isn’t Just For X86 Anymore, Boots On ARM In QEMU

April 15, 2026 by 7 Comments

Ever since it was called OpenBeOS, Haiku has targeted the x86 platform. That makes good sense: it’s hard enough maintaining a niche system on ubiquitous hardware. But x86 isn’t the only game in town anymore. Apple’s doing very well on ARM, Linux runs on oodles of ARM SBCs, and even Windows uh, exists, on that architecture, so why not Haiku? That’s what [smrobtzz] figured, and thanks to his work you can now run Haiku on ARM, in QEMU.

There’s no image available as yet — you still need to bootstrap your own from a working system, and ironically that system cannot be Haiku. [smrobtzz] apparently used MacOS, which makes sense as his ultimate goal is apparently to go where only Aishi Linux has gone before and boot Haiku on his M1 MacBook. There had been previous efforts to get Haiku going on Raspberry Pi hardware, which seems logical considering how lightweight the operating system is, but they’re apparently nowhere near booting either. QEMU is a good start.

Interestingly, according to the ports page, Haiku is “functional” on both RISC V QEMU and the now-discontinued HiFive Unmatched SBC. We don’t seem to have covered it, but that milestone happened five year ago. Given how most RISC V boards currently available are a bit slow for modern desktop Linux, Haiku would likely be a breath of fresh air. The BeOS-descended system might be single user, but it’s snappy.

We reported a couple of years back that Haiku was daily-drivable on x86 ,it’s only gotten better since then, assuming you choose the right hardware. Hardware support is always the hard part about alternative OSes, but Haiku users are absolutely spoiled compared to fans of MorphOS, which still only runs on G4 or G5 PowerPC, and even then not only some hardware.