Original Art

1142 Articles

Reconductoring: Building Tomorrow’s Grid Today

June 11, 2025 by 58 Comments

What happens when you build the largest machine in the world, but it’s still not big enough? That’s the situation the North American transmission system, the grid that connects power plants to substations and the distribution system, and which by some measures is the largest machine ever constructed, finds itself in right now. After more than a century of build-out, the towers and wires that stitch together a continent-sized grid aren’t up to the task they were designed for, and that’s a huge problem for a society with a seemingly insatiable need for more electricity.

There are plenty of reasons for this burgeoning demand, including the rapid growth of data centers to support AI and other cloud services and the move to wind and solar energy as the push to decarbonize the grid proceeds. The former introduces massive new loads to the grid with millions of hungry little GPUs, while the latter increases the supply side, as wind and solar plants are often located out of reach of existing transmission lines. Add in the anticipated expansion of the manufacturing base as industry seeks to re-home factories, and the scale of the potential problem only grows.

The bottom line to all this is that the grid needs to grow to support all this growth, and while there is often no other solution than building new transmission lines, that’s not always feasible. Even when it is, the process can take decades. What’s needed is a quick win, a way to increase the capacity of the existing infrastructure without having to build new lines from the ground up. That’s exactly what reconductoring promises, and the way it gets there presents some interesting engineering challenges and opportunities.

Continue reading “Reconductoring: Building Tomorrow’s Grid Today” →

The Ongoing BcacheFS Filesystem Stability Controversy

June 10, 2025 by 55 Comments

In a saga that brings to mind the hype and incidents with ReiserFS, [SavvyNik] takes us through the latest data corruption bug report and developer updates regarding the BcacheFS filesystem in the Linux kernel. Based on the bcache (block cache) cache mechanism in the Linux kernel, its author [Kent Overstreet] developed it into what is now known as BcacheFS, with it being announced in 2015 and subsequently merged into the Linux kernel (6.7) in early 2024. As a modern copy-on-write (COW) filesystem along the lines of ZFS and btfs, it was supposed to compete directly with these filesystems.

Despite this, it has become clear that BcacheFS is rather unstable, with frequent and extensive patches being submitted to the point where [Linus Torvalds] in August of last year pushed back against it, as well as expressing regret for merging BcacheFS into mainline Linux. As covered in the video, [Kent] has pushed users reporting issues to upgrade to the latest Linux kernel to get critical fixes, which really reinforces the notion that BcacheFS is at best an experimental Alpha-level filesystem implementation and should probably not be used with important data or systems.

Although one can speculate on the reasons for BcacheFS spiraling out of control like this, ultimately if you want a reliable COW filesystem in Linux, you are best off using btrfs or ZFS. Of course, regardless of which filesystem you use, always make multiple backups, test them regularly and stay away from shiny new things on production systems.

Continue reading “The Ongoing BcacheFS Filesystem Stability Controversy” →

Feline Genetics And Why Orange Cats Are The Most Special

June 9, 2025 by 43 Comments

Recently, butlers to orange-colored cats got a bit of a shock when reading the news, as headlines began to call out their fuzzy feline friends as ‘freaks of nature’ and using similarly uncouth terms. Despite the name-calling, the actual reason for this flurry of feline fascination was more benign — with two teams of scientists independently figuring out the reason why some cats have fur that is orange. Tracking down the reason for this turned out to be far more complicated than assumed, with the fact that about 80% of orange cats are male being only the tip of the cat-shaped iceberg.

It was known to be an X chromosome-linked mutation, but rather than the fur coloring being affected directly, instead the mechanism was deduced to be a suppression of the black-brownish pigmentation (eumelanin) in favor of the orange coloration (pheomelanin). Finding the exact locus of the responsible ‘O gene’ (for orange) in the cat genome has been the challenge for years, which turned out to be a mutation related to the X-linked ARHGAP36 gene, whose altered expression results in the suppression of many melanogenesis genes.

Interestingly, this particular mutation appears to be of a singular origin that apparently persisted over millennia courtesy of the domestication of humans (H. sapiens) by Felis catus.

Continue reading “Feline Genetics And Why Orange Cats Are The Most Special” →

Screens Of Death: From Diagnostic Aids To A Sad Emoji

June 5, 2025 by 57 Comments

There comes a moment in the life of any operating system when an unforeseen event will tragically cut its uptime short. Whether it’s a sloppily written driver, a bug in the handling of an edge case or just dumb luck, suddenly there is nothing more that the OS’ kernel can do to salvage the situation. With its last few cycles it can still gather some diagnostic information, attempt to write this to a log or memory dump and then output a supportive message to the screen to let the user know that the kernel really did try its best.

This on-screen message is called many things, from a kernel panic message on Linux to a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on Windows since Windows 95, to a more contemplative message on AmigaOS and BeOS/Haiku. Over the decades these Screens of Death (SoD) have changed considerably, from the highly informative screens of Windows NT to the simplified BSOD of Windows 8 onwards with its prominent sad emoji that has drawn a modicum of ridicule.

Now it seems that the Windows BSOD is about to change again, and may not even be blue any more. So what’s got a user to think about these changes? What were we ever supposed to get out of these special screens?

Continue reading “Screens Of Death: From Diagnostic Aids To A Sad Emoji” →

High-Stakes Fox Hunting: The FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division In World War II

June 4, 2025 by 31 Comments

With few exceptions, amateur radio is a notably sedentary pursuit. Yes, some hams will set up in a national or state park for a “Parks on the Air” activation, and particularly energetic operators may climb a mountain for “Summits on the Air,” but most hams spend a lot of time firmly planted in a comfortable chair, spinning the dials in search of distant signals or familiar callsigns to add to their logbook.

There’s another exception to the band-surfing tendencies of hams: fox hunting. Generally undertaken at a field day event, fox hunts pit hams against each other in a search for a small hidden transmitter, using directional antennas and portable receivers to zero in on often faint signals. It’s all in good fun, but fox hunts serve a more serious purpose: they train hams in the finer points of radio direction finding, a skill that can be used to track down everything from manmade noise sources to unlicensed operators. Or, as was done in the 1940s, to ferret out foreign agents using shortwave radio to transmit intelligence overseas.

That was the primary mission of the Radio Intelligence Division, a rapidly assembled organization tasked with protecting the United States by monitoring the airwaves and searching for spies. The RID proved to be remarkably effective during the war years, in part because it drew heavily from the amateur radio community to populate its many field stations, but also because it brought an engineering mindset to the problem of finding needles in a radio haystack.

Continue reading “High-Stakes Fox Hunting: The FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division In World War II” →

The Potential Big Boom In Every Dust Cloud

June 2, 2025 by 49 Comments

To the average person, walking into a flour- or sawmill and seeing dust swirling around is unlikely to evoke much of a response, but those in the know are quite likely to bolt for the nearest exit at this harrowing sight. For as harmless as a fine cloud of flour, sawdust or even coffee creamer may appear, each of these have the potential for a massive conflagration and even an earth-shattering detonation.

As for the ‘why’, the answer can be found in for example the working principle behind an internal combustion engine. While a puddle of gasoline is definitely flammable, the only thing that actually burns is the evaporated gaseous form above the liquid, ergo it’s a relatively slow process; in order to make petrol combust, it needs to be mixed in the right air-fuel ratio. If this mixture is then exposed to a spark, the fuel will nearly instantly burn, causing a detonation due to the sudden release of energy.

Similarly, flour, sawdust, and many other substances in powder form will burn gradually if a certain transition interface is maintained. A bucket of sawdust burns slowly, but if you create a sawdust cloud, it might just blow up the room.

This raises the questions of how to recognize this danger and what to do about it.

Continue reading “The Potential Big Boom In Every Dust Cloud” →

Forced E-Waste PCs And The Case Of Windows 11’s Trusted Platform

May 29, 2025 by 145 Comments

Until the release of Windows 11, the upgrade proposition for Windows operating systems was rather straightforward: you considered whether the current version of Windows on your system still fulfilled your needs and if the answer was ‘no’, you’d buy an upgrade disc. Although system requirements slowly crept up over time, it was likely that your PC could still run the newest-and-greatest Windows version. Even Windows 7 had a graphical fallback mode, just in case your PC’s video card was a potato incapable of handling the GPU-accelerated Aero Glass UI.

This makes a lot of sense, as the most demanding software on a PC are the applications, not the OS. Yet with Windows 11 a new ‘hard’ requirement was added that would flip this on its head: the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a security feature that has been around for many years, but never saw much use outside of certain business and government applications. In addition to this, Windows 11 only officially supports a limited number of CPUs, which risks turning many still very capable PCs into expensive paperweights.

Although the TPM and CPU requirements can be circumvented with some effort, this is not supported by Microsoft and raises the specter of a wave of capable PCs being trashed when Windows 10 reaches EOL starting this year.

Continue reading “Forced E-Waste PCs And The Case Of Windows 11’s Trusted Platform” →