You Can’t Call It A Battlestation Without This Overhead Control Panel

August 21, 2015 by Richard Baguley 20 Comments

Modern computers are rubbish. Why, they barely have a switch or a blinky light on them. What’s the point in having a computer if you don’t have the thrill of throwing a switch or eight and watching lights blink in response? [Smashcuts] obviously agrees because he built a control panel filled with heavy-duty switches and blinking wonderfulness to augment his battlestation. This piece of mechanical wonderment has buttons for useful features such as typing several levels of derisive laughter in chat windows, playing odd sound effects and a large red panic button that… well, I won’t spoil the surprise. The whole thing is hand-wired and fronted with laser-cut panels that make it look really authentic. [smashcuts] built it “because it didn’t exist and I felt like it needed to”, which is a perfect justification for this piece of industrial scale awesomeness.

It does have some more practical uses, though: he has set several of the switches to trigger actions in Photoshop and other programs, so this could be easily adapted for those who have the odd belief that things need a practical use to exist. He used USB controllers from Desktop Aviator, and a Mac program called Controller Mate to set up the sequencing for the blinkies. Unfortunately, [smashcuts] didn’t produce a how-to guide for this panel, claiming that “I don’t really have blueprints or schematics. I REALLY didn’t know what I was doing, so all the notes I do have wouldn’t make sense to anyone. It’d be like reading an owners manual to a car written by a caveman”. Either way, it is an impressive build, and you can find more details from the creator on this reddit thread.

The Machine That Japed: Microsoft’s Humor-Emulating AI

August 17, 2015 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

Ten years ago, highbrow culture magazine The New Yorker started a contest. Each week, a cartoon with no caption is published in the back of the magazine. Readers are encouraged to submit an apt and hilarious caption that captures the magazine’s infamous wit. Editors select the top three entries to vie for reader votes and the prestige of having captioned a New Yorker cartoon.

The magazine receives about 5,000 submissions each week, which are scrutinized by cartoon editor [Bob Mankoff] and a parade of assistants that burn out after a year or two. But soon, [Mankoff]’s assistants may have their own assistant thanks to Microsoft researcher [Dafna Shahaf].

[Dafna Shahaf] heard [Mankoff] give a speech about the New Yorker cartoon archive a year or so ago, and it got her thinking about the possibilities of the vast collection with regard to artificial intelligence. The intricate nuances of humor and wordplay have long presented a special challenge to creators. [Shahaf] wondered, could computers begin to learn what makes a caption funny, given a big enough canon?

[Shahaf] threw ninety years worth of wry, one-panel humor at the system. Given this knowledge base, she trained it to choose funny captions for cartoons based on the jokes of similar cartoons. But in order to help [Mankoff] and his assistants choose among the entries, the AI must be able to rank the comedic value of jokes. And since computer vision software is made to decipher photos and not drawings, [Shahaf] and her team faced another task: assigning keywords to each cartoon. The team described each one in terms of its contextual anchors and subsequently its situational anomalies. For example, in the image above, the context keywords could be car dealership, car, customer, and salesman. Anomalies might include claws, fangs, and zoomorphic automobile.

The result is about the best that could be hoped for, if one was being realistic. All of the cartoon editors’ chosen winners showed up among the AI’s top 55.8%, which means the AI could ultimately help [Mankoff and Co.] weed out just under half of the truly bad entries. While [Mankoff] sees the study’s results as a positive thing, he’ll continue to hire assistants for the foreseeable future.

Humor-enabled AI may still be in its infancy, but the implications of the advancement are already great. To give personal assistants like Siri and Cortana a funny bone is to make them that much more human. But is that necessarily a good thing?

[via /.]

Commodore C16 Resurrection With A Raspberry Pi

August 16, 2015 by Al Williams 27 Comments

[lactobacillusprime] had a non-working Commodore C16 and too many Raspberry Pi computers, so he decided to bring the C16 back to life by emulating it on the Pi. At the heart of the project is the Pi, along with a small board that converts the old style Commodore keyboards (and joysticks) to a USB port.

Once you have the keyboard as a USB port, the rest of the project is more or less mechanics and software. [lactobacillusprime] did a nice job of getting everything in the new case, along with all the I/O wires routed through the existing ports. For software, Emulation Station does the job of launching the Commodore emulation on the Pi.

Of course, there’s no reason to limit yourself to just the Commodore emulator. Emulation Station along with the right back end emulators will allow this machine to play games that no real Commodore C16 could.

Of course, we were happiest to see him boot up Commodore 64 BASIC. Perhaps we should complete all those half finished C64 BASIC projects we started back in the 1980’s. In general, we hate to see old computers gutted instead of repaired, but at least this one will continue running its software. If you are upset about seeing a machine gutted, you can always switch over to our previous coverage of putting Commodore guts in a new box.

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No Windows Drivers? Boot Up A Linux VM!

August 4, 2015 by Elliot Williams 46 Comments

[Voltagex] was fed up with BSODs on his Windows machine due to a buggy PL2303 USB/serial device driver. The Linux PL2303 driver worked just fine, though. A weakling would simply reboot into Linux. Instead, [Voltagex] went for the obvious workaround: create a tiny Linux distro in a virtual machine, route the USB device over to the VM where the drivers work, and then Netcat the result back to Windows.

OK, not really obvious, but a cool hack. Using Buildroot, a Linux system cross-compilation tool, he got the size of the VM down to a 32Mb memory footprint which runs comfortably on even a small laptop. And everything you need to replicate the VM is posted up on Github.

Is this a ridiculous workaround? Yes indeed. But when you’ve got a string of tools like that, or you just want an excuse to learn them, why not? And who can pass up a novel use for Netcat?

Hacking The Digital And Social System

August 3, 2015 by Voja Antonic 114 Comments

When you live in a totalitarian, controlled and “happy” society, and you want to be a hacker, you have to hack the social system first. Being just an engineer doesn’t cut it, you have to be a hypocrite, dissident and a smuggler at the same time. That’s the motto of my personal story, which starts in Yugoslavia, and ends in Serbia. No, I didn’t move, I’m still in Belgrade, only the political borders have changed.

Half a century ago, when I was in elementary school, I discovered the magical world of HAM radio. I became a member of two amateur radio clubs, passed all exams and got my licence and callsign, which was YU1OPC. I was delighted, but after five years, the party was over. What happened? Well, one day the police paid a visit to all registered owners of CB Band equipment and simply took that equipment away. No one knows why they did it, but it was probably off the books, as we never got any written confirmation, and no one ever saw their equipment again.

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Build Your Own CPU? That’s The Easy Part!

July 31, 2015 by Al Williams 38 Comments

You want to build your own CPU? That’s great fun, but you might find it isn’t as hard as you think. I’ve done several CPUs over the years, and there’s no shortage of other custom CPUs out there ranging from pretty serious attempts to computers made out of discrete chips to computers made with relays. Not to trivialize the attempt, but the real problem isn’t the CPU. It is the infrastructure.

What Kind of Infrastructure?

I suppose the holy grail would be to bootstrap your custom CPU into a full-blown Linux system. That’s a big enough job that I haven’t done it. Although you might be more productive than I am, you probably need a certain amount of sleep, and so you may want to consider if you can really get it all done in a reasonable time. Many custom CPUs, for example, don’t run interactive operating systems (or any operating system, for that matter). In extreme cases, custom CPUs don’t have any infrastructure and you program them in straight machine code.

Machine code is error prone so, you really need an assembler. If you are working on a big machine, you might even want a linker. Assembly language coding gets tedious after a while, so maybe you want a C compiler (or some other language). A debugger? What about an operating system?

Each one of those things is a pretty serious project all by itself (on top of the project of making a fairly capable CPU). Unless you have a lot of free time on your hands or a big team, you are going to have to consider how to hack some shortcuts.

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44 Mac Pros Racked Up To Replace Each Rack Of 64 Mac Minis

July 31, 2015 by Mike Szczys 74 Comments

We were delighted at a seeing 96 MacBook Pros in a rack a couple of days ago which served as testing hardware. It’s pretty cool so see a similar exquisitely executed hack that is actually in use as a production server. imgix is a startup that provides image resizing for major web platforms. This means they need some real image processing horsepower and recently finalized a design that installs 44 Mac Pro computers in each rack. This hardware was chosen because it’s more than capable of doing the heavy lifting when it comes to image processing. And it turns out to be a much better use of rack space than the 64 Mac Minis it replaces.

Racking Mac Pro for Production

Each of the 11 R2 panels like the one shown here holds 4 Mac Pro. Cooling was the first order of business, so each panel has a grate on the right side of it for cold-air intake. This is a sealed duct through which one side of each Pro is mounted. That allows the built-in exhaust fan of the computers to cool themselves, pulling in cold air and exhausting out the opposite side.

Port access to each is provided on the front of the panel as well. Connectors are mounted on the right side of the front plate which is out of frame in this image. Power and Ethernet run out the back of the rack.

The only downside of this method is that if one computer dies you need to pull the entire rack to replace it. This represents 9% of the total rack and so imgix designed the 44-node system to deal with that kind of processing loss without taking the entire rack down for service.

Why This Bests the Mac Mini

3 racks - Linux. Mac Min, Mac Pro — 3 racks – Linux. Mac Min, Mac Pro

Here you can see the three different racks that the company is using. On the left is common server equipment running Linux. In the middle is the R1 design which uses 64 Mac Minis for graphic-intensive tasks. To the right is the new R2 rack which replace the R1 design.

Obviously each Mac Pro is more powerful than a Mac Mini, but I reached out to imgix to ask about what prompt them to move away from the R1 design that hosts eight rack panes each with eight Mac Minis. [Simon Kuhn], the Director of Production, makes the point that the original rack design is a good one, but in the end there’s just too little computing power in the space of one rack to make sense.

Although physically there is room for at least twice as many Mac Mini units — by mounting them two-deep in each space — this would have caused several problems. First up is heat. Keeping the second position of computers within safe operating temperatures would have been challenging, if not impossible. The second is automated power control. The R1 racks used two sets of 48 controllable outlets to power computers and cooling fans. This is important as the outlets allow them to power cycle mis-behaving units remotely. And finally, more units means more Ethernet connections to deal with.

We having a great time looking that custom server rack setups. If you have one of your own, or a favorite which someone else built, please let us know!

[Thanks to drw72 for mentioning R2 in a comment]