Why 2025 Will Not Be The Year Of Linux On The Desktop

December 31, 2024 by 122 Comments

One of the longest running jokes in our sphere is that the coming year will finally be the year of “Linux on the Desktop.” Never mind that the erosion of the traditional Windows-style desktop form of computing is a thing, or that Linux-derived operating systems such as Android or Chrome OS are running on literally billions of devices across the globe, it sends up the unreasonable optimism of Linux enthusiasts back in the day that their nascent platform could depose Windows from its pedestal.

If there’s one thing we like more than a good tech joke then, it’s a well-written tech rant, and [Artem S. Tashkinov] has penned a doozy in “Why Linux is not ready for the desktop, the final edition“. It’s Linux trolling at its finest, and will surely get many a crusty open source devotee rushing to their keyboard to decry its ideas.

Aside from the inherent humor then, reading it we have to admit that he makes a set of very cogent points. Even having used a Linux desktop exclusively for a very long time indeed there’s no shame in admitting that it’s not perfect, and things such as the mildly annoying state of network file sharing or the complexity for most users of getting to grips with the security model are very fair criticisms. And the last section on the Linux community hits hard, it’s necessary to admit that the world of open source doesn’t always welcome people trying to use its software as well as it could.

But as power users of a Linux desktop for everything, more than just for writing Hackaday, we’d take the view that for all its undoubted faults, it still offers a better experience than the latest version of Windows. Oddly it could now be an acceptable desktop for many people, but the sad thing is that the need for that may well have passed to those Android and Chrome OS devices we mentioned earlier.

We’ve been known to have our own Linux related rants from time to time.

New Years Circuit Challenge: Make This RFID Circuit

December 31, 2024 by 9 Comments
A 125kHz PCB antenna, a spiral pattern on a PCB.
The Proxmark3 PCB 125kHz antenna., GNU GPL version 2, GitHub link.

Picture this: It’s the end of the year, and a few hardy souls gather in a hackerspace to enjoy a bit of seasonal food and hang out. Conversation turns to the Flipper Zero, and aspects of its design, and one of the parts we end up talking about is its built-in 125 kHz RFID reader.

It’s a surprisingly complex circuit with a lot of filter components and a mild mystery surrounding the use of a GPIO to pulse the receive side of its detector through a capacitor. One thing led to another as we figured out how it worked, and as part of the jolity we ended up with one member making a simple RFID reader on the bench.

Just a signal generator making a 125 kHz square wave, coupled to a two transistor buffer pumping a tuned circuit. The tuned circuit is the coil scavenged from an old RFID card, and the capacitor is picked for resonance in roughly the right place. We were rewarded with the serial bitstream overlaying the carrier on our ‘scope, and had we added a filter and a comparator we could have resolved it with a microcontroller. My apologies, probably due to a few festive beers I failed to capture a picture of this momentous event. Continue reading “New Years Circuit Challenge: Make This RFID Circuit” →

VPlayer Puts Smart Display In Palm Of Your Hand

December 31, 2024 by 18 Comments

It’s not something we always think about, but the reality is that many of the affordable electronic components we enjoy today are only available to us because they’re surplus parts intended for commercial applications. The only reason you can pick up something like a temperature sensor for literal pennies is because somebody decided to produce millions of them for inclusion in various consumer doodads, and you just happened to luck out.

The vPlayer, from [Kevin Darrah] is a perfect example. Combining a 1.69 inch touch screen intended for smartwatches with the ESP32-S3, the vPlayer is a programmable network-connected display that can show…well, pretty much anything you want, within reason. As demonstrated in the video below, applications range from showing your computer’s system stats to pulling in live images and videos from the Internet.

Continue reading “VPlayer Puts Smart Display In Palm Of Your Hand” →

Lowering Your Noise Floor, The Easy Way

December 31, 2024 by 35 Comments

If there’s anything more annoying to an amateur radio operator than noise, we’re not sure what it could be. We’re talking about radio frequency noise, of course, the random broadband emissions that threaten to make it almost impossible to work the bands and pick out weak signals. This man-made interference is known as “QRM” in ham parlance, and it has become almost intolerable of late, as poorly engineered switch-mode power supplies have become more common.

But hams love a technical challenge, so when a nasty case of QRM raised its ugly head, [Kevin Loughlin (KB9RLW)] fought back. With an unacceptable noise floor of S8, he went on a search for the guilty party, and in the simplest way possible — he started flipping circuit breakers. Sure, he could have pulled out something fancier like a TinySA spectrum analyzer, but with his HF rig on and blasting white noise, it was far easier to just work through the circuits one by one to narrow the source down. His noise problem went away with the living room breaker, which led to pulling plugs one by one until he located the culprit: a Roomba vacuum’s charging station.

Yes, this is a simple trick, but one that’s worth remembering as at least a first pass when QRM problems creep up. It probably won’t help if the source is coming from a neighbor’s house, but it’s a least worth a shot before going to more involved steps. As for remediation, [Kevin] opts to just unplug the Roomba when he wants to work the bands, but if you find that something like an Ethernet cable is causing your QRM issue, you might have to try different measures.

Continue reading “Lowering Your Noise Floor, The Easy Way” →

Sega Dreamcast console banner image

Fan Made Dreamcast Port Of GTA 3 Steals The Show

December 30, 2024 by 15 Comments

As it turns out, Sega’s long defunct Dreamcast console is still thinking. The company behind the machine cut support long ago due in part to the commercial pressures applied by Sony’s PlayStation 2 console, but that never stopped the most dedicated of Dreamcast fans from seeking out its true potential. Thanks to [Stefanos] and his team, the genre defining Grand Theft Auto III (GTA 3), can now run on Sega’s hardware. Their combined efforts have yielded a fully playable port of the PC version of the game for the Dreamcast.

The porting effort was years in the making. It began with reverse engineering the entire source code of GTA 3 then implementing it into the homebrew SDK for the Dreamcast, KallistiOS. All the in-game graphic and sound assets are only pulled from a user provided PC copy of the game. Steps for those seeking to compile a bootable Dreamcast image of their own have been provided on the project’s website. Real hardware enthusiasts will be pleased as the port runs fine on the twenty-five year old Dreamcast as evidenced in the video below.

This port of GTA 3 represents what could have been a true butterfly effect moment in console gaming history. The game was a major hit in the early days of the PlayStation 2, and it has been theorized that it could have proven to be a major commercial success for Sega as well had it been pressed onto a Dreamcast GD-ROM disc. Recently one of the original developers of GTA 3, Obbe Vermejj, divulged that the game actually began development on the Dreamcast. The project was obviously transferred onto PlayStation 2 for commercial reasons, but with this port from [Stefanos] and crew we no longer have to dream of what could have been.

Continue reading “Fan Made Dreamcast Port Of GTA 3 Steals The Show” →

Different potato varieties. – The potato is the vegetable of choice in the United States. On average, Americans devour about 65 kg of them per year. New potato releases by ARS scientists give us even more choices of potatoes to eat. (Credit: Scott Bauer, USDA ARS)

Re-engineering Potatoes To Remove Their All-Natural Toxins

December 30, 2024 by 66 Comments

Family Solanum (nightshade) is generally associated with toxins, and for good reasons, as most of the plants in this family are poisonous. This includes some of everyone’s favorite staple vegetables: potatoes, tomatoes and eggplant, with especially potatoes responsible for many poisonings each year. In the case of harvested potatoes, the chemical responsible (steroidal glycoalkaloids, or SGA) is produced when the potato begins to sprout. Now a team of researchers at the University of California have found a way to silence the production of the responsible protein: GAME15.

The research was published in Science, following earlier research by the Max Planck Institute. The researchers deleted the gene responsible for GAME15 in Solanum nigrum (black nightshade) to confirm that the thus modified plants produced no SGA. In the case of black nightshade there is not a real need to modify them as – like with tomatoes – the very tasty black berries they produce are free of SGA, and you should not eat the SGA-filled and very bitter green berries anyway, but it makes for a good test subject.

Ultimately the main benefits of this research appear to be in enriching our general understanding of these self-toxicity mechanisms of plants, and in making safer potatoes that can be stored without worries about them suddenly becoming toxic to eat.

Top image: Different potato varieties. (Credit: Scott Bauer, USDA ARS)

When The EU Speaks, Everyone Charges The Same Way

December 30, 2024 by 98 Comments

The moment everyone has been talking about for years has finally arrived, the European Union’s mandating of USB charging on all portable electronic devices is now in force. While it does not extend beyond Europe, it means that there is a de facto abandonment of proprietary chargers in other territories too. It applies to all mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, headsets, game consoles, portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems and earbuds, and from early 2026 it will be extended to laptops.

Hackaday readers will probably not need persuading as to the benefits of a unified charger, and truth be told, there will be very few devices that haven’t made the change already. But perhaps there’s something more interesting at work here, for this moment seals the place of USB-C as a DC power connector rather than as a data connector that can also deliver power.

Back in 2016 we lamented the parlous state of low voltage DC power standards, and in the time since then we’ve arrived at a standard involving ubiquitous and commoditised power supplies, cables, and modules which we can use for almost any reasonable power requirement. You can thank the EU for that mobile phone now having the same socket as its competitor, but you can thank the USB Implementers Forum for making DC power much simpler.