We are spoiled with multimeters today. Even the cheapest meter you will get these days is almost surely digital with a tremendous input impedance. But a few decades ago, meters were almost always analog affairs. To make a precise measurement, you needed a mirror under the meter to ensure you read the needle correctly. Moreover, a common meter wouldn’t have that high of an input impedance. If you spent more, you could get a VTVM and, later, one that used FETs to provide high input impedance. [Peter AA2VG] just picked up a vintage Micronta FET volt-ohm meter to join some of the other new and old meters in his shack. You can check it out in the video below.
[Peter] already has a Simpson and a more modern Fluke meter. The Simpson, however, doesn’t have a tube or FET amplifier. The Fluke is nice, but there is something about the needle on an analog meter. If you aren’t old enough to remember, the Micronta brand was a Radio Shack label.
If you’re worried that [Roman Dvořák]’s spectroscopic analysis of fireworks is going to ruin New Year’s Eve or the Fourth of July, relax — the science of this build only adds to the fun.
Not that there’s nothing to worry about with fireworks, of course; there are plenty of nasty chemicals in there, and we can say from first-hand experience that getting hit in the face and chest with shrapnel from a shell is an unpleasant experience. [Roman]’s goal with this experiment is pretty simple: to see if it’s possible to cobble together a spectrograph to identify the elements that light up the sky during a pyrotechnic display. The camera rig was mainly assembled from readily available gear, including a Chronos monochrome high-speed camera and a 500-mm telescopic lens. A 100 line/mm grating was attached between the lens and the camera, a finding scope was attached, and the whole thing went onto a sturdy tripod.
From a perch above Prague on New Year’s Eve, [Roman] collected a ton of images in RAW12 format. The files were converted to TIFFs by a Python script and converted to video by FFmpeg. Frames with good spectra were selected for analysis using a Jupyter Notebook project. Spectra were selected by moving the cursor across the image using slider controls, converting pixel positions into wavelengths.
There are some optical improvements [Roman] would like to make, especially in aiming and focusing the camera; as he says, the dynamic and unpredictable nature of fireworks makes them difficult to photograph. As for identifying elements in the spectra, that’s on the to-do list until he can find a library of spectra to use. Or, there’s always DIY Raman spectroscopy. Continue reading “Seeing Fireworks In A Different Light”→
As a nerdy kid in the 90s, I spent a fair bit of time watching the computer-themed cartoon Reboot. During the course of making a documentary about the show, [Jacob Weldon] and [Raquel Lin] have uncovered the original digital master tapes of the show.
This is certainly exciting news for fans of the show, but there’s a bit of a wrinkle. These digital masters are all on D-1 digital cassette tapes which the studio doesn’t have a player for anymore. The dynamic duo are on the hunt for a Bosch BTS-D1 to be able to recapture some of this video for their own film while also heavily hinting to the studio that a new box set from the masters would be well-received.
As the first CGI TV series, Reboot has a special place in the evolution of entertainment, and while it was a technical marvel for its time, it was solid enough to last for four seasons and win numerous awards before meeting a cliffhanger ending. If you’re an expert in D-1 or have a deck to lend or sell, be sure to email the creators.
If there’s one thing which probably unites all of Hackaday’s community, it’s a love of technology. We live to hear about the very latest developments before anyone else, and the chances are for a lot of them we’ll all have a pretty good idea how they work. But if there’s something which probably annoys a lot of us the most, it’s when we see a piece of new technology misused. A lot of us are open-source enthusiasts not because we’re averse to commercial profit, but because we’ve seen the effects of monopolistic practices distorting the market with their new technologies and making matters worse, not better. After all, if a new technology isn’t capable of making the world a better place in some way, what use is it?
It’s depressing then to watch the same cycle repeat itself over and over, to see new technologies used in the service of restrictive practices for short-term gain rather than to make better products. We probably all have examples of new high-tech products that are simply bad, that are new technology simply for the sake of marketing, and which ultimately deliver something worse than what came before, but with more bling. Perhaps the worst part is the powerlessness, watching gullible members of the public lapping up something shiny and new that you know to be flawed, and not being able to do anything about it.
Here at Hackaday though, perhaps there is something I can do about it. I don’t sit in any boardroom that matters but I do have here a soapbox on which to stand, and from it I can talk to you, people whose work takes you into many fascinating corners of the tech industry and elsewhere. If I think that new technologies are being used irresponsibly to create bad products, at least I can codify how that might be changed. So here are my four Rules For The Responsible Use Of New Technology, each with some examples. They should each be self-evident, and I hope you’ll agree with me. Continue reading “A Few Reasonable Rules For The Responsible Use Of New Technology”→
As the holiday season is upon us and a Hackaday scribe sits protected from the incoming Atlantic storms in her snug eyrie, it’s time for her to consider the basics of her craft. Writing, spelling, and the English language; such matters as why Americans have different English spellings from Brits, but perhaps most important of them all for Hackaday readers; is it “gif”, or is is “jif”? This or the jokey sentence about spellings might be considered obvious clickbait, but instead they’re a handle to descend into the study of language. Just how do we decide the conventions of our language, and should we even care too much about them?
Don’t Believe Everything You Read in School
Not everything you learn here is worth holding on to. Harrison Keely, CC BY 4.0.
We are sent to school to Learn Stuff. During that time we are deprived of our liberty as a succession of adults attempt year after year to cram our heads with facts. Some of it we find interesting and other parts not so much, but for the majority of it, we are discouraged from thinking for ourselves and are instead expected to learn by rote a set of fixed curricula.
Thus while writers have to discover for themselves that English is a constantly evolving language through which they can break free of these artificial bounds that school has imposed upon them, far too many people remain afraid to put their head above the linguistic parapet.
The result is that perceived deviations from the rules are jumped upon by those afraid to move with the language, and we even find our own linguistic Holy Wars to fight. The one mentioned above about “gif” versus “jif” is a great example, does it really matter that much whether you pronounce it with a hard “G” because that’s how most people say it, or as though it were a “J” because the creator of the file format said it that way? Not really, because English is an evolving language in the hands of those who speak it, not those of the people who write school books. Continue reading “It’s Pronounced GIF”→
It’s not every day we get to take a good look inside a high-level exploit chain developed by an unnamed APT from the western world. But thanks to some particularly dedicated researchers at Kaspersky, which just happens to be headquartered in Moscow, that’s exactly what we have today. The name Operation Triangulation was picked, based off part of the device fingerprinting code that rendered a yellow triangle on an HTML canvas.
The entire talk is available, given this week at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress, 37c3. The exploit starts with an iMessage attachment, delivered silently, that exploits an undocumented TrueType font instruction. Looking at the source code implies that it was a copy-paste error where a programmer didn’t quite get the logic right for a pointer calculation. That vulnerability gives a memory write primitive that pivots into code execution. What’s particularly interesting is that Apple silently fixed this bug January 2023, and didn’t make any public statements. Presumably there were an uptick of crash logs that pointed to this problem, but didn’t conclusively show attempted exploitation.
The exploits then moves to using NSExpression as a next stage. NSExpression is an ugly way to write code, but it does allow the exploit chain to get to the next stage, running JavaScript as an application, without Just In Time compilation. The JS payload is quite a beast, weighing in at 11,000 lines of obfuscated code. It manages to call native APIs directly from JS, which then sets up a kernel exploit. This is multiple integer overflow flaws that result in essentially arbitrary system memory reads and writes. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Triangulation, ProxyCommand, And Barracuda”→
The equipment used in professional radio and TV studios is both extremely high quality and very expensive indeed, and thus out of the reach of an experimenter. Happily as studios are refurbished there’s a steady supply of second-hand equipment which can be surprisingly cheap, but as [Nathan] found out with a Quartz audio router, comes with no control software. What’s to be done with what’s essentially a piece of junk? Remove its brain and replace it with one that can be controlled, of course!
On the PCB alongside a bank of switch matrices is an FPGA which does the heavy lifting. That’s “heavy” in a limited sense, because all it does is handle the chip select lines for the matrices and write data to their registers. This is a task that can be handled by a microcontroller, so in goes an Arduino Nano, which along with a few other board modifications delivers a serial-controlled studio router.
The interesting part for us in this project comes from a look at the date codes on the board, they’re from the early 2000s. This is (roughly) contemporary with the ATmega chip on the Arduino, so we’re curious as to why the designers saw fit to use an FPGA when the microcontrollers of the day were clearly up to the task for much less outlay. We suspect a touch of millennium-era price inflation, but we can’t be sure.
