Audio Effects Applied To Text

April 11, 2025 by 3 Comments

If you are a visual thinker, you might enjoy [AIHVHIA’s] recent video, which shows the effect of applying audio processing to text displayed on an oscilloscope. The video is below.

Of course, this presupposes you have some way to display text on an oscilloscope. Audio driving the X and Y channels of the scope does all the work. We aren’t sure exactly how he’s doing that, but we suspect it is something like Osci-Render.

Does this have any value other than art? It’s hard to say. Perhaps the effect of panning audio on text might give you some insight into your next audio project. Incidentally, panning certainly did what you would expect it to do, as did the pass filters. But some of the effects were a bit surprising. We still want to figure out just what’s happening with the wave folder.

If text isn’t enough for you, try video. Filtering that would probably be pretty entertaining, too. If you want to try your own experiments, we bet you could do it all — wave generation and filtering — in GNU Radio.

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This Week In Security: AI Spam, SAP, And Ivanti

April 11, 2025 by 13 Comments

AI continues to be used in new and exciting ways… like generating spam messages. Yes, it was inevitable, but we now have spammers using LLM to generate unique messages that don’t register as spam. AkiraBot is a Python-powered tool, designed to evade CAPTCHAs, and post sketchy SEO advertisements to web forms and chat boxes around the Internet.

AkiraBot uses a bunch of techniques to look like a legitimate browser, trying to avoid triggering CAPTCHAs. It also runs traffic through a SmartProxy service to spread the apparent source IP around. Some captured logs indicate that of over 400,000 attempted victim sites, 80,000 have successfully been spammed.

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The Jupiter Ace Remembered

April 11, 2025 by 11 Comments

It is hard to imagine that it has been more than four decades since two of the original designers of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum broke off to market the Jupiter Ace. [Nemanja Trifunovic] remembers the tiny computer in a recent post, and we always love to recall the old computers that used TVs for screens and audio tape recorders for mass storage.

One thing we always loved about the Jupiter Ace is that while most computers of the era had Basic as their native tongue, the Ace used Forth. As the post points out, while this may have given it great geek cred, it didn’t do much for sales, and the little machine was history within a year. However, the post also proposes that Forth wasn’t the real reason for the machine’s lack of commercial success.

Why did they pick Forth? Why not? It is efficient and interactive. The only real disadvantage was that Basic was more familiar to more people. Books and magazines of the day showed Basic, not Forth. But, according to the post, the real reason for its early demise was that it was already using outdated hardware from day one.

The Ace provided only 3K of RAM and did not offer color graphics. While this may sound laughable today, it wasn’t totally out of the question in 1978. Unfortunately, the Ace debuted in 1982. There were options that offered much more for just a little less. There is also the argument that as users became less technical, they just wanted to load pre-programmed tapes or cartridges and didn’t really care what language was running the computer.

Maybe, but we did and we can’t help but imagine a future where Forth was the language of choice for personal computers. Given how few of these were made, we see a lot of projects around them or, at least, replicas. Of course, these days that can be as simple as a single chip.

Brush Up On Your Trade Craft With This Tiny FM Bug

April 11, 2025 by 19 Comments

Would-be spooks and spies, take note: this one-transistor FM transmitter is a circuit you might want to keep in mind for your bugging needs. True, field agents aren’t likely to need to build their own equipment, but how cool a spy would you be if you could?

Luckily, you won’t need too many parts to recreate [Ciprian (YO6DXE)]’s project, most of which could be found in a decently stocked junk bin, or even harvested from e-waste. On the downside, the circuit is pretty fussy, with even minor component value changes causing a major change in center frequency. [Ciprian] had to do a lot of fiddling to get the frequency in the FM band, particularly with the inductor in the LC tank circuit. Even dropping battery voltage shifted the frequency significantly, which required a zener diode to address.

[Ciprian] ran a few tests and managed to get solid copy out to 80 meters range, which is pretty impressive for such a limited circuit. The harmonics, which extend up into the ham bands and possibly beyond, are a bit of a problem; while those could be addressed with a low-pass filter, in practical terms, the power of this little fellow is probably low enough to keep you from getting into serious trouble. Still, it’s best not to push your luck.

While you’re trying your hand at one-transistor circuits, you might want to try [Ciprian]’s one-transistor CW transceiver next.

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Farewell Economy 7, A Casualty Of The Long Wave Switch-Off

April 10, 2025 by 33 Comments

If you paid attention to advertising in 1980s Britain, you were never far from Economy 7. It was the magic way to heat your house for less, using storage heaters which would run at night using cheap electricity, and deliver warmth day-long. Behind it all was an unseen force, a nationwide radio switching signal transmitted using the BBC’s 198 kHz Long Wave service. Now in 2025 the BBC Radio 4 Long Wave service it relies on is to be turned off, rendering thousands of off-peak electricity meters still installed, useless. [Ringway Manchester] is here to tell the tale.

The system was rolled out in the early 1980s, and comprised of a receiver box which sat alongside your regular electricity meter and switched in or out your off-peak circuit. The control signal was phase-modulated onto the carrier, and could convey a series of different energy use programs. 198 kHz had the useful property due to its low frequency of universal coverage, making it the ideal choice. As we’ve reported in the past the main transmitter at Droitwich is to be retired due to unavailability of the high-power vacuum tubes it relies on, so now time’s up for Economy 7 too. The electricity companies are slow on the uptake despite years of warning, so there’s an unseemly rush to replace those old meters with new smart meters. The video is below the break.

The earliest of broadcast bands may be on the way out, but it’s not entirely over. There might even be a new station on the dial for some people.

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Using Integer Addition To Approximate Float Multiplication

April 10, 2025 by 14 Comments

Once the domain of esoteric scientific and business computing, floating point calculations are now practically everywhere. From video games to large language models and kin, it would seem that a processor without floating point capabilities is pretty much a brick at this point. Yet the truth is that integer-based approximations can be good enough to hit the required accuracy. For example, approximating floating point multiplication with integer addition, as [Malte Skarupke] recently had a poke at based on an integer addition-only LLM approach suggested by [Hongyin Luo] and [Wei Sun].

As for the way this works, it does pretty much what it says on the tin: adding the two floating point inputs as integer values, followed by adjusting the exponent. This adjustment factor is what gets you close to the answer, but as the article and comments to it illustrate, there are plenty of issues and edge cases you have to concern yourself with. These include under- and overflow, but also specific floating point inputs.

Unlike in scientific calculations where even minor inaccuracies tend to propagate and cause much larger errors down the line, graphics and LLMs do not care that much about float point precision, so the ~7.5% accuracy of the integer approach is good enough. The question is whether it’s truly more efficient as the paper suggests, rather than a fallback as seen with e.g. integer-only audio decoders for platforms without an FPU.

Since one of the nice things about FP-focused vector processors like GPUs and derivatives (tensor, ‘neural’, etc.) is that they can churn through a lot of data quite efficiently, the benefits of shifting this to the ALU of a CPU and expecting (energy) improvements seem quite optimistic.

Windows On ARM On Arm

April 10, 2025 by 12 Comments

While some companies like Apple have gone all-in on the ARM architecture, others are more hesitant to dive into the deep end. For example, Microsoft remains heavily invested in the x86 architecture and although it does have some ARM offerings, a lot of them feel a bit half-baked. So you might question why someone like [Gustave] has spent so much time getting Windows to run on unusual ARM platforms. But we don’t need much of a reason to do something off-the-wall like that around these parts, so take a look at his efforts to get Windows for ARM running on a smartwatch.

The smartwatch in question here is a Pixel Watch 3, which normally runs a closed-source Android implementation called Wear OS. The bootloader can be unlocked, so [Gustave] took that approach to implement a few clever workarounds to get Windows to boot including adding UEFI to the watch. During the process Google updated these devices to Android 15, though, which broke some of these workarounds. The solution at that point was to fake a kernel header and re-implement UEFI and then load Windows (technically Windows PE) onto the watch.

Although this project was released on April 1, and is by [Gustave]’s own admission fairly ridiculous and not something he actually recommends anyone do, he does claim that it’s real and provides everything needed for others to run Windows on their smartwatches if they want to. Perhaps one of our readers will be brave enough to reproduce the results and post about it in the comments. In the meantime, there are a few more open options for smartwatches available if you’re looking for something to tinker with instead.

Thanks to [Ruhan] for the tip!