A glowing pocket watch with Roman numerals.

What Is The Hour? It’s XVII O’ Clock

February 4, 2025 by 18 Comments

When live-action role playing, or LARPing, one must keep fully in tune with the intended era. That means no digital watches, and certainly no pulling out your fantastic rectangle from the future to find out if you’re late picking up the kid.

The guts of a pocket watch with glowing Roman numerals.So what do you do when you’re LARPing at 2 PM, but you gotta be back at the soccer practice field by 5 PM? Well, you fashion a period-appropriate timepiece like [mclien]’s 17 o’ Clock. Visually, it’s about as close to a pocket sundial as you can get. It’s deliberately non-connected, and its only function is to tell the time.

But how? If you visually divide the watch across the top and bottom, you get two sets of Roman numerals. The top half handles the hour, and the bottom half the minute. [mclien] started designing this in 2018 and picked it back up in the second half of 2024.

Back to the non-connected part. The only permanently-powered part of the project is a high-precision real-time clock (RTC). The rest uses a power latching circuit, which turns on the Adafruit Trinket M0 to show the time using a NeoPixel ring. Be sure to check out the awesome project logs with fantastic pictures throughout.

Looking for a smarter pocket watch? It’s time you built one yourself. And speaking of pocket sundials…

Telling Time Used To Be A Ball

February 4, 2025 by 14 Comments

If you watch the New Year’s festivities from New York, you know that they mark midnight with the dropping of a big, gaudy ball. You might assume this was just an arbitrary gimmick, but it turns out dropping balls has a place in the history of timekeeping, especially for ships at sea. The New York ball doesn’t work precisely the same, but it was clearly inspired by an ancient method of indicating the time.

Apparently, even the ancient Greeks used ball dropping to indicate time. But the modern ball got its start with [Captain Robert Wauchope], who installed one at Portsmouth, England, in 1829. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich got one in 1833, which you can see working in the video below.

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Freedesktop And Alpine Linux Looking For New Hosting

February 4, 2025 by 37 Comments

A well-known secret in the world of open source software is that many projects rely on donated hosting for everything from their websites to testing infrastructure. When the company providing said hosting can no longer do so for whatever reason, it leaves the project scrambling for a replacement. This is what just happened for Alpine Linux, as detailed on their blog.

XKCD's dependency model
Modern-day infrastructure, as visualized by XKCD. (Credit: Randall Munroe)

Previously Equinix Metal provided the hosting, but as they are shutting down their bare-metal services, the project now has to find an alternative. As described in the blog post, this affects in particular storage services, continuous integration, and development servers.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Equinix was also providing hosting for the Freedesktop.org project. In a post on their GitLab, [Benjamin Tissoires] thanks the company for supporting them as long as they have, and details the project’s current hosting needs.

As the home of X.org and Wayland (and many more), the value of Freedesktop.org to the average user requires no explanation. For its part, Alpine Linux is popular in virtualization, with Docker images very commonly using it as a base. This raises the uncomfortable question of why such popular open source projects have to depend on charity when so many companies use them, often commercially.

We hope that these projects can find a new home, and maybe raise enough money from their users to afford such hosting themselves. The issue of funding (F)OSS projects is something that regularly pops up, such as the question of whether FOSS bounties for features are helpful or harmful.

A Closer Look At The Tanmatsu

February 4, 2025 by 27 Comments

A few weeks ago we brought you news of a new palmtop computer for hackers, powered by the new Espressif ESP32-P4 application processor. The Tanmatsu (Japanese for “Terminal”) is a compact handheld device with a QWERTY keyboard and an 800×480 DSI display, and while it currently exists at the final prototype stage there is a pre-order page upon which you can reserve an early production model for yourself. We’ve been lucky enough to be invited to give one a close-up inspection, so it was time to hot-foot it on the train to a Dutch hackerspace in order to bring you a preview.

A Little History, And First Impressions

The Tanmatsu, held in both hands.
Recesses in the case fit well against the hands.

Before looking at the device, it’s time for a little history. The Tanmatsu has its origin in badge.team, the Netherlands-based group that has produced so many European event badges over the years, and it was destined to eventually become the badge for the upcoming WHY2025 hacker camp. As sometimes happens in any community there has been a significant difference of opinion between the event orga and the badge.team folks that it’s inappropriate to go into here, so now it exists as a standalone project. It’s destined to be open-source in its entirety including hardware and software (and we will hold them to that, never fear), but because of the events surrounding its conception the full repositories will be not be made public until some time late in the summer.

Picking the Tanmatsu up and holding it, it’s a rectangular slab a bit larger and thicker than a CD case with that QWERTY keyboard and display on its front face, an array of ports including an SMA socket for a LoRA antenna on its sides, and an expansion connector on its rear. It has a sandwich construction, with a PCB front face, a 3D printed spacer, the PCB itself, and a 3D printed back cover all held together with a set of screws. The recesses on its bottom edge and the lower halves of the sides locate neatly with fingers and thumbs when it’s held in two hands for two-thumb typing. The keyboard is a silicone moulding as is common on this type of device, and while the keys are quite small it was not difficult to type on it. The display meanwhile feels of much higher quality than the SPI parts previously seen on badges. Continue reading “A Closer Look At The Tanmatsu” →

Homebrew Foil And Oil Caps Change Your Guitar’s Tone

February 4, 2025 by 47 Comments

How any string instrument sounds depends on hundreds of factors; even the tiniest details matter. Seemingly inconsequential things like whether the tree that the wood came from grew on the north slope or south slope of a particular valley make a difference, at least to the trained ear. Add electronics into the mix, as with electric guitars, and that’s a whole other level of choices that directly influence the sound.

To experiment with that, [Mark Gutierrez] tried rolling some home-brew capacitors for his electric guitar. The cap in question is part of the guitar’s tone circuit, which along with a potentiometer forms a variable low-pass filter. A rich folklore has developed over the years around these circuits and the best way to implement them, and there are any number of commercially available capacitors with the appropriate mojo you can use, for a price.

[Mark]’s take on the tone cap is made with two narrow strips of regular aluminum foil separated by two wider strips of tissue paper, the kind that finds its way into shirt boxes at Christmas. Each of the foil strips gets wrapped around and crimped to a wire lead before the paper is sandwiched between. The whole thing is rolled up into a loose cylinder and soaked in mineral oil, which serves as a dielectric.

To hold the oily jelly roll together, [Mark] tried both and outer skin of heat-shrink tubing with the ends sealed by hot glue, and a 3D printed cylinder. He also experimented with a wax coating to keep the oily bits contained. The video below shows the build process as well as tests of the homebrew cap against a $28 commercial equivalent. There’s a clear difference in tone compared to switching the cap out of the circuit, as well as an audible difference in tone between the two caps. We’ll leave the discussion of which sounds better to those with more qualified ears; fools rush in, after all.

Whatever you think of the sound, it’s pretty cool that you can make working capacitors so easily. Just remember to mark the outer foil lead, lest you spoil everything.

Continue reading “Homebrew Foil And Oil Caps Change Your Guitar’s Tone” →

Understanding The T12 Style Soldering Iron Tip

February 4, 2025 by 16 Comments

Soldering irons and their tips come in a wide range of formats and styles, with the (originally Hakko) T12 being one of the more interesting offerings. This is because of how it integrates not only the tip and heating element, but also a thermocouple and everything else in a self-contained package. In a recent video [Big Clive] decided to not only poke at one of these T12 tips, but also do a teardown.

These elements have three bands, corresponding to the power supply along with a contact for the built-in thermocouple. After a quick trip to the Vise of Knowledge, [Clive] allows us a glimpse at the mangled remnants of a T12, which provides a pretty good overview of how these tips are put together.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the length is a hollow tube through which the wires from the three contacts run. These power the ceramic heating element, as well as provide the soldering iron handle access to the thermocouple that’s placed near the actual tip.

With a simple diagram [Clive] explains how these T12 elements are then used to regulate the temperature, which isn’t too distinct from the average soldering iron with ceramic heating element, but it’s still nice to have it all integrated rather than having to try to carefully not damage the ceramic heater while swapping tips with the average soldering iron.

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The Clever Design Behind Everyday Traffic Poles

February 3, 2025 by 32 Comments

Ever stopped at a red light and noticed something odd about the poles holding up the traffic lights? Look closer next time—many of them appear to hover just above the concrete, anchored by visible bolts. This video below explains it all. It’s not a job left unfinished. It is actually clever design, and all about functionality and easy maintenance. Let’s break down why engineers prefer this so-called ‘floating’ base plate setup.

At first, you might think mounting poles directly into concrete would be more stable—after all, that’s how heavy columns are often installed. But traffic light poles are lightweight, hollow, and face constant wind pressure. Instead of brute stability, they need flexibility and precise alignment. Enter the standoff base plate. By resting on leveling nuts, these poles can be fine-tuned for perfect verticality, even when the ground shifts slightly over time. That’s critical for keeping your 30-foot pole from leaning like the Tower of Pisa.

The open design also simplifies maintenance. If the pole tilts after years of wear, it takes just a few nut adjustments to fix it—no heavy cranes required. Plus, the gap helps prevent moisture buildup, reducing corrosion. So next time you’re waiting at an intersection, you’ll know it’s not just clever engineering—it’s practical street smarts. If you’re an infrastructure nut, this slightly older article might spark your interest.

Continue reading “The Clever Design Behind Everyday Traffic Poles” →