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Zombie Netscape Won’t Die

January 27, 2026 by 31 Comments

The very concept of the web browser began with a humble piece of software called NCSA Mosaic, all the way back in 1993. It was soon eclipsed by Netscape Navigator, and later Internet Explorer, which became the titans of the 1990s browser market. In turn, they too would falter. Navigator’s dying corpse ended up feeding what would become Mozilla Firefox, and Internet Explorer later morphed into the unexceptional browser known as Edge.

Few of us have had any reason to think about Netscape Navigator since its demise in 2008. And yet, the name lingers on. A zombie from a forgotten age, risen again to haunt us today.

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Marion Stokes Fought Disinformation With VCRs

January 20, 2026 by 48 Comments

You’ve likely at least heard of Marion Stokes, the woman who constantly recorded television for over 30 years. She comes up on reddit and other places every so often as a hero archivist who fought against disinformation and disappearing history. But who was Marion Stokes, and why did she undertake this project? And more importantly, what happened to all of those tapes? Let’s take a look.

Marion the Librarian

Marion was born November 25, 1929 in Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Noted for her left-wing beliefs as a young woman, she became quite politically active, and was even courted by the Communist Party USA to potentially become a leader. Marion was also involved in the civil rights movement.

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A Linux Power User Puts SteamOS To Work

January 12, 2026 by 54 Comments

The line between a Linux user and a Linux power user is a bit gray, and a bit wide. Most people who install Linux already have more computer literacy than average, and the platform has long encouraged experimentation and construction in a way macOS and Windows generally aren’t designed for. Traditional Linux distributions often ask more of their users as well, requiring at least a passing familiarity with the terminal and the operating system’s internals especially once something inevitably breaks.

In recent years, however, a different design philosophy has been gaining ground. Immutable Linux distributions like Fedora Silverblue, openSUSE MicroOS, and NixOS dramatically reduce the chances an installation behaves erratically by making direct changes to the underlying system either impossible or irrelevant.

SteamOS fits squarely into this category as well. While it’s best known for its console-like gaming mode it also includes a fully featured Linux desktop, which is a major part of its appeal and the reason I bought a Steam Deck in the first place. For someone coming from Windows or macOS, this desktop provides a familiar, fully functional environment: web browsing, media playback, and other basic tools all work out of the box.

As a Linux power user encountering an immutable desktop for the first time, though, that desktop mode wasn’t quite what I expected. It handles these everyday tasks exceptionally well, but performing the home sysadmin chores that are second nature to me on a Debian system takes a very different mindset and a bit of effort. Continue reading “A Linux Power User Puts SteamOS To Work” →

Internet-Connected Consoles Are Retro Now, And That Means Problems

December 22, 2025 by 27 Comments

A long time ago, there was a big difference between PC and console gaming. The former often came with headaches. You’d fight with drivers, struggle with crashes, and grow ever more frustrated dealing with CD piracy checks and endless patches and updates. Meanwhile, consoles offered the exact opposite experience—just slam in a cartridge, and go!

That beautiful feature fell away when consoles joined the Internet. Suddenly there were servers to sign in to and updates to download and a whole bunch of hoops to jump through before you even got to play a game. Now, those early generations of Internet-connected consoles are becoming retro, and that’s introduced a whole new set of problems now the infrastructure is dying or dead. Boot up and play? You must be joking!

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Thorium-Metal Alloys And Radioactive Jet Engines

December 16, 2025 by 36 Comments

Although metal alloys is not among the most exciting topics for most people, the moment you add the word ‘radioactive’, it does tend to get their attention. So too with the once fairly common Mag-Thor alloys that combine magnesium with thorium, along with other elements, including zinc and aluminium. Its primary use is in aerospace engineering, as these alloys provide useful properties such as heat resistance, high strength and creep resistance that are very welcome in e.g. jet engines.

Most commonly found in the thorium-232 isotope form, there are no stable forms of this element. That said, Th-232 has a half-life of about 14 billion years, making it only very weakly radioactive. Like uranium-238 and uranium-235 it has the unique property of not having stable isotopes and yet still being abundantly around since the formation of the Earth. Thorium is about three times as abundant as uranium and thus rather hard to avoid contact with.

This raises the question of whether thorium alloys are such a big deal, and whether they justify removing something like historical artefacts from museums due to radiation risks, as has happened on a few occasions.

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Ask Hackaday: Solutions, Or Distractions?

December 10, 2025 by 13 Comments

The “Long Dark” is upon us, at least for those who live north of the equator, and while it’s all pre-holiday bustle, pretty lights, and the magical first snow of the season now, soon the harsh reality of slushy feet, filthy cars, and not seeing the sun for weeks on end will set in. And when it does, it pays to have something to occupy idle mind and hands alike, a project that’s complicated enough to make completing even part of it feel like an accomplishment.

But this time of year, when daylight lasts barely as long as a good night’s sleep, you’ve got to pick your projects carefully, lest your winter project remain incomplete when the weather finally warms and thoughts turn to other matters. For me, at least, that means being realistic about inevitabilities such as competition from the day job, family stuff, and the dreaded “scope creep.”

It’s that last one that I’m particularly concerned with this year, because it has the greatest potential to delay this project into spring or even — forbid it! — summer. And that means I need to be on the ball about what the project actually is, and to avoid the temptation to fall into any rabbit holes that, while potentially interesting and perhaps even profitable, will only make it harder to get things done.

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Ore Formation: A Surface Level Look

December 4, 2025 by 9 Comments

The past few months, we’ve been giving you a quick rundown of the various ways ores form underground; now the time has come to bring that surface-level understanding to surface-level processes.

Strictly speaking, we’ve already seen one: sulfide melt deposits are associated with flood basalts and meteorite impacts, which absolutely are happening on-surface. They’re totally an igneous process, though, and so were presented in the article on magmatic ore processes.

For the most part, you can think of the various hydrothermal ore formation processes as being metamorphic in nature. That is, the fluids are causing alteration to existing rock formations; this is especially true of skarns.

There’s a third leg to that rock tripod, though: igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. Are there sedimentary rocks that happen to be ores? You betcha! In fact, one sedimentary process holds the most valuable ores on Earth– and as usual, it’s not likely to be restricted to this planet alone. Continue reading “Ore Formation: A Surface Level Look” →