Share Your Projects: Leave Breadcrumbs

August 9, 2023 by 20 Comments

I’ve talked about a low-effort way to document your projects by taking plenty of pictures, and about ways that your PCBs could be documenting themselves. Today, let’s talk about a quick and easy way that you could help other hackers as you go through your own hacking adventures — leaving breadcrumbs.

In short, breadcrumbs are little pieces of crucial information that you had to spend time to figure out. They are solutions to problems that another hacker just like you could stumble upon in the future, something that you perhaps wish you didn’t have to figure out on your own, and certainly something that others won’t need to spend time figuring out.

Breadcrumbs are about saving time, for you and others. It helps if you think of your solved problems in terms of time spent. If you figure out a small problem and then publish your solution, you might be saving half an hour, a full hour, or a good few hours of time another hacker that’s could even be less experienced in debugging than you. In fact, your breadcrumb might even make a difference between someone completing a project and abandoning it!

However, there’s also the trade-off of taking time to document something. If you can’t publish your solution in a few minutes’ time, it might become much harder to persuade your brain to publish the next time you have something notable. Here’s a guideline: if you’ve just figured out a cool terminal command that helps you solve a certain kind of problem, you should have a quick way to publish that command within a minute. The good news is, the internet has a hundred different places you could easily share your findings, depending on the kind of problem you’ve solved! Continue reading “Share Your Projects: Leave Breadcrumbs” →

MS-DOS Meets The Fediverse

August 9, 2023 by 30 Comments

By now, most Windows users are set up with decently functional machines running Windows 10 or 11. Of course there are a few legacy machines still lagging behind on Windows 7 or 8 and plenty of computers in industrial settings running ancient proprietary software on Windows XP. But only the most hardcore of IBM PC users are still running DOS, and if you have eschewed things like Unix for this command-line operating system this long you might want to try using it to get online in the Fediverse with Mastodon.

The first step is getting DOS 6.22, the most recent version released in 1994, set up with all the drivers and software needed to access the Internet. At the time of its release there were many networking options so the operating system didn’t include these tools by default. [Stephen] first sets up an emulated NE2000-compatible networking card and then installs the entire TCP/IP stack and then gets his virtual machine set up with an IP address.

With a working Internet connection set up, the next step on the path of exploring federated social media is to install DOStodon (although we might have favored the name “MastoDOS”) which is a Mastodon client specifically built for MS-DOS by [SuperIlu]. There are pre-compiled packages available on its GitHub page for easy installation in DOS but the source code is available there as well. And, if this is your first time hearing about the Fediverse, it is mostly an alternative to centralized social media like Facebook and Reddit but the decentralization isn’t without its downsides.

Humanity’s Return To The Moon And The Prospect Of South Pole Moon Bases

August 9, 2023 by 31 Comments

The last time that a human set foot on the Moon, it was December 1972 — when the crew of the Apollo 17 mission spent a few days on the surface before returning to Earth. Since then only unmanned probes have either touched down on the lunar surface or entered orbit to take snapshots and perform measurements.

But after years of false starts, there are finally new plans on the table which would see humans return to the Moon. Not just to visit, but with the goal of establishing a permanent presence on the lunar surface. What exactly has changed that the world went from space fever in the 1960s to tepid interest in anything beyond LEO for the past fifty years, to the renewed interest today?

Part of the reason at least appears to be an increasing interest in mineable resources on the Moon, along with the potential of manufacturing in a low gravity environment, and as a jumping-off point for missions to planets beyond Earth, such as Mars and Venus. Even with 1960s technology, the Moon is after all only a few days away from launch to landing, and we know that the lunar surface is rich in silicon dioxide, aluminium oxide as well as other metals and significant amounts of helium-3, enabling in-situ resource utilization.

Current and upcoming Moon missions focus on exploring the lunar south pole in particular, with frozen water presumed to exist in deep craters at both poles. All of which raises the question of we may truly see lunar-based colonies and factories pop up on the Moon this time, or are we merely seeing a repeat of last century?

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Running DOOM In A Keycap Takes Careful Work

August 9, 2023 by 4 Comments

Shoehorning DOOM into different hardware is a classic hacker’s exercise, and [TheKeebProject] managed to squeeze the 1993 classic into a custom keycap with the help of a Raspberry Pi RP2040, a custom PCB, and a clear resin enclosure. It even has a speaker for sound!

All processing is done inside the keycap, which is a clever feat. There is a USB connection, but it’s only for power and keyboard controls, so it’s completely playable without needing a whole lot of external support. The custom PCB and code are based off an earlier RP2040 DOOM project, and [TheKeebProject] has certainly made it their own by managing to get everything so tightly integrated. There’s a quick video mashup embedded below. There’s still a bit of work to do, but the code and design files are all on GitHub should you wish for a closer look.

Making DOOM physically smaller is a good challenge, but we’d like to remind fans that we’ve also seen DOOM shrink in terms of power consumption, all the way down to 1 mW.

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Super Mario In Sed, Sort Of

August 9, 2023 by 7 Comments

We definitely needed to reach for a sed reference guide for this one, but looking at the animated GIF of the script running, it is recognizably Super Mario Bros. albeit with minimal gameplay beyond jumping obstacles and avoiding or destroying koopas et al. Creator [Ivan Chebykin] is for certain a master of the dark arts.

Digging in a bit deeper, it’s not strictly speaking 100% sed. A wrapper shell script is required to interface to the shell and grab the keyboard input to pass along. This is simply because sed is a stream processor, and as such it requires text to be fed into it, and it produces a text output. It has no way of reading the terminal input directly, hence the wrapper script. However, all the game logic and ‘graphics’ rendering is pure sed, so that’s perfectly reasonable.

Such programming demos are a great way to hone the finer points of various tools we use every day, whilst not being serious enough to matter if we fail. Pushing the boundaries of what can be done with these basic nuts and bolts we take for granted, is for us the very essence of software hacking, and bravo we say.

Reckon you could top this? Show us! In the meantime, here’s a guide to hacking the recently released Game and Watch, and then doing the decent thing and running DOOM on it. Finally, sed is notoriously tricky to work with, so to help here’s a graphical debugger to make things a little clearer.

Inside The PET Keyboard

August 8, 2023 by 10 Comments

These days, you have a certain expectation for computer keys on a keyboard. Of course, there are variations and proponents of different mechanisms and noise levels. However, back in the late part of the 20th century, it was a different world. Computers came with a bewildering and sometimes befuddling array of keyboards. Since the IBM Selectric was the king of typewriters, we assumed the IBM PC keyboard would be spectacular, but it wasn’t. The PC Jr was even worse! Atari experimented with flat keyboards to save costs, and many computers had keys more reminiscent of calculator keys than you would imagine. The market voted. In general, a keyboard that wasn’t really a keyboard was the kiss of death for a computer. Case in point: the Commodore PET with its infamous chicklet keyboard, which gets a detailed examination in a recent post from [Norbert Landsteiner].

The PET keyboard gets some bad rap due to software limitations. Because of this, some games would use their own scan routines, and [Norbert] has worked on emulation able to accommodate software that wants to read the hardware directly. The resulting insights into the old keyboard is very interesting. For example, you can press more than one key at once. The result? The answer to that question takes up about half the post.

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The Orb Web Desktop

August 8, 2023 by 28 Comments

[Hugo Leisink] is a programmer who contributes to Open Source projects. In their spare time, they have been developing a web-browser-based operating system called Orb. It is available for the princely sum of zero cheeseburgers and doesn’t need a high-spec machine to run smoothly. The project is built using PHP and Javascript, which allows it to run efficiently on most desktop devices. There are a number of apps included, which are again written in a combination of PHP and js, together with a few written using webasm.

A few notable examples include a C64 emulator, minesweeper, and even a js port of Wolfenstein 3D so this isn’t just a toy, but actually useful. Ok, for real use cases, there are also the usual file browsers, and document readers as well as a writing application based on CKeditor. There is a kind of Windows 3.1 look and feel simplicity to the experience which is refreshing in the modern era of complex applications with their learning curves. Orb could be very useful in an educational setting, or just for jotting your own notes as you travel. Who knows, because the possibilities are endless if you’re willing to get your hands dirty with a bit of coding.

We’ve seen a few web desktops before, here’s a collection of them we saw last year. If you want to go in the other direction and turn a webpage into a desktop app, then look no further than Gluon.