Niklaus Wirth with Personal Computer Lilith that he developed in the 1970ies. (Photo: ETH Zurich)

Remembering Niklaus Wirth: Father Of Pascal And Inspiration To Many

January 5, 2024 by Maya Posch 33 Comments

Although perhaps not as much of a household name as other pioneers of last century’s rapid evolution of computer hardware and the software running on them, Niklaus Wirth’s contributions puts him right along with other giants. Being a very familiar face both in his native Switzerland at the ETH Zurich university – as well as at Stanford and other locations around the world where computer history was written – Niklaus not only gave us Pascal and Modula-2, but also inspired countless other languages as well as their developers.

Sadly, Niklaus Wirth passed away on January 1st, 2024, at the age of 89. Until his death, he continued to work on the Oberon programming language, as well as its associated operating system: Oberon System and the multi-process, SMP-capable A2 (Bluebottle) operating system that runs natively on x86, X86_64 and ARM hardware. Leaving behind a legacy that stretches from the 1960s to today, it’s hard to think of any aspect of modern computing that wasn’t in some way influenced or directly improved by Niklaus.

Continue reading “Remembering Niklaus Wirth: Father Of Pascal And Inspiration To Many” →

2023: As The Hardware World Turns

January 2, 2024 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

We’ve made it through another trip around the sun, and for the first time in what feels like far too long, it seems like things went pretty well for the hackers and makers of the world. Like so many, our community suffered through a rough couple of years: from the part shortages that made building even the simplest of devices more expensive and difficult than it should have been, to the COVID-mandated social distancing that robbed us of our favorite meetups. But when looking back on the last twelve months, most of the news was refreshingly positive.

Pepperoni costs ten bucks, but they can’t activate Windows on their registers…

Oh sure, a trip to to the grocery store can lead to a minor existential crisis at the register, but there’s not much we at Hackaday can do about that other than recommend you some good hydroponics projects to help get your own home farm up and running.

As has become our New Year tradition, we like to take this time to go over some of the biggest stories and trends that we picked up on from our unique vantage point. Some will be obvious, but there’s always a few that sneak up on us. These posts tend to make for interesting reading in the future, and if you’ve got the time, we’d recommend going back and reading the previous entries in this series and reminiscing a bit.

It’s also a good time to reflect on Hackaday itself — how we’ve grown, the things that have changed, and perhaps what we can do better going forward. Believe it or not we do read all of the feedback from the community, whether it’s in the comments of individual posts or sent into us directly. We couldn’t do this without readers like you, so please drop us a line and let us know what you’re thinking.

So before we get any farther into 2024, let’s wind back the clock and revisit some of the highlights from the previous year.

Continue reading “2023: As The Hardware World Turns” →

China’s Nuclear-Powered Containership: A Fluke Or The Future Of Shipping?

December 26, 2023 by Maya Posch 73 Comments

Since China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) unveiled its KUN-24AP containership at the Marintec China Expo in Shanghai in early December of 2023, the internet has been abuzz about it. Not just because it’s the world’s largest container ship at a massive 24,000 TEU, but primarily because of the power source that will power this behemoth: a molten salt reactor of Chinese design that is said to use a thorium fuel cycle. Not only would this provide the immense amount of electrical power needed to propel the ship, it would eliminate harmful emissions and allow the ship to travel much faster than other containerships.

Meanwhile the Norwegian classification society, DNV, has already issued an approval-in-principle to CSSC Jiangnan Shipbuilding shipyard, which would be a clear sign that we may see the first of this kind of ship being launched. Although the shipping industry is currently struggling with falling demand and too many conventionally-powered ships that it had built when demand surged in 2020, this kind of new container ship might be just the game changer it needs to meet today’s economic reality.

That said, although a lot about the KUN-24AP is not public information, we can glean some information about the molten salt reactor design that will be used, along with how this fits into the whole picture of nuclear marine propulsion.

Continue reading “China’s Nuclear-Powered Containership: A Fluke Or The Future Of Shipping?” →

Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity

December 18, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 72 Comments

Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it. As they say in the industry, it’s not “dispatchable”. A large enough grid can mitigate this somewhat by moving energy long distances or by using various existing storage methods like pumped storage, but for the time being some amount of dispatchable power generation like nuclear, fossil, or hydro power is often needed to backstop the fundamental nature of nature. As prices for wind and solar drop precipitously, though, the economics of finding other grid storage solutions get better. While the current focus is almost exclusively dedicated to batteries, another way of solving these problems may be using renewables to generate hydrogen both as a fuel and as a means of grid storage. Continue reading “Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity” →

Can Google’s New AI Read Your Datasheets For You?

December 12, 2023 by Al Williams 25 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of AI tools lately, and, of course, we know they aren’t really smart, but they sure fool people into thinking they are actually intelligent. Of course, these programs can only pick through their training, and a lot depends on what they are trained on. When you use something like ChatGPT, for example, you assume they trained it on reasonable data. Sure, it might get things wrong anyway, but there’s also the danger that it simply doesn’t know what you are talking about. It would be like calling your company’s help desk and asking where you left your socks — they simply don’t know.

We’ve seen attempts to have AI “read” web pages or documents of your choice and then be able to answer questions about them. The latest is from Google with NotebookLM. It integrates a workspace where you can make notes, ask questions, and provide sources. The sources can be text snippets, documents from Google Drive, or PDF files you upload.

You can’t ask questions until you upload something, and we presume the AI restricts its answers to what’s in the documents you provide. It still won’t be perfect, but at least it won’t just give you bad information from an unknown source. Continue reading “Can Google’s New AI Read Your Datasheets For You?” →

The Sunspots Are Coming (Again)

December 1, 2023 by Jenny List 5 Comments

There are a bunch of ways to estimate the age of a radio amateur, by the letters in their callsign, by their preferred choice of homebrewing technology, or sometimes by their operating style. One that perhaps doesn’t immediately come to mind is to count how many solar cycles they remember, and since the current cycle 25 is my fourth I guess I’ve seen a few. Cycle 25 is so far shaping up to be quite an active one especially of late, which popular media are describing as bombarding us with flares from a “sunspot archipelago” and the more measured tones of spaceweather.com giving us warning of X-class flares heading in our direction, today!

Jean-Claude Roy, VP, Hydro Quebec — We wouldn’t be this guy for anything. From CBC’s coverage of the 1989 power outage.

As the technology for solar observation has increased in sophistication and the Internet has allowed anyone to follow the events above us as they unfold, the awareness of solar phenomena has shifted away from the relatively small numbers of astronomers and radio amateurs who would once have been eagerly awaiting a solar cycle to a wider audience. Ever since a particularly severe event in March 1989 during cycle 22 caused disruptions including the blackout of a significant part of Canada it’s been a periodic topic of mild doom in slow news moments. But what lies behind the reports of solar activity? Perhaps it’s time to take a look.

The solar cycle refers to the 11-year period of solar activity from a maximum of observed sunspots through a minimum to a new maximum. The sunspots are the visible evidence of the solar magnetic field changing its polarity, and appear as darker areas where there is a greater strength of magnetic flux in the sun’s photosphere. We refer to solar cycles by number with solar cycle 1 occurring in 1755 because that year represents the earliest cycle which can be found in modern astronomical observation data, but previous cycles have been deduced over millennia through dendrochronology, sediment analysis, isotope observations, and other methods. Continue reading “The Sunspots Are Coming (Again)” →

Falsified Photos: Fooling Adobe’s Cryptographically-Signed Metadata

November 30, 2023 by Adam Zeloof 34 Comments

Last week, we wrote about the Leica M11-P, the world’s first camera with Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) credentials baked into every shot. Essentially, each file is signed with Leica’s encryption key such that any changes to the image, whether edits to the photo itself or the metadata, are tracked. The goal is to not only prove ownership, but that photos are real — not tampered with or AI-generated. At least, that’s the main selling point.

Although the CAI has been around since 2019, it’s adoption is far from widespread. Only a handful of programs support it, although this list includes Photoshop, and its unlikely anybody outside the professional photography space was aware of it until recently. This isn’t too surprising, as it really isn’t relevant to the casual shooter — when I take a shot to upload to Instagram, I’m rarely thinking about whether or not I’ll need cryptographic proof that the photo wasn’t edited — usually adding #nofilter to the description is enough. Where the CAI is supposed to shine, however, is in the world of photojournalism. The idea is that a photographer can capture an image that is signed at the time of creation and maintains a tamper-proof log of any edits made. When the final image is sold to a news publisher or viewed by a reader online, they are able to view that data.

At this point, there are two thoughts you might have (or, at least, there are two thoughts I had upon learning about the CAI)