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There’s Now A Wiki For Hacking Redbox Machines

November 21, 2024 by 5 Comments

With the rapidly evolving situation surrounding the Redbox vending machines still out in the wild, it’s about time somebody put together a Wiki to keep it all straight.

The unredbox wiki has information on the various different hardware revisions that Redbox put out into the wild, from the regular outdoor machines to the weird indoor blue variant. The site also has breakdowns on individual components. For example, it covers the computers inside the machines, built by Dell, Lenovo, and Premio, and bits and pieces like the DVD carousel and the modems used inside.

Basically, if you’re working with these machines and you don’t have a manual, this resource could help you out.  As could the neat video below that shows the internals of a Redbox machine during the reloading process.

Whatever you do, though, don’t steal the kiosks. There’s folks handling that already, you’re not allowed to just walk up and haul them away. Check out our earlier coverage of people that are still out there renting from these machines, too.

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With Core ONE, Prusa’s Open Source Hardware Dream Quietly Dies

November 20, 2024 by 104 Comments

Yesterday, Prusa Research officially unveiled their next printer, the Core ONE. Going over the features and capabilities of this new machine, it’s clear that Prusa has kept a close eye on the rapidly changing desktop 3D printer market and designed a machine to better position themselves within a field of increasingly capable machines from other manufacturers.

While some saw the incremental upgrades of the i3 MK4 as being too conservative, the Core ONE ticks all the boxes of what today’s consumer is looking for — namely high-speed CoreXY movement with a fully enclosed chamber — while still offering the build quality, upgradability, and support that the company has built its reputation on. Put simply it’s one of the most exciting products they’ve introduced in a long time, and exactly the kind of machine that many Prusa fans have been waiting for.

Unfortunately, there’s one feature that’s ominously absent from the Core ONE announcement post. It’s easy to overlook, and indeed, most consumers probably won’t even know it’s missing. But for those of us who are concerned with such matters, it’s an unspoken confirmation that an era has finally come to an end.

With the Core ONE, Prusa Research is no longer in the business of making open source 3D printer hardware, but that doesn’t mean that the printer isn’t hackable. It’s complicated, so read on.

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The Great Redbox Cleanup: One Company Is Hauling Away America’s Last DVD Kiosks

November 19, 2024 by 75 Comments

Remember Redbox? Those bright red DVD vending machines that dotted every strip mall and supermarket in America, offering cheap rentals when Netflix was still stuffing discs into paper envelopes? After streaming finally delivered the killing blow to physical rentals, Redbox threw in the towel in June 2024, leaving around 34,000 kiosks standing as silent monuments to yet another dead media format.

Last month, we reported that these machines were still out there, barely functional and clinging to life. Now, a company called The Junkluggers has been tasked with the massive undertaking of clearing these mechanical movie dispensers from the American retail landscape, and they’re doing it in a surprisingly thoughtful way. I chatted to them to find out how it’s going.

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Smart Thermostats Pitched For Texas Homes To Relieve Stressed Grid

November 14, 2024 by 84 Comments

It’s not much of a secret that Texas’ nearly completely isolated grid is in a bit of a pickle, with generating capacity often being handily outstripped during periods of extreme demand. In a latest bid to fight this problem, smart thermostats are being offered to customers, who will then participate in peak-shaving. The partnership between NRG Energy Inc., Renew Home LLC, and Alphabet Inc. will see about 650,000 of these thermostats distributed to customers.

For customers the incentive would be mostly financial, though the details on the potential cost savings seem scarce. The thermostats would be either a Vivint (an NRG company) or Google Nest branded one, which would be controlled via Google Cloud, allowing for thermostat settings to be changed to reduce the load on the grid. This is expected to save ‘300 MW’ in the first two years, though it’s not clear whether this means ‘continuously’, or intermittent like with a peaker natural gas plant.

Demand curtailment is not a new thing, with it being a big thing among commercial customers in South Korea, as we discussed within the topic of vehicle-to-grid energy storage. Depending on how it is implemented it can make a big difference, but it’ll remain to see how regular consumers take to the idea. It also provides more evidence for reducing grid load being a lot easier than adding grid-level storage, which is becoming an increasingly dire topic as more non-dispatchable solar and wind power is added to the grid.

Will .IO Domain Names Survive A Geopolitical Rearrangement?

October 23, 2024 by 46 Comments

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a major functional component of the modern Internet. We rely on it for just about everything! It’s responsible for translating human-friendly domain names into numerical IP addresses that get traffic where it needs to go. At the heart of the system are the top-level domains (TLDs)—these sit atop the whole domain name hierarchy.

You might think these TLDs are largely immutable—rock solid objects that seldom change. That’s mostly true, but the problem is that these TLDs are sometimes linked to real-world concepts that are changeable. Like the political status of various countries! Then, things get altogether more complex. The .io top level domain is the latest example of that.

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Recycling Tough Plastics Into Precursors With Some Smart Catalyst Chemistry

October 8, 2024 by 33 Comments

Plastics are unfortunately so cheap useful that they’ve ended up everywhere. They’re filling our landfills, polluting our rivers, and even infiltrating our food chain as microplastics. As much as we think of plastic as recyclable, too, that’s often not the case—while some plastics like PET (polyethylene terephthalate) are easily reused, others just aren’t.

Indeed, the world currently produces an immense amount of polyethylene and polypropylene waste. These materials are used for everything from plastic bags to milk jugs and for microwavable containers—and it’s all really hard to recycle. However, a team at UC Berkeley might have just figured out how to deal with this problem.

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Vehicle-To-Everything: The Looming Smart Traffic Experience

October 7, 2024 by 47 Comments

Much of a car’s interaction with the world around it is still a very stand-alone, analog experience, regardless of whether said car has a human driver or a self-driving computer system. Mark I eyeballs or equivalent computer-connected sensors perceive the world, including road markings, traffic signs and the locations of other road traffic. This information is processed and the car’s speed and trajectory are adjusted to ideally follow the traffic rules and avoid unpleasant conversations with police officers, insurance companies, and/or worse.

An idea that has been kicked around for a few years now has been to use wireless communication between cars and their environment to present this information more directly, including road and traffic conditions, independent from signs placed near or on the road. It would also enable vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V), which somewhat like the transponders in airplanes would give cars and other vehicles awareness of where other traffic is hanging out. Other than V2V, Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) would also include communication regarding infrastructure (V2I), pedestrians (V2P) and an expansive vehicle-to-network (V2N) that gives off strong Ghost in the Shell vibes.

Is this is the future of road traffic? The US Department of Transport (DOT) seems to think that its deployment will be a good thing, but V2X has been stuck in regulatory hurdles. This may now change, with the DOT releasing a roadmap for its deployment.

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