For most people, the Wi-Fi hardware of today provides a perfectly satisfactory user experience. However, technology is ever-evolving, and as always, the next advancement is already around the corner. Enter Wi-Fi 7: a new standard that is set to redefine the boundaries of speed, efficiency, and connection reliability.
Wi-Fi 7 isn’t just another incremental step in the world of wireless tech. It’s promising drastic improvements over its predecessors. But what does it bring to the table? And how does it differ from Wi-Fi 6E, which is still relatively fresh in the market? Read on.
A culture in which it’s fair to say the community which Hackaday serves is steeped in, is electronic music. Within these pages you’ll find plenty of synthesisers, chiptune players, and other projects devoted to synthetic sound. Not everyone here is a musician of obsessive listener, but if Hackaday had a soundtrack album we’re guessing it would be electronic. Along the way, many of us have picked up an appreciation for the history of electronic music, whether it’s EDM from the 1990s, 8-bit SID chiptunes, or further back to figures such as Wendy Carlos, Gershon Kingsley, or Delia Derbyshire. But for all that, the origin of electronic music is frustratingly difficult to pin down. Is it characterised by the instruments alone, or does it have something more specific in the music itself? Here follows the result of a few months’ idle self-enlightenment as we try to get tot he bottom of it all.
Will The Real Electronic Music Please Stand Up?
If you own a synthesiser, the Telharmonium is its daddy.
Anyone reading around the subject soon discovers that there are several different facets to synthesised music which are collectively brought together under the same banner and which at times are all claimed individually to be the purest form of the art. Further to that it rapidly becomes obvious when studying the origins of the technology, that purely electronic and electromechanical music are also two sides of the same coin. Is music electronic when it uses an electronic instrument, when electronics are used to modify the sound of an acoustic instrument, when it is sequenced electronically often in a manner unplayable by a human, or when it uses sampled sounds? Is an electric guitar making electronic music when played through an effects pedal?
The history of electronic music as far as it seems from here, starts around the turn of the twentieth century, and though the work of many different engineers and musicians could be cited at its source there are three inventions which stand out. Thaddeus Cahill’s tone-wheel-based Telharmonium US patent was granted in 1897, the same year as that for Edwin S. Votey’s Pianola player piano, while the Russian Lev Termen’s Theremin was invented in 1919. In those three inventions we find the progenital ancestors of all synthesisers, sequencers, and purely electronic instruments. If it appears we’ve made a glaring omission by not mentioning inventions such as the phonograph, it’s because they were invented not to make music but to record it. Continue reading “Where Did Electronic Music Start?”→
Quartz, though, is at least a partial exception to this rule. Once its unusual electrical properties were understood, crystalline quartz was sent directly from quarries and mines to factories, where they were turned into piezoelectric devices with no chemical transformation whatsoever. The magic of crystal formation had already been done by natural processes; all that was needed was a little slicing and dicing.
As it turns out, though, quartz is so immensely useful for a technological society that there’s no way for the supply of naturally formed crystals to match demand. Like copper before it, which was first discovered in natural metallic deposits that could be fashioned into tools and decorations more or less directly, we would need to discover different sources for quartz and invent chemical transformations to create our own crystals, taking cues from Mother Nature’s recipe book on the way.
When we last left this subject, I told you all about Transorma, the first letter-sorting machine in semi-wide use. But before and since Transorma, machines have come about to perform various tasks on jumbled messes of mail — things like distinguishing letters from packages, making sure letters are all facing the same way before cancelling the postage, and the gargantuan task of getting huge piles of mail into the machines in the first place. So let’s dive right in, shall we?
The ways in which we interact with computers has changed dramatically over the decades. From flipping switches on the control panels of room-sized computers, to punching holes into cards, to ultimately the most common ways that we interact with computers today, in the form of keyboards, mice and touch screens. The latter two especially were developed as a way to interact with graphical user interfaces (GUI) in an intuitive way, but keyboards remain the only reasonable way to quickly enter large amounts of text, which raises many ergonomic questions about how to interact with the rest of the user interface, whether this is a command line or a GUI.
For text editors, perhaps the most divisive feature is that of modal versus non-modal interaction. This one point alone underlies most of the Great Editor War that has raged since time immemorial. Practically, this is mostly about highly opiniated people arguing about whether they like Emacs or vi (or Vim) better. Since in August of 2023 we said our final farewell to the creator of Vim – Bram Moolenaar – this might be a good point to put down the torches and pitchforks and take a sober look at why Vim really is the logical choice for fast, ergonomic coding and editing.
Rarely a week goes by that some company doesn’t offer to send us their latest and greatest laser. You know the type — couple of aluminum extrusions, Class 4 diode flopping around in the breeze, and no enclosure to speak of unless you count the cardboard box they shipped it in. In other words, an accident waiting to happen. Such gracious invitations get sent to the trash without a second thought.
Now don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that the average Hackaday reader would be able to render such a contraption (relatively) safe for use around the shop. Build a box around it, bolt on a powerful enough fan to suck the smoke out through the window, and you’ve turned a liability into a legitimate tool. But the fact remains that we simply can’t put our stamp on something that is designed with such a blatant disregard for basic safety principles.
The earlier WAINLUX JL4 — lucky rabbit foot not included.
That being the case, a recent email from WAINLUX nearly met the same fate as all those other invitations. But even at a glance it was clear that this new machine they wanted to send out, the K8, was very different from others we’d seen. Different even from what the company themselves have put out to this point. This model was fully enclosed, had a built-in ventilation fan, an optional air filter “sidecar”, and yes, it would even turn off the laser if you opened the door while it was in operation. After reading through the promotional material they sent over, I had to admit, I was intrigued.
It seemed like I wasn’t the only one either; it was only a matter of days before the Kickstarter for the WAINLUX K8 rocketed to six figures. At the time of this writing, the total raised stands at just under $230,000 USD. There’s clearly a demand for this sort of desktop laser, the simplicity of using a diode over a laser tube is already appealing, but one that you could actually use in a home with kids or pets would be a game changer for many people.
But would the reality live up to the hype? I’ve spent the last couple of weeks putting a pre-production WAINLUX K8 through its paces, so let’s take a look and see if WAINLUX has a winner on their hands.
Though Hackaday scribes have been known to imbibe a few glasses in their time, it’s fair to say that we are not a wine critic site. When a news piece floated by about a company getting into trouble for illegally submerging crates of wine though, our ears pricked up. Why are vintners dumping their products in the sea?
Making wine, or indeed any alcoholic beverage, starts with taking a base liquor, be it grape juice, apple juice, barley malt solution, or whatever, and fermenting it with a yeast culture to produce alcohol. The result is a drink that’s intoxicating but rough, and the magic that turns it into a connoisseur’s tipple happens subsequently as it matures. The environment in which the maturation happens has a huge influence on this, which is one of many reasons why wine from the cellar of a medieval chateau tastes better than that from an industrial unit in southern England. The Californian company was attempting to speed up this process by leaving the bottles beneath the waves. Continue reading “The Briny Depths Give Wine An Edge, But How?”→
