A Live ISO For Those Vibe Coding Experiments

March 5, 2026 by 11 Comments

Vibe coding is all the rage at the moment if you follow certain parts of the Internet. It’s very easy to dunk upon it, whether it’s to mock the sea of people who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and want the magic machine to make them a million dollar app with no work, or the vibe coded web apps with security holes you could drive a bus through.

But AI-assisted coding is now a thing that will stick around whether you like it or not, and there are many who want to dip a toe in the water to see what the fuss is about. For those who don’t quite trust the magic machines in their inner sanctum, [jscottmiller] is here with Clix, a bootable live Linux environment which puts Claude Code safely in a sandbox away from your family silver.

Physically it’s a NixOS live USB image with the Sway tiling Wayland compositor, and as he puts it: “Claude Code ready to go”. It has a shared partition for swapping files with Windows or macOS machines, and it’s persistent. The AI side of it has permissive settings, which means the mechanical overlord can reach parts of the OS you wouldn’t normally let it anywhere near; the point of having it in a live environment in the first place.

We can see the attraction of using an environment such as this one for experimenting without commitment, but we’d be interested to hear your views in the comments. It’s about a year since we asked you all about vibe coding, has the art moved forward in that time?

SpyTech: The Underwater Wire Tap

March 5, 2026 by 15 Comments

In the 1970s, the USSR had an undersea cable connecting a major naval base at Petropavlovsk to the Pacific Fleet headquarters at Vladivostok. The cable traversed the Sea of Okhotsk, which, at the time, the USSR claimed. It was off limits to foreign vessels, heavily patrolled, and laced with detection devices. How much more secure could it be? Against the US Navy, apparently not very secure at all. For about a decade starting in 1972, the Navy delivered tapes of all the traffic on the cable to the NSA.

Top Secret

You need a few things to make this a success. First, you need a stealthy submarine. The Navy had the USS Halibut, which has a strange history. You also need some sort of undetectable listening device that can operate on the ocean floor. You also need a crew that is sworn to secrecy.

That last part was hard to manage. It takes a lot of people to mount a secret operation to the other side of the globe, so they came up with a cover story: officially, the Halibut was in Okhotsk to recover parts of a Soviet weapon for analysis. Only a few people knew the real mission. The whole operation was known as Operation Ivy Bells.

The Halibut

The Halibut is possibly the strangest submarine ever. It started life destined to be a diesel sub. However, before it launched in 1959, it had been converted to nuclear power. In fact, the sub was the first designed to launch guided missiles and was the first sub to successfully launch a guided missile, although it had to surface to launch.

Oddly enough, the sub carried nuclear cruise missiles and its specific target, should the world go to a nuclear war, was the Soviet naval base at Petropavolvsk.

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The LEGO-lookalike displaying [Paul]'s dashboard

LEGO Space Computer Made Full Size, 47 Years On

March 5, 2026 by 10 Comments

There’s just something delightful about scaled items. Big things shrunk down, like LEGO’s teeny tiny terminal brick? Delightful. Taking that terminal brick and scaling it back to a full-sized computer? Even better. That’s what designer [Paul Staal] has done with his M2x2 project.

In spite of the name, it actually has a Mac Mini M4 as its powerful beating heart. An M2 might have been more on-brand, but it’s probably a case of wanting the most horsepower possible in what [Paul] apparently uses as his main workstation these days. The build itself is simple, but has some great design details. As you probably expected, the case is 3D printed. You may not have expected that he can use the left stud as a volume control, thanks to an IKEA Symfonisk remote hidden beneath. The right stud comes off to allow access to a wireless charger.

The minifigs aren’t required to charge those airpods, but they’re never out of place.

The 7″ screen can display anything, but [Paul] mostly uses it either for a custom home assistant dashboard, or to display an equalizer, both loosely styled after ‘screen’ on the original brick. We have to admit, as cool as it looked with the minifigs back in the day, that sharp angle to the screen isn’t exactly ergonomic for humans.

Perhaps the best detail was putting LEGO-compatible studs on top of the 10:1 scaled up studs, so the brick that inspired the project can sit securely atop its scion. [Paul] has provided a detailed build guide and the STLs necessary to print off a brick, should anyone want to put one of these nostalgic machines on their own desk.

We’ve covered the LEGO computer brick before, but going the other way–putting a microcontroller and display in the brick it to run DOOM. We’ve also seen it scaled up before, but that project was a bit more modest in size and computing power.

Using A Solid-State Elastocaloric Cooler To Freeze Water

March 5, 2026 by 11 Comments

Elastocaloric materials are a class of materials that exhibit a big change in temperature when exposed to mechanical stress. This could potentially make them useful as solid-state replacement for both vapor-compression refrigeration systems and Peltier coolers.

The entire assembled elastocaloric device. (Credit: Guoan Zhou, Nature, 2026)
The entire assembled elastocaloric device. (Credit: Guoan Zhou, Nature, 2026)

So far one issue has been that reaching freezing temperatures was impossible, but a recently demonstrated solution (online PDF via IEEE Spectrum) using NiTi-based shape-memory alloys addressed that issue with a final temperature of -12°C achieved within 15 minutes from room temperature.

In the paper by [Guoan Zhou] et al. the cascade cooler is described, with eight stages of each three tubular, thin-walled NiTi structures. Each of these stages is mechanically loaded by a ceramic head that provides the 900 MPa mechanical stress required to transfer thermal energy via the stages from one side to the other of the device, alternately absorbing or releasing the energy with CaCl2 as the heat-exchange fluid.

NiTi alloys are known as about the ideal type of SMA for this elastocaloric purpose, so how much further this technology can be pushed remains to be seen. For stationary refrigeration applications it might just be the ticket, but we’ll have to see as the technology is developed further.

Running Video Through A Guitar Effects Pedal

March 4, 2026 by 1 Comment

Guitar pedals are designed to take in a sound signal, do fun stuff to it, and then spit it out to your amplifier where it hopefully impresses other people. However, [Liam Taylor] decided to see what would happen if you fed video through a guitar pedal instead. 

The device under test is a Boss ME-50 multi-effects unit. It’s capable of serving up a wide range of effects, from delay to chorus to reverb, along with compression and distortion and a smattering of others. [Liam] hooked up the composite video output from an old Sony camcorder from the 2000s to a 3.5 mm audio jack, and plugged it straight into the auxiliary input of the ME-50 (notably, not the main guitar input of the device).

The multi-effects pedal isn’t meant to work with an analog video signal, but it can pass it through and do weird things to it regardless. Using the volume pedal on the ME-50 puts weird lines on the signal, while using a wah effect makes everything a little wobbly. [Liam] then steps through a whole range of others, like ring modulation, octave effects, and reverb, all of which do different weird things to the visuals. Particularly fun are some of the periodic effects which create predictable variation to the signal. True to its name, the distortion effect did a particularly good job of messing things up overall.

It’s a fun experiment, and recalls us of some of the fantastic analog video synths of years past. Video after the break.

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Trying A Vibe-Coded Operating System

March 4, 2026 by 32 Comments

If you were to read the README of the Vib-OS project on GitHub, you’d see it advertised as a Unix-like OS that was written from scratch, runs on ARM64 and x86_64, and comes with a full GUI, networking and even full Doom game support. Unfortunately, what you are seeing there isn’t the beginnings of a new promising OS that might go toe to toe with the likes of Linux or Haiku, but rather a vibe-coded confabulation. Trying to actually use the OS as [tirimid] recently did sends you down a vibe-coded rabbit hole of broken code, more bugs than you can shake a bug zapper at, and most of the promised features being completely absent.

[tirimid] is one of those people who have a bit of a problem, in that they like to try out new OSes, just to see what they’re like. The fun starts with simply making the thing run at all in any virtual machine environment, as apparently the author uses MacOS and there it probably ‘runs fine’.

After this the graphical desktop does in fact load, some applications also open, but it’s not possible to create new folders in the ‘file explorer’, the function keys simply switch between wallpapers, there’s no networking or Doom support despite the promises made, there’s no Python or Nano support at all, and so on.

Clearly it’s still got the hallmarks of a functioning OS, and it’s sort of nice that you don’t need to know what you’re doing to create a sort-of-OS, but it will not appease those who feel that vibe-coding is killing Open Source software.

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A 3D-printed mechanism is clamped between the jaws of a pair of calipers, which are surrounded by 3D-printed covers. A hammer is resting against one of the jaws, and a man's gloved hand is holding the calipers.

Embossing Precision Ball Joints For A Micromanipulator

March 4, 2026 by 5 Comments

[Diffraction Limited] has been working on a largely 3D-printed micropositioner for some time now, and previously reached a resolution of about 50 nanometers. There was still room for improvement, though, and his latest iteration improves the linkage arms by embossing tiny ball joints into them.

The micro-manipulator, which we’ve covered before, uses three sets of parallel rod linkages to move a platform. Each end of each rod rotates on a ball joint. In the previous iteration, the parallel rods were made out of hollow brass tubing with internal chamfers on the ends. The small area of contact between the ball and socket created unnecessary friction, and being hollow made the rods less stiff. [Diffraction Limited] wanted to create spherical ball joints, which could retain more lubricant and distribute force more evenly.

The first step was to cut six lengths of solid two-millimeter brass rod and sand them to equal lengths, then chamfer them with a 3D-printed jig and a utility knife blade. Next, they made two centering sleeves to hold small ball bearings at the ends of the rod being worked on, while an anti-buckling sleeve surrounded the rest of the rod. The whole assembly went between the jaws of a pair of digital calipers, which were zeroed. When one of the jaws was tapped with a hammer, the ball bearings pressed into the ends of the brass rod, creating divots. Since the calipers measured the amount of indentation created, they was able to emboss all six rods equally. The mechanism is designed not to transfer force into the calipers, but he still recommends using a dedicated pair.

In testing, the new ball joints had about a tenth the friction of the old joints. They also switched out the original 3D-printed ball mount for one made out of a circuit board, which was more rigid and precisely manufactured. In the final part of the video, he created an admittedly unnecessary, but useful and fun machine to automatically emboss ball joints with a linear rail, stepper motor, and position sensor.

On such a small scale, a physical ball joint is clearly simpler, but on larger scales it’s also possible to make flexures that mimic a ball joint’s behavior.