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Moving From Windows To FreeBSD As The Linux Chaos Alternative

November 11, 2025 by 99 Comments

Back in the innocent days of Windows 98 SE, I nearly switched to Linux on account of how satisfied I was with my Windows experience. This started with the Year of the Linux Desktop in 1999 that started with me purchasing a boxed copy of SuSE Linux and ended with me switching to Windows 2000. After this I continued tinkering with non-Windows OSes including QNX, BeOS, various BSDs, as well as Linux distributions that promised a ‘Windows-like’ desktop experience, such as Lindows.

Now that Windows 2000’s proud legacy has seen itself reduced to a rusting wreck resting on cinderblocks on Microsoft’s dying front lawn, the quiet discomfort that many Windows users have felt since Windows 7 was forcefully End-Of-Life-d has only increased. With it comes the uncomfortable notion that Windows as a viable desktop OS may be nearing its demise. Yet where to from here?

Although the recommendations from the peanut gallery seem to coalesce around Linux or Apple’s MacOS (formerly OS X), there are a few dissenting voices extolling the virtues of FreeBSD over both. There are definitely compelling reasons to pick FreeBSD over Linux, in addition to it being effectively MacOS’s cousin. Best of all is not having to deal with the Chaos Vortex that spawns whenever you dare to utter the question of ‘which Linux distro?’. Within the world of FreeBSD there is just FreeBSD, which makes for a remarkably coherent experience.

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Medieval Iron, Survivorship Bias And Modern Metallurgy

November 5, 2025 by 43 Comments

When you hear it said that “Modern steel is disposable by design”, your ears perk up, as you just caught the unmistakable sound of faux romanticism along with ‘lost ancient technology‘ vibes. Although it happens sometimes that we did lose something important, as with for example the ancient Roman concrete that turns out to have self-healing properties as a result of so-called hot mixing, this is decidedly an exception.

We nearly lost that technology because of the technological and scientific bonfire that was the prelude to a thousand years of darkness over Europe: called the Dark Ages, Middle Ages as well as the medieval period. Thus when you come across a slideshow video with synthesized monotonal voice-over which makes the bold claim that somehow medieval iron was superior and today’s metallurgy both worse and designed to break, you really have to do a spit-take. The many corrections in the comment section further reinforces the feeling that it’s more slop than fact.

One of the claims made is that the bloomery furnace beats the blast furnace, due to beneficial additives to the iron. Considering that the video cites its sources, it’s at least worthy of a dive into the actual science here. Are modern iron and steel truly that inferior and disposable?

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A Tale Of Two Car Design Philosophies

October 16, 2025 by 123 Comments

As a classic car enthusiast, my passion revolves around cars with a Made in West Germany stamp somewhere on them, partially because that phrase generally implied a reputation for mechanical honesty and engineering sanity. Air-cooled Volkswagens are my favorites, and in fact I wrote about these, and my own ’72 Super Beetle, almost a decade ago. The platform is incredibly versatile and hackable, not to mention inexpensive and repairable thanks to its design as a practical, affordable car originally meant for German families in the post-war era and which eventually spread worldwide. My other soft-spot is a car that might seem almost diametrically opposed to early VWs in its design philosophy: the Mercedes 300D. While it was a luxury vehicle, expensive and overbuilt in comparison to classic Volkswagens, the engineers’ design choices ultimately earned it a reputation as one of the most reliable cars ever made.

As much as I appreciate these classics, though, there’s almost nothing that could compel me to purchase a modern vehicle from either of these brands. The core reason is that both have essentially abandoned the design philosophies that made them famous in the first place. And while it’s no longer possible to buy anything stamped Made in West Germany for obvious reasons, even a modern car with a VIN starting with a W doesn’t carry that same weight anymore. It more likely marks a vehicle destined for a lease term rather than one meant to be repaired and driven for decades, like my Beetle or my 300D.

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Reshaping Eyeballs With Electricity, No Lasers Or Cutting Required

October 8, 2025 by 36 Comments

Glasses are perhaps the most non-invasive method of vision correction, followed by contact lenses. Each have their drawbacks though, and some seek more permanent solutions in the form of laser eye surgeries like LASIK, aiming to reshape their corneas for better visual clarity. However, these methods often involve cutting into the eye itself, and it hardly gets any more invasive than that.

A new surgical method could have benefits in this regard, allowing correction in a single procedure that requires no lasers and no surgical cutting of the eye itself. The idea is to use electricity to help reshape the eye back towards greater optical performance.

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Airbags, And How Mercedes-Benz Hacked Your Hearing

October 6, 2025 by 42 Comments

Airbags are an incredibly important piece of automotive safety gear. They’re also terrifying—given that they’re effectively small pyrotechnic devices that are aimed directly at your face and chest. Myths have pervaded that they “kill more people than they save,” in part due a hilarious episode of The Simpsons. Despite this, they’re credited with saving tens of thousands of lives over the years by cushioning fleshy human bodies from heavy impacts and harsh decelerations.

While an airbag is generally there to help you, it can also hurt you in regular operation. The immense sound pressure generated when an airbag fires is not exactly friendly to your ears. However, engineers at Mercedes-Benz have found a neat workaround to protect your hearing from the explosive report of these safety devices. It’s a nifty hack that takes advantage of an existing feature of the human body. Let’s explore how air bags work, why they’re so darn loud, and how that can be mitigated in the event of a crash.

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On 3D Scanners And Giving Kinects A New Purpose In Life

October 2, 2025 by 32 Comments

The concept of a 3D scanner can seem rather simple in theory: simply point a camera at the physical object you wish to scan in, rotate around the object to capture all angles and stitch it together into a 3D model along with textures created from the same photos. This photogrammetry application is definitely viable, but also limited in the sense that you’re relying on inferring three-dimensional parameters from a set of 2D images and rely on suitable lighting.

To get more detailed depth information from a scene you’d need to perform direct measurements, which can be done physically or through e.g. time-of-flight (ToF) measurements. Since contact-free ways of measurements tend to be often preferred, ToF makes a lot of sense, but comes with the disadvantage of measuring of only a single spot at a time. When the target is actively moving, you can fall back on photogrammetry or use an approach called structured-light (SL) scanning.

SL is what consumer electronics like the Microsoft Kinect popularized, using the combination of a visible and near-infrared (NIR) camera to record a pattern projected onto the subject, which is similar to how e.g. face-based login systems like Apple’s Face ID work. Considering how often Kinects have been used for generic purpose 3D scanners, this raises many questions regarding today’s crop of consumer 3D scanners, such as whether they’re all just basically Kinect-clones.

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A Cut Above: Surgery In Space, Now And In The Future

September 30, 2025 by 3 Comments

In case you hadn’t noticed, we live in a dangerous world. While our soft, fleshy selves are remarkably good at absorbing kinetic energy and healing the damage that results, there are very definite limits to what we humans can deal with, beyond which we’ll need some help. Car crashes, falls from height, or even penetrating trauma such as gunshot wounds — events such as these will often land you in a trauma center where, if things are desperate enough, you’ll be on the operating table within the so-called “Golden Hour” of maximum survivability, to patch the holes and plug the leaks.

While the Golden Hour may be less of a hard limit than the name implies, it remains true that the sooner someone with a major traumatic injury gets into surgery, the better their chances of survival. Here on planet Earth, most urban locations can support one or more Level 1 trauma centers, putting huge swathes of the population within that 60-minute goal. Even in rural areas, EMS systems with Advanced Life Support crews can stabilize the severely wounded until they can be evacuated to a trauma center by helicopter, putting even more of the population within this protective bubble.

But ironically, residents in the highest-priced neighborhood in human history enjoy no such luxury. Despite only being the equivalent of a quick helicopter ride away, the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station are pretty much on their own when it comes to any traumatic injuries or medical emergencies that might crop up in orbit. While the ISS crews are well-prepared for that eventuality, as we’ll see, there’s only so much we can do right now, and we have a long way to go before we’re ready to perform surgery in space

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