The IMac GPU Becomes Upgradeable, With PCIe

October 23, 2023 by Jenny List 11 Comments

Over its long lifetime, the Apple iMac all-in-one computer has morphed from the early CRT models through those odd table-lamp machines into today’s beautiful sleek affairs. They look pretty, but is there anything that can be done to upgrade them? Maybe not today’s ones, but the models from the mid-2000s can be given some surprising new life. [LowEndMac] have featured a 2006 24″ model that’s received a much more powerful GPU, something we’d have thought to be impossible.

The iMacs from that era resemble a monitor with a slightly chunkier back, in which resides the guts of the computer. By then the company was producing machines with an x86 processor, and their internals share a lot of similarities with a laptop of the period. The card is a Mac Radeon model newer than the machine would ever be used with, and it sits in a chain of mini PCIe to PCIe adapters. Even then it can’t drive the original screen, so a replacement panel and power supply are taken from another monitor and grafted into the iMac case. This along with a RAM and SSD upgrade makes this about the most upgraded a 2006 iMac could be.

Of course, another approach is to simply replace the whole lot with an Intel NUC.

Framework Motherboard Turned Cyberdeck

October 23, 2023 by Danie Conradie 11 Comments

The beauty of a modular ecosystem lies in how it allows individuals to repurpose components in unconventional ways. This is precisely what [Ben Makes Everything] has achieved by using a Framework laptop’s motherboard and battery to create a slab-style cyberdeck. (Video, embedded below.)

The Framework motherboard presents an excellent choice for custom portable computer projects due to its relatively compact size and built-in modular I/O port options, all based on USB-C. Framework even released additional documentation to support this use-case. It’s significantly more powerful than the standard Raspberry PI, which is typically employed in similar projects. Ben chose a 2400 x 900 IPS display that can draw power and video through a single USB-C cable. For user input, he opted for an Apple keyboard and an optical trackball with a PS2 interface. He utilized a Arduino Pro Micro as a PS2-to-USB adaptor, using the remaining pins on the Arduino as a versatile interface for electronic projects.

The enclosure is crafted from machined aluminum plates with 3D printed spacers to secure all components. The screen can be tilted up to 45 degrees for more ergonomic desktop use. The Framework motherboard is equipped with four USB-C ports for peripheral devices; [Ben] allocated one for the display and another for a USB hub which connects the keyboard, Arduino, and external USB and HDMI connectors. The remaining USB-C ports are still available for original Framework expansion cards.

The completed project not only looks fantastic but may also be highly functional. It would have been a great entry in our recent Cyberdeck Challenge.

Restoration Of A Thinkpad 701C

October 13, 2023 by Richard Baguley 9 Comments

This is like ASMR for Hackers: restoration specialist [Polymatt] has put together a video of his work restoring a 1995 IBM Thinkpad 701c, the famous butterfly keyboard laptop. It’s an incredible bit of restoration, with a complete teardown and rebuild, even including remaking the decals and rubber feet.

[Polymatt] runs Project Butterfly, an excellent site for those who love these iconic laptops, offering advice and spare parts for restoring them. In this video, he does a complete teardown, taking the restored laptop completely apart, cleaning it out, and replacing parts that are beyond salvaging, like the battery, and replacing them. Finally, he puts the whole thing back together again and watches it boot up. It’s a great video that we’ve put below the break and is well worth watching if you wonder about how much work this sort of thing involves: the entire process took him over two years.

We’ve covered some of his work in the past, including the surprisingly complicated business of analyzing and replacing the Ni-Cad battery that the original laptop used. Continue reading “Restoration Of A Thinkpad 701C” →

Error-Correcting RAM On The Desktop

October 12, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 55 Comments

When running a server, especially one with mission-critical applications, it’s common practice to use error-correcting code (ECC) memory. As the name suggests, it uses an error-correcting algorithm to continually check for and fix certain errors in memory. We don’t often see these memory modules on the desktop for plenty of reasons, among which are increased cost and overhead and decreased performance for only marginal gains, but if your data is of upmost importance even when working on a desktop machine, it is possible to get these modules up and running in certain modern AMD computers.

Specifically, this feature was available on AMD Ryzen CPUs, but since the 7000 series with the AM5 socket launched, the feature wasn’t officially supported anymore. [Rain] decided to upgrade their computer anyway, but there were some rumors floating around the Internet that this feature might still be functional. An upgrade to the new motherboard’s UEFI was required, as well as some tweaks to the Linux kernel to make sure there was support for these memory modules. After probing the system’s behavior, it is verified that the ECC RAM is working and properly reporting errors to the operating system.

Reporting to the OS and enabling the correct modules is one thing, actually correcting an error was another. It turns out that introducing errors manually and letting the memory correct them is possible as well, and [Rain] was able to perform this check during this process as well. While ECC RAM may be considered overkill for most desktop users, it offers valuable data integrity for professional or work-related tasks. Just don’t use it for your Super Mario 64 speedruns.

Meshtastic And Owntracks To Kick Your Google Habit

October 11, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 20 Comments

I have an admission to make. I have a Google addiction. Not the normal addiction — I have a problem with Google Maps, and the timeline feature. I know, I’m giving my location data to Google, who does who-knows-what-all with it. But it’s convenient to have an easy way to share location with my wife, and very useful to track my business related travel for each month. What we could really use is a self-hosted, open source system to track locations and display location history. And for bonus points, let’s include some extra features, like the ability to track vehicles, kids, and pets that aren’t carrying a dedicated Internet connection.

You can read the title — you know where we’re going with this. We’re setting up an Owntracks service, and then tying it to Meshtastic for off-Internet usability. The backbone that makes this work is MQTT, a network message bus that has really found its niche in the Home Assistant project among others. It’s a simple protocol, where clients send brief messages labeled by topic, and can also subscribe to specific topics. For this little endeavor we’ll use the Mosquito MQTT broker.

One of the nice things about MQTT is that the messages are all text strings, and often take the form of JSON. When trying to get two applications to talking using a shared MQTT server, there may need to be a bit of translation. One application may label a field latitude, and the other shortens it to lat. The glue code to put these together is often known as an MQTT translator, or sometimes an MQTT bridge. This is a program that listens to a given topic, ingests each message, and sends it back to the MQTT server in a different format and topic name.

The last piece is Owntracks, which has a recorder project, which pulls locations from the MQTT server, and stores it locally. Then there’s Owntracks Frontend, which is a much nicer user interface, with some nice features like viewing movement a day at a time. Continue reading “Meshtastic And Owntracks To Kick Your Google Habit” →

A monitoring station as set up in the CEZ, featuring both the legacy (ARMS) and new wireless monitoring system.

How The 2022 CEZ Event Shows The Fragility Of Environmental Sensors In High-Risk Areas

October 10, 2023 by Maya Posch 3 Comments

In what reads somewhat like a convoluted detective story, the events unfolding at the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) in Ukraine during late February had the media channels lighting up with chatter about ‘elevated gamma radiation levels’, which showed up on the public CEZ radiation monitoring dashboard for a handful of gamma radiation sensors. This happened right before this reporting system went off-line, leaving outside observers guessing at what was going on. By the time occupying forces had been driven out of the CEZ, the gamma radiation levels were reported as being similar to before the invasion, yet the computer hardware which was part of the monitoring system had vanished along with the occupying forces. After considering many explanations, this left security researchers like [Ruben Santamarta] to consider that the high values had been spoofed.

Continue reading “How The 2022 CEZ Event Shows The Fragility Of Environmental Sensors In High-Risk Areas” →

Jenny’s Daily Drivers: SerenityOS, And In Particular, Ladybird

October 10, 2023 by Jenny List 35 Comments

As we continue on with the series in which I take a different OS for a spin every month I am afraid, dear reader, that this month I have a confession to make. Our subject here isn’t a Daily Driver at all, and it’s not the fault of the operating system in question. Instead I’m taking a look at a subject that’s not quite ready for the big time but is interesting for another reason. The OS is SerenityOS, which describes itself as “a love letter to ’90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core“, and the reason I’m interested in it comes from its web browser. I know that the OS is very much a work in progress and I’ll have to forgo my usual real hardware and run it in QEMU, but I’ve heard good things about it and I want to try it. The browser in question is called Ladybird, and it’s interesting because it has the aim of creating a modern fully capable cross-platform browser from scratch, rather than being yet another WebKit-based appliance.

A Pleasant Trip Into The 1990s

Part of a Linux desktop with the SerenityOS build instructions in the background, a terminal having built the OS, and the OS itself in a QEMU window. — My first look at SerenityOS after building it.

SerenityOS isn’t ready to be installed on real hardware, and there’s no handy ISO to download. Instead I had to clone the repository to my Linux machine and run the build script to compile the whole thing, something I was very pleased to observe only took about 40 minutes. It creates a hard disk image and opens QEMU for you, and you’re straight into a desktop.

When they mention ’90s user interfaces they definitely weren’t hiding anything, because what I found myself in could have easily been a Windows 9x desktop from the middle of that decade. There are a bunch of themes including some Mac-like ones, but should you select the “Redmond” one, you’re on very familiar ground if you had a Microsoft environment back then. It’s only skin-deep though, because as soon as you venture into a command line shell there’s no DOS to be found. This is a UNIX-like operating system, so backslashes are not allowed and it’s familiarly similar to an equivalent on my Linux box. The purpose of this review is not to dive too far into the workings of the OS, but suffice it to say that both the underpinnings and the desktop feel stable and as polished as a Windows 95 lookalike can be. The various bundled utilities and other small programs seem to work well, and without any hint of the instabilities I’ve become used to when I’ve experimented with other esoteric operating systems. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: SerenityOS, And In Particular, Ladybird” →