Tech In Plain Sight: Primitive Engineering Materials

December 22, 2021 by Al Williams 33 Comments

It isn’t an uncommon science fiction trope for our hero to be in a situation where there is no technology. Maybe she’s back in the past or on a faraway planet. The Professor from Gilligan’s Island comes to mind, too. I’d bet the average Hacakday reader could do pretty well in that kind of situation, but there’s one thing that’s often overlooked: materials. Sure, you can build a radio. But can you make wire? Or metal plates for a capacitor? Or a speaker? We tend to overlook how many abstractions we use when we build. Even turning trees into lumber isn’t a totally obvious process.

People are by their very nature always looking for ways to use the things around them. Even 300,000 years ago, people would find rocks and use them as tools. It wasn’t long before they found that some rocks could shape other rocks to form useful shapes like axes. But the age of engineered materials is much younger. Whether clay, metal, glass, or more obviously plastics, these materials are significantly more useful than rocks tied to sticks, but making them in the first place is an engineering story all on its own.

Continue reading “Tech In Plain Sight: Primitive Engineering Materials” →

The Dreamcast Legacy

December 22, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 48 Comments

The Dreamcast is a bit of an odd beast. Coming on the heels of the unpopular Sega Saturn, the Dreamcast was meant to be a simple console built with off-the-shelf parts and released in late 1998. The Nintendo 64 was already tough competition (1996). Ultimately, the Dreamcast fell out of the public eye in the early 2000s as the Playstation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube were all released with incredible fanfare just a few years later. In some sense, Sega’s last console is a footnote in gaming history.

But despite not achieving the success that Sega hoped for, the Dreamcast has formed a small cult following, because as we know, nothing builds a cult-like following like an untimely demise. Since its release, it has gained a reputation for being ahead of its time. It was the first console to include a modem for network play and an easy storage solution for transferring game data between consoles via the VMUs that docked in the controllers. It had innovative and classic games such as Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Phantasy Star Online, and Shenmue. Microsoft even released a version of Windows CE with DirectX allowing developers to port PC games to the console quickly.

We see our fair share of console hacks here on Hackaday, but what is the ultimate legacy of the Dreamcast? How did it come to be? What happened to it, and why did so much of Sega’s hopes ride on it? Continue reading “The Dreamcast Legacy” →

Plastics: Photopolymers For 3D Printing And Beyond

December 21, 2021 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

Chances are good that if you’ve done any 3D printing, it was of the standard fused deposition modeling variety. FDM is pretty simple stuff — get a bit of plastic filament hot enough, squeeze the molten goo out of a fine nozzle, control the position of the nozzle more or less precisely in three dimensions, and repeat for hours on end until your print is done. To the outsider it looks like magic, but to us it’s just another Saturday afternoon.

Resin printing is another thing altogether, and a lot closer to magic for most of us. The current crop of stereolithography printers just have a high-resolution LCD display between a UV light source and a build tank with a transparent bottom. Prints are built up layer by layer by flashing UV light patterns into the tank as a build plate slowly lifts it up from the resin, like some creature emerging from the primordial goo.

Of course it’s all just science, but if there is any magic in SLA printing, surely it’s in the resins used for it. Their nondescript brown plastic bottles and information-poor labels give little clue as to their ingredients, although their hydrocarbon reek and viscous, sticky texture are pretty good clues. Let’s take a look inside the resin bottle and find out what it is that makes the magic of SLA happen.

Continue reading “Plastics: Photopolymers For 3D Printing And Beyond” →

Is Cloud Seeding Good, Bad, Or Ugly?

December 20, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 34 Comments

The Chinese Communist Party celebrated its centenary on the 1st of July, 2021. For such a celebration, clear skies and clean air would be ideal. For the capable nation-state, however, one needn’t hope against the whims of the weather. One can simply control it instead!

A recent paper released by Tsinghua University indicated that China had used cloud seeding in order to help create nicer conditions for its 100-year celebration. Weather modification techniques have been the source of some controversy, so let’s explore how they work and precisely what it was that China pulled off.

Continue reading “Is Cloud Seeding Good, Bad, Or Ugly?” →

PinePhone Malware Surprises Users, Raises Questions

December 16, 2021 by Arya Voronova 84 Comments

On December 5th, someone by the IRC nickname of [ubuntu] joined the Pine64 Discord’s #pinephone channel through an IRC bridge. In the spirit of December gift-giving traditions, they have presented their fellow PinePhone users with an offering – a “Snake” game. What [ubuntu] supposedly designed had the potential to become a stock, out-of-the-box-installed application with a small but dedicated community of fans, modders and speedrunners.

Unfortunately, that would not be the alternate universe we live in, and all was not well with the package being shared along with a cheerful “hei gaiz I make snake gaem here is link www2-pinephnoe-games-com-tz replace dash with dot kthxbai” announcement. Shockingly, it was a trojan! Beneath layers of Base64 and Bashfuscator we’d encounter shell code that could be in the “example usage” section of a modern-day thesaurus entry for the word “yeet“.

Continue reading “PinePhone Malware Surprises Users, Raises Questions” →

The Real Science (Not Armchair Science) Of Consciousness

December 15, 2021 by Steven Dufresne 43 Comments

Among brain researchers there’s a truism that says the reason people underestimate how much unconscious processing goes on in your brain is because you’re not conscious of it. And while there is a lot of unconscious processing, the truism also points out a duality: your brain does both processing that leads to consciousness and processing that does not. As you’ll see below, this duality has opened up a scientific approach to studying consciousness.

Are Subjective Results Scientific?

Researcher checking fMRI images. — Checking fMRI images.

In science we’re used to empirical test results, measurements made in a way that are verifiable, a reading from a calibrated meter where that reading can be made again and again by different people. But what if all you have to go on is what a person says they are experiencing, a subjective observation? That doesn’t sound very scientific.

That lack of non-subjective evidence is a big part of what stalled scientific research into consciousness for many years. But consciousness is unique. While we have measuring tools for observing brain activity, how do you know whether that activity is contributing to a conscious experience or is unconscious? The only way is to ask the person whose brain you’re measuring. Are they conscious of an image being presented to them? If not, then it’s being processed unconsciously. You have to ask them, and their response is, naturally, subjective.

Skepticism about subjective results along with a lack of tools, held back scientific research into consciousness for many years. It was taboo to even use the C-word until the 1980s when researchers decided that subjective results were okay. Since then, here’s been a great deal of scientific research into consciousness and this then is a sampling of that research. And as you’ll see, it’s even saved a life or two.

Continue reading “The Real Science (Not Armchair Science) Of Consciousness” →

Orbital Safety: The Challenges Of Surviving Space Junk

December 14, 2021 by Maya Posch 22 Comments

Hanging around in earth orbit is like walking into the middle of a Wild West gunfight — bullets are flying around everywhere, and even though none are purposefully aimed at you, one might have your name on it. Many of these bullets are artificial satellites that are actively controlled and monitored, but we also find dead satellites, remnants of satellites, discarded rocket stages, tools lost during spacewalks, and even flecks of paint and rust, much of it zipping around at multiple kilometers per second without any guidance.

While removing this space debris directly would be ideal, the reality is that any spacecraft and any spacesuit that has to spend time in orbit needs to be capable of sustaining at least some hits by space debris impacting it.

Orbital Mechanics

That it’s easy to create new debris should come as no surprise to anyone. What may take a bit more imagination is just how long it can take for this debris to make its way towards earth’s atmosphere, where it will uneventfully burn up. Everything in orbit is falling toward the earth, but its tangential velocity keeps it from hitting — like a marble spinning around the hole in a funnel. Drag from the planet’s atmosphere is the friction that eventually slows the object down, and where it orbits in the planet’s atmosphere determines how long this descent will take. Continue reading “Orbital Safety: The Challenges Of Surviving Space Junk” →