Some time ago, Linus Torvalds made a throwaway comment that sent ripples through the Linux world. Was it perhaps time to abandon support for the now-ancient Intel 486? Developers had already abandoned the 386 in 2012, and Torvalds openly mused if the time was right to make further cuts for the benefit of modernity.
It would take three long years, but that eventuality finally came to pass. As of version 6.15, the Linux kernel will no longer support chips running the 80486 architecture, along with a gaggle of early “586” chips as well. It’s all down to some housekeeping and precise technical changes that will make the new code inoperable with the machines of the past.
Some Mondays are worse than others, but April 28 2025 was particularly bad for millions of people in Spain and Portugal. Starting just after noon, a number of significant grid oscillations occurred which would worsen over the course of minutes until both countries were plunged into a blackout. After a first substation tripped, in the span of only a few tens of seconds the effects cascaded across the Iberian peninsula as generators, substations, and transmission lines tripped and went offline. Only after the HVDC and AC transmission lines at the Spain-France border tripped did the cascade stop, but it had left practically the entirety of the peninsula without a functioning power grid. The event is estimated to have been the biggest blackout in Europe ever.
Following the blackout, grid operators in the affected regions scrambled to restore power, while the populace tried to make the best of being plummeted suddenly into a pre-electricity era. Yet even as power gradually came back online over the course of about ten hours, the question of what could cause such a complete grid collapse and whether it might happen again remained.
With recently a number of official investigation reports having been published, we have now finally some insight in how a big chunk of the European electrical grid suddenly tipped over.
Look out of a window, ask yourself the question, “Has a nuke gone off?”. Maybe, maybe not, and all of us here at Hackaday need to know the answer to these important questions! Introducing the hasanukegoneoff.com Indicator from [bigcrimping] to answer our cries.
An ESP32 running a MicroPython script handles the critical checks from hasanukegoneoff.com for any notification of nuclear mayhem. This will either power the INS-1 neon bulb, indicating “no” or “yes” in the unfortunate case of a blast. Of course, there is also the button required for testing the notification lights; no chance of failure can be left. All of this is fitted onto a custom dual-sided PCB and placed inside a custom 3D-printed enclosure.
Hasanukegoneoff.com’s detection system, covered before here, relies on an HSN-1000L Nuclear Event Detector to check for neutrons coming from the blast zone. [bigcrimping] also provides the project plans for your own blast detector to answer the critical question of “has a nuke gone off” from anywhere other than the website’s Chippenham, England location.
This entire project is open sourced, so keep sure to check out [bigcrimping]’s GitHub for both portions of this project on the detector and receiver. While this project provides some needed dark humor, nukes are still scary and especially so when disarming them with nothing but a hacksaw and testing equipment.
Since October 1978, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has operated its fleet of Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) — the data from which has been used for a wide array of environmental monitoring applications, from weather forecasting to the detection of forest fires and volcanic eruptions. But technology marches on, and considering that even the youngest member of the fleet has been in orbit for 16 years, NOAA has decided to retire the remaining operational POES satellites on June 16th.
Under normal circumstances, the retirement of weather satellites wouldn’t have a great impact on our community. But in this case, the satellites in question utilize the Automatic Picture Transmission (APT), Low-Rate Picture Transmission (LRPT), and High Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) protocols, all of which can be received by affordable software defined radios (SDRs) such as the RTL-SDR and easily decoded using free and open source software.
As such, many a radio hobbyist has pointed their DIY antennas at these particular satellites and pulled down stunning pictures of the Earth. It’s the kind of thing that’s impressive enough to get new folks interested in experimenting with radio, and losing it would be a big blow to the hobby.
Luckily, it’s not all bad news. While one of the NOAA satellites slated for retirement is already down for good, at least two remaining birds should be broadcasting publicly accessible imagery for the foreseeable future.
If legend is to be believed, three disparate social forces in early 20th-century America – the temperance movement, the rise of car culture, and the Scots-Irish culture of the South – collided with unexpected results. The temperance movement managed to get Prohibition written into the Constitution, which rankled the rebellious spirit of the descendants of the Scots-Irish who settled the South. In response, some of them took to the backwoods with stills and sacks of corn, creating moonshine by the barrel for personal use and profit. And to avoid the consequences of this, they used their mechanical ingenuity to modify their Fords, Chevrolets, and Dodges to provide the speed needed to outrun the law.
Though that story may be somewhat apocryphal, at least one of those threads is still woven into the American story. The moonshiner’s hotrod morphed into NASCAR, one of the nation’s most-watched spectator sports, and informed much of the car culture of the 20th century in general. Unfortunately, that led in part to our current fossil fuel predicament and its attendant environmental consequences, which are now being addressed by replacing at least some of the gasoline we burn with the same “white lightning” those old moonshiners made. The cost-benefit analysis of ethanol as a fuel is open to debate, as is the wisdom of using food for motor fuel, but one thing’s for sure: turning corn into ethanol in industrially useful quantities isn’t easy, and it requires some Big Chemistry to get it done. Continue reading “Big Chemistry: Fuel Ethanol”→
Earlier this month we covered the brewing controversy over libogc, the community-developed C library that functions as the backbone for GameCube and Wii homebrew software. Questions about how much of the library was based on leaked information from Nintendo had been circulating for decades, but the more recent accusations that libogc included code from other open source projects without proper attribution brought the debate to a head — ultimately leading Wii Homebrew Channel developer Hector Martin to archive the popular project and use its README as a central point to collect evidence against libogc and its developers.
At the time, most of the claims had to do with code being taken from the Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems (RTEMS) project. Martin and others in the community had performed their own investigations, and found some striking similarities between the two codebases. A developer familiar with both projects went so far as to say that as much as half the code in libogc was actually lifted from RTEMS and obfuscated so as to appear as original work.
While some of these claims included compelling evidence, they were still nothing more than accusations. For their part, the libogc team denied any wrongdoing. Contributors to the project explained that any resemblance between libogc code and that of either leaked Nintendo libraries or other open source projects was merely superficial, and the unavoidable result of developing for a constrained system such as a game console.
But that all changed on May 6th, when the RTEMS team released an official statement on the subject. It turns out that they had been following the situation for some time, and had conducted their own audit of the libogc code. Their determination was that not only had RTEMS code been used without attribution, but that it appeared at least some code had also been copied verbatim from the Linux kernel — making the license dispute (and its solution) far more complex.
Last week, the mainstream news was filled with headlines about K2-18b — an exoplanet some 124 light-years away from Earth that 98% of the population had never even heard about. Even astronomers weren’t aware of its existence until the Kepler Space Telescope picked it out back in 2015, just one of the more than 2,700 planets the now defunct observatory was able to identify during its storied career. But now, thanks to recent observations by the James Web Space Telescope, this obscure planet has been thrust into the limelight by the discovery of what researchers believe are the telltale signs of life in its atmosphere.
Artist’s rendition of planet K2-18b.
Well, maybe. As you might imagine, being able to determine if a planet has life on it from 124 light-years away isn’t exactly easy. We haven’t even been able to conclusively rule out past, or even present, life in our very own solar system, which in astronomical terms is about as far off as the end of your block.
To be fair the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy researchers, lead by Nikku Madhusudhan, aren’t claiming to have definitive proof that life exists on K2-18b. We probably won’t get undeniable proof of life on another planet until a rover literally runs over it. Rather, their paper proposes that abundant biological life, potentially some form of marine phytoplankton, is one of the strongest explanations for the concentrations of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide that they’ve detected in the atmosphere of K2-18b.
As you might expect, there are already challenges to that conclusion. Which is of course exactly how the scientific process is supposed to work. Though the findings from Cambridge are certainly compelling, adding just a bit of context can show that things aren’t as cut and dried as we might like. There’s even an argument to be made that we wouldn’t necessarily know what the signs of extraterrestrial life would look like even if it was right in front of us.
