Electric vehicles make for cleaner transport. However, they’re hung up by the limited range available from batteries. Long recharge times further compound the issue.
These issues are exacerbated when it comes to trucks hauling heavy goods. More payload means more weight, which means less range, or more batteries, which means less payload. Electric highways promise to solve this issue with the magic of overhead wires.
Continue reading “Trucks Could Soon Run On Electrified Highways”
Did you know that pornography is completely illegal in China? Probably not surprising news, though, right? The country has already put measures in place to scour the Internet in search of explicit content, mostly using AI. But the government also employs human porn appraisers, called jian huang shi, whose job it is to judge images and videos to decide whether they contain explicit content. Also probably not surprising is that humans are better than AI at knowing porn when they see it — or at least, they are faster at identifying it. Weirdness and morality and everything else aside, these jian huang shi are regular people, and frankly, they get exhausted looking at this stuff all day.
So what is the answer to burnout in this particular field? Researchers at Beijing Jiaotong University have come up with a way to bring the technological and human aspects of their existing efforts together. They’ve created a helmet that can detect particular spikes in brainwaves that occur from exposure to explicit imagery. Basically, it flashes a combination of naughty and ho-hum images in rapid succession until a spike is detected, then it flags the offending image.
Continue reading “Chinese Anti-Porn Helmet Raises Eyebrows, Questions”
Most houses built in the US today are platform construction: skinny two-by-fours are stacked and layered to create walls with studs. Each floor is framed on top of the other. It is fast, relatively cheap, and easy to learn how to do. However, it is not without drawbacks. Some estimates put the amount of waste generated per square foot (0.09 m2) at around 3.9 lbs (1.8 kg).
Timber framing is an older style where giant beams are used to create the structure of the house. Each timber is hand-carved and shaped, requiring skill and precision. Some cabins are still built this way because it is easy to source the timber locally and cutting into big logs is less work than cutting into lots of small logs. It’s relatively ecologically friendly, but slow and skilled-labor intensive.
We live in a world where there is a vast need for cheaper, faster, more eco-friendly housing, but finding a solution that can tick all the boxes is fiendishly difficult. Can 3D-printed housing accomplish all three of those goals? We’re not there yet, but we’re working on it.
Continue reading “You Wouldn’t 3D Print A House, Would You?”
In their monthly announcement, among all the cool things Pine64, they talked about the open firmware for PinePhone’s LTE modem. The firmware isn’t fully open – a few parts remain closed. And Pine emphasizes that they neither pre-install nor officially endorse this firmware, and PinePhones will keep shipping with the vendor-supplied modem firmware image instead.
That said, the new firmware is way more featureful – it has less bugs, more features, decreased power consumption, and its proprietary parts are few and far between. I’d like to note that, with a special build of this firmware, the PinePhone’s modem can run Doom – because, well, of course.
And with all that, it’s become way easier to install this firmware – there’s fwupd hooks now! You can think of fwupd as the equivalent of Windows Update for firmware, except not abusive, and aimed at Linux. A perfect fit for keeping your open-source devices as functional as they can be, in other words.
What’s the deal? If open firmware is that much cooler, why don’t more of our phones have open firmware options available? Continue reading “Open Firmware For PinePhone LTE Modem – What’s Up With That?”
Videoconferencing has been around in one form or another for quite a while, but it took the pandemic to thrust into prominence with just about everyone. In a way, it has been the delivery of something long-promised by phone companies, futurists, and science fiction writers: the picture phone. But very few people imagined how the picture phone would actually manifest itself. We thought it might be interesting to look at some of the historical predictions and attempts to bring this technology to the mass market.
The reality is, we don’t have true picture phones. We have computers with sufficient bandwidth to carry live video and audio. Your FaceTime call is going over the data network. Contrast that with, say, sending a fax which really is a document literally over the phone lines.
My first job out of grad school was with a biotech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a small outfit, and everyone had a “lab job” in addition to whatever science they were hired to do — a task to maintain the common areas of the lab. My job was to maintain the water purification systems that made sure everyone had an ample supply of pure, deionized water to work with. The job consisted of mainly changing the filter and ion-exchange cartridges of the final polishing units, which cleaned up the tap water enough for science.
When I changed the filter packs, I was always amazed and revolted by the layers of slime and sediment in them. A glimpse out the window at the banks of the river Charles — love that dirty water — was enough to explain what I was seeing, and it was a lesson in just how much other stuff is mixed in with the water you drink and cook with and bathe in.
While we humans can generally do pretty well with water that rates as only reasonably pure, our industrial processes are quite another thing. Everything from power plants to pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities needs water of much, much higher purity, but nothing requires purer water than the specialized, nanometer-scale operations of a semiconductor fab. But how does ordinary tap water get transformed into a chemical of such purity that contaminants are measured in parts per trillion? And how do fabs produce enough of this ultrapure water to meet their needs? With some big chemistry.
One of the news items that generated the most chatter among Hackaday editors this week was that ESA’s Mars Express mission is receiving a software update. And they’re updating the operating system to…Windows 98.
Microsoft’s late-90s consumer desktop operating system wouldn’t have been the first to come to mind as appropriate for a spacecraft, but ESA were quick to remind us that it was the development toolchain, not the craft itself, that depended upon it. It’s still quite a surprise to find Windows 98 being dusted off for such an unexpected purpose, and it’s led us to consider those now-almost-forgotten operating systems once more, and to question where else it might still be found. Continue reading “Windows 98 For Spaceships? Not Quite!”
