Easy For The Masses

October 11, 2025 by 93 Comments

Last week, we were talking about how glad we are to be the type who by-and-large understands technology, and how it’s becoming more and more difficult to simply get along otherwise. We thought we had a good handle on the topic.

Then, we were talking about Google’s plans to require an ID for Android developers, and whether or not this will shut down free and open software development on the Android platform. Would this be the end of the ability to run whatever software that you’d like on your phone? Google offered the figleaf that “sideloading” – installing software through methods other than Google’s official store, would still be be allowed. But there’s a catch – you have to use Android Debug Bridge (ADB).

Is that a relief? It surely means that I will be able to install anything I want: I use ADB all the time, because it’s one of the fastest and easiest ways to transfer files and update software on the device. But how many non-techies do you know who use ADB? We’d guess that requiring this step shuts out 99.9% of Android users. If you make software hard to install for the masses, even if you make it possible for the geeks, you’re effectively killing it.

I have long wondered why end-to-end encrypted e-mail isn’t the default. After all, getting a GPG signing key, distributing it to your friends, and then reading mail with supporting software shouldn’t be a big deal, right? If GPG signing were available by default in Outlook or GMail, everyone would sign their e-mail. But there is no dead-simple, non-techie friendly way to do so, and so nobody does it.

Requiring ADB to load Android software is going to have the same effect, and it’s poised to severely restrict the amount of good, open software we have on the platform unless we can figure out a way to make installing that software easy enough that even the naive users can do it.

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Toasty Subwoofer Limps Back To Life

October 11, 2025 by 6 Comments

[JohnAudioTech] noticed there was no bass on the TV at his parents’ house. That led to the discovery of a blown fuse and a corresponding repair. When he opened it up, he could smell that something had gone on in the amplifier. You can follow the repair in the video below.

His first theory was that some glue became conductive and shorted the power rails. We were skeptical, to be honest. When he fed power to it through a current limiter, he could hear a sizzling noise and even see a little glowing from the hot component.

Disassembly ensued. Removing the suspect components showed some seriously burned components and some charring under a switching transistor. The capacitors looked much worse for wear, and the PCB needed some wires to jumper burned conductors.

At the end, there was thumping, so it seems the surgery was a success. However, testing blew a fuse again, which made us nervous. Still, seems to work if you don’t drive it too hard.

We always enjoy watching a teardown, and if there’s a repair too, that’s even better.

Continue reading “Toasty Subwoofer Limps Back To Life” →

The Electret Preamp You Might Need

October 11, 2025 by 18 Comments

Electret capsules can be found in some of the highest quality microphones for studio use, as well as in some of the very cheapest microphone capsules on the market. More care and attention has gone into the high-end capsule and its associated circuitry than the cheap one, but is it still possible to get good quality from something costing under a dollar? [Mubarak Basha] thinks so, and has designed a preamp circuit to get the best from a cheap electret capsule.

These capsules may be cheap, but with the addition of a low voltage supply, a resistor, and a capacitor, their internal FET delivers a decent enough input to many a project. To improve on that will need a bit of effort, and in this the preamp delivers by taking care to match impedance, impose a carefully chosen frequency response, and just the right gain to derive a line level output from the electret’s level. It’s hardly a complex circuit, but that’s not always necessary.

As always in these situations, without appropriate test equipment it’s difficult to gauge quality. We’d say this though, if you make one of these and it falls short, you won’t have spent much. Meanwhile if you’re curious about electrets, here’s our guide.

Some assembly code

Programming Space Game For X86 In Assembly Without An Operating System

October 10, 2025 by 40 Comments

In this video our hacker [Inkbox] shows us how to create a computer game that runs directly on computer hardware, without an operating system!

[Inkbox] briefly explains what BIOS is, then covers how UEFI replaces it. He talks about the genesis of UEFI from Intel in the late 90s. After Intel’s implementation of UEFI was made open source it got picked up by the TianoCore community who make tools such as the TianoCore EDK II.

[Inkbox] explains that the UEFI implementation provides boot services and runtime services. Boot services include things such as loading memory management facilities or running other UEFI applications, and runtime services include things like system clock access and system reset. In addition to these services there are many more UEFI protocols that are available.

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Your LLM Won’t Stop Lying Any Time Soon

October 10, 2025 by 48 Comments

Researchers call it “hallucination”; you might more accurately refer to it as confabulation, hornswaggle, hogwash, or just plain BS. Anyone who has used an LLM has encountered it; some people seem to find it behind every prompt, while others dismiss it as an occasional annoyance, but nobody claims it doesn’t happen. A recent paper by researchers at OpenAI (PDF) tries to drill down a bit deeper into just why that happens, and if anything can be done.

Spoiler alert: not really. Not unless we completely re-think the way we’re training these models, anyway. The analogy used in the conclusion is to an undergraduate in an exam room. Every right answer is going to get a point, but wrong answers aren’t penalized– so why the heck not guess? You might not pass an exam that way going in blind, but if you have studied (i.e., sucked up the entire internet without permission for training data) then you might get a few extra points. For an LLM’s training, like a student’s final grade, every point scored on the exam is a good point. Continue reading “Your LLM Won’t Stop Lying Any Time Soon” →

PLA Gears Fail To Fail In 3D Printed Bicycle Drivetrain

October 10, 2025 by 33 Comments

Anyone who has ever snapped a chain or a crank knows how much torque a bicycle’s power train has to absorb on a daily basis; it’s really more than one might naively expect. For that reason, [Well Done Tips]’s idea of 3D printing a gear chain from PLA  did not seem like the most promising of hacks to us.

Contrary to expectations, though, it actually worked; at the end of the video (at about 13:25), he’s on camera going 20 km/h, which while not speedy, is faster than we thought the fixed gearing would hold up. The gears themselves, as you can see, are simple spurs, and were modeled in Fusion360 using a handy auto-magical gear tool. The idler gears are held in place by a steel bar he welded to the frame, and are rolling on good old-fashioned skateboard bearings–two each. (Steel ones, not 3D printed bearings.) The healthy width of the spur gears probably goes a long way to explaining how this contraption is able to survive the test ride.

The drive gear at the wheel is steel-reinforced by part of the donor bike’s cassette, as [Well Done Tips] recognized that the shallow splines on the freewheel hub were not exactly an ideal fit for PLA. He does complain of a squeaking noise during the test ride, and we can’t help but wonder if switching to helical gears might help with that. That or perhaps a bit of lubricant, as he’s currently riding the gears dry. (Given that he, too, expected them to break the moment his foot hit the pedal, we can’t hardly blame him not wanting to bother with grease.)

We’ve seen studies suggesting PLA might not be the best choice of plastic for this application; if this wasn’t just a fun hack for a YouTube video, we’d expect nylon would be his best bet. Even then, it’d still be a hack, not a reliable form of transportation. Good thing this isn’t reliable-transportation-a-day!

Continue reading “PLA Gears Fail To Fail In 3D Printed Bicycle Drivetrain” →

Possibly The Newest ISA Card

October 10, 2025 by 13 Comments

Back when the IBM PC was new, laying out an ISA board was a daunting task. You probably didn’t have a very fast ‘scope, if you had one at all. Board layout was almost certainly done on a drafting table with big pieces of tape. It was hard for small companies, much less hobbyists, to make a new card. You could buy a prototype board and wirewrap or otherwise put together something, but that was also not for the faint of heart. But with modern tools, something like that is a very doable project and [profdc9] has, in fact, done it. The card uses an ATMega328P and provides two SD cards for use as mass storage on an old computer.

The design tries to use parts that won’t be hard to get in the future. At least for a while, yet. There’s capacity for expansion, too, as there is an interface for a Wiznet 5500 Ethernet adapter.

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