This week, Jonathan Bennett chats with Alexandre Dulaunoy and Quentin Jérôme about Kunai and CIRCL! How does Kunai help solve Linux security monitoring? Why is eBPF the right place for one of these tools to run? And how is CIRCL helping Luxembourg and the world deal with the modern security landscape? Watch to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 832: Give Yourself A Medal”
The 1970s was a perfect time for alternative modes of transport to be trialed that might replace cars in the wake of the global oil crisis. One of these was the Cabinentaxi, or C-Bahn as it was later called, which was a variation on the standard suspended and monorail concepts.
It was a people mover concept, with ‘pods’ (or cabins) that’d ride either on top of or below the suspended track. It was tested intensively over the course of six years, performed admirably, and completely failed to materialize commercially due to budget crunch times around the world.
Recently [Tim Traveller] went to the muddy farm field that once housed the big test track (pictured above), of which nothing remains but the gates and a sign. Despite the fact that few people have heard of Cabinentaxi prior to seeing [Tim]’s video or reading this, there is a big Wikipedia entry on it, as well as a (German language) site dedicated to the technology.
What made the C-Bahn different from trains and buses were the smaller pods, high throughput capacity and ability to call a pod on demand at any of the stations. This kind of flexibility is what is seen more or less with today’s people moving systems at airports and some cities, except the C-Bahn was classified as a personal rapid transport (PRT), with on-demand pods that could travel between any two stations without stopping or delays. This is something that isn’t seen with public transport today, even if self-driving cars purport to one day do this kind of trick.
Considering that this technology died most due to economical circumstances, we remain hopeful to see its revival one day.
Continue reading “Germany’s Cabinentaxi: The Double-Sided Monorail That Wasn’t Meant To Be”
Not too long ago, I was searching for ideas for the next installment of the “Big Chemistry” series when I found an article that discussed the world’s most-produced chemicals. It was an interesting article, right up my alley, and helpfully contained a top-ten list that I could use as a crib sheet for future articles, at least for the ones I hadn’t covered already, like the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia.
Number one on the list surprised me, though: sulfuric acid. The article stated that it was far and away the most produced chemical in the world, with 36 million tons produced every year in the United States alone, out of something like 265 million tons a year globally. It’s used in a vast number of industrial processes, and pretty much everywhere you need something cleaned or dissolved or oxidized, you’ll find sulfuric acid.
Staggering numbers, to be sure, but is it really the most produced chemical on Earth? I’d argue not by a long shot, when there’s a chemical that we make 4.4 billion tons of every year: Portland cement. It might not seem like a chemical in the traditional sense of the word, but once you get a look at what it takes to make the stuff, how finely tuned it can be for specific uses, and how when mixed with sand, gravel, and water it becomes the stuff that holds our world together, you might agree that cement and concrete fit the bill of “Big Chemistry.”
Magnets aren’t magic, but sometimes you can do things with them to fool the uninitiated — like levitating. [Jonathan Lock] does that with his new maglev desk toy, that looks like at least a level 2 enchantment.
This levitator is USB-powered, and typically draws 1 W to 3 W to levitate masses between 10 g and 500 g. The base can provide 3 V to 5 V inductive power to the levitator to the tune of 10 mA to 50 mA, which is enough for some interesting possibilities, starting with the lights and motors [Jonathan] has tried.
In construction it is much like the commercial units you’ve seen: four permanent magnets that repel another magnet in the levitator. Since such an arrangement is about as stable as balancing a basketball on a piece of spaghetti, the permanent magnets are wrapped in control coils that pull the levitator back to the center on a 1 kHz loop. This is accomplished by way of a hall sensor and an STM32 microcontroller running a PID loop. The custom PCB also has an onboard ESP32, but it’s used as a very overpowered USB/UART converter to talk to the STM32 for tuning in the current firmware.
If you think one of these would be nice to have on your desk, check it out on [Jonathan]’s GitLab. It’s all there, from a detailed build guide (with easy-to-follow animated GIF instructions) to CAD files and firmware. Kudos to [Jonathan] for the quality write-up; sometimes documenting is the hardest part of a project, and it’s worth acknowledging that as well as the technical aspects.
We’ve written about magnetic levitation before, but it doesn’t always go as well as this project. Other times, it very much does. There are also other ways to accomplish the same feat, some of which can lift quite a bit more.
If you want solar power, you usually have to make a choice. You can put a solar panel in a fixed location and accept that it will only put out the maximum when the sun is properly positioned. Or, you can make the panels move to track the sun.
While this isn’t difficult, it does add cost and complexity, plus mechanical systems usually need more maintenance. According to [Xavier Derdenback], now that solar panels are cheaper than ever, it is a waste of money to make a tracking array. Instead, you can build a system that looks to the east and the west. The math says it is more cost effective.
The idea is simple. If you have panels facing each direction, then one side will do better than the other side in the morning. The post points out that a tracking setup, of course, will produce more power. That’s not the argument. However, for a given power output, the east-west solution has lower installation costs and uses less land.
An ongoing refrain with modern movies is “Why is all of this CG?”– sometimes, it seems like practical effects are simultaneously a dying art, while at the same time modern technology lets them rise to new hights. [Davis Dewitt] proves that second statement with his RC movie star “robot” for an upcoming feature film.
The video takes us through the design process, including what it’s like to work with studio concept artists. As for the robot, it’s controlled by an Arduino Nano, lots of servos, and a COTS airplane R/C controller, all powered by li-po batteries. This is inside an artfully weathered and painted 3D printed body. Apparently weathering is important to make the character look like a well-loved ‘good guy’. (Shiny is evil, who knew?) Hats off to [Davis] for replicating that weathering for an identical ‘stunt double’.
Check out the video below for all the deets, or you can watch to see if “The Lightning Code” is coming to a theater near you. If you’re into films, this isn’t the first hack [Davis] has made for the silver screen. If you prefer “real” hacks to props, his Soviet-Era Nixie clock would look great on any desk. Thanks to [Davis] for letting us know about this project via the tips line.
We don’t often consider using do-it-yourself projects as a hedge against the apocalypse. But [The Thought Emporium] thinks we should know how to make penicillin just in case. We aren’t so sure, but we do think it is a cool science experiment, and you can learn how to replicate it in the video below.
If you want to skip the history lesson, you need to fast-forward to about the six-minute mark. According to the video, we are surrounded by mold that can create anti-bacterial compounds. However, in this case, he starts with a special strain of mold made to produce lots of antibiotics.
