The Potential Big Boom In Every Dust Cloud

June 2, 2025 by Maya Posch 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.

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

May 29, 2025 by Maya Posch 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.

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Remotely Interesting: Stream Gages

May 28, 2025 by Dan Maloney 32 Comments

Near my childhood home was a small river. It wasn’t much more than a creek at the best of times, and in dry summers it would sometimes almost dry up completely. But snowmelt revived it each Spring, and the remains of tropical storms in late Summer and early Fall often transformed it into a raging torrent if only briefly before the flood waters receded and the river returned to its lazy ways.

Other than to those of us who used it as a playground, the river seemed of little consequence. But it did matter enough that a mile or so downstream was some sort of instrumentation, obviously meant to monitor the river. It was — and still is — visible from the road, a tall corrugated pipe standing next to the river, topped with a box bearing the logo of the US Geological Survey. On occasion, someone would visit and open the box to do mysterious things, which suggested the river was interesting beyond our fishing and adventuring needs.

Although I learned quite early that this device was a streamgage, and that it was part of a large network of monitoring instruments the USGS used to monitor the nation’s waterways, it wasn’t until quite recently — OK, this week — that I learned how streamgages work, or how extensive the network is. A lot of effort goes into installing and maintaining this far-flung network, and it’s worth looking at how these instruments work and their impact on everyday life.

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Hands-On: EufyMake E1 UV Printer

May 27, 2025 by Tom Nardi 48 Comments

The modern hacker and maker has a truly incredible arsenal of tools at their disposal. High-tech tools like 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC routers have all become commonplace, and combined with old standbys like the drill press and mini lathe, it sometimes seems like we’ve finally peaked in terms of what the individual is realistically capable of producing in their own home. But occasionally a new tool comes along, and it makes us realize that there are still avenues unexplored for the home gamer.

After spending the last few weeks playing with it, I can confidently say the eufyMake E1 UV printer is one of those tools. The elevator pitch is simple: with a UV printer, you can print anything on anything. As you can imagine, the reality is somewhat more complex, but the fact that you can toss a three dimensional object in the chamber and spray it with a high-resolution color image with a few button presses holds incredible creative potential. Enough that the Kickstarter for the $1,700 printer has already raised a mind-boggling $27 million at the time of this writing, with more than a month yet to go before crossing the finish line.

If you’re on the fence about backing the campaign, or just have doubts about whether or not the machine can do what eufyMake claims, I’ll put those concerns to rest right now — it’s the real deal. Even after using the machine for as long as I have, each time a print job ends, I find myself momentary taken aback by just how good the end result is. The technology inside this machine that not only makes these results possible, but makes them so easily obtainable, is truly revolutionary.

That being said, it’s not a perfect machine by any stretch of the imagination. While I never ran into an outright failure while using the eufyMake E1, there’s a fairly long list of issues which I’d like to see addressed. Some of them are simple tweaks which may well get sorted out before the product starts shipping this summer, while others are fundamental to the way the machine operates and could represent an opportunity for competitors.

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A Brief History Of Fuel Cells

May 22, 2025 by Al Williams 13 Comments

If we asked you to think of a device that converts a chemical reaction into electricity, you’d probably say we were thinking of a battery. That’s true, but there is another device that does this that is both very similar and very different from a battery: the fuel cell.

In a very simple way, you can think of a fuel cell as a battery that consumes the chemicals it uses and allows you to replace those chemicals so that, as long as you have fuel, you can have electricity. However, the truth is a little more complicated than that. Batteries are energy storage devices. They run out when the energy stored in the chemicals runs out. In fact, many batteries can take electricity and reverse the chemical reaction, in effect recharging them. Fuel cells react chemicals to produce electricity. No fuel, no electricity.

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Big Chemistry: Fuel Ethanol

May 21, 2025 by Dan Maloney 73 Comments

If legend is to be believed, three disparate social forces in early 20th-century America – the temperance movement, the rise of car culture, and the Scots-Irish culture of the South – collided with unexpected results. The temperance movement managed to get Prohibition written into the Constitution, which rankled the rebellious spirit of the descendants of the Scots-Irish who settled the South. In response, some of them took to the backwoods with stills and sacks of corn, creating moonshine by the barrel for personal use and profit. And to avoid the consequences of this, they used their mechanical ingenuity to modify their Fords, Chevrolets, and Dodges to provide the speed needed to outrun the law.

Though that story may be somewhat apocryphal, at least one of those threads is still woven into the American story. The moonshiner’s hotrod morphed into NASCAR, one of the nation’s most-watched spectator sports, and informed much of the car culture of the 20th century in general. Unfortunately, that led in part to our current fossil fuel predicament and its attendant environmental consequences, which are now being addressed by replacing at least some of the gasoline we burn with the same “white lightning” those old moonshiners made. The cost-benefit analysis of ethanol as a fuel is open to debate, as is the wisdom of using food for motor fuel, but one thing’s for sure: turning corn into ethanol in industrially useful quantities isn’t easy, and it requires some Big Chemistry to get it done.
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The World Wide Web And The Death Of Graceful Degradation

May 20, 2025 by Maya Posch 72 Comments

In the early days of the World Wide Web – with the Year 2000 and the threat of a global collapse of society were still years away – the crafting of a website on the WWW was both special and increasingly more common. Courtesy of free hosting services popping up left and right in a landscape still mercifully devoid of today’s ‘social media’, the WWW’s democratizing influence allowed anyone to try their hands at web design. With varying results, as those of us who ventured into the Geocities wilds can attest to.

Back then we naturally had web standards, courtesy of the W3C, though Microsoft, Netscape, etc. tried to upstage each other with varying implementation levels (e.g. no iframes in Netscape 4.7) and various proprietary HTML and CSS tags. Most people were on dial-up or equivalently anemic internet connections, so designing a website could be a painful lesson in optimization and targeting the lowest common denominator.

This was also the era of graceful degradation, where us web designers had it hammered into our skulls that using and navigating a website should be possible even in a text-only browser like Lynx, w3m or antique browsers like IE 3.x. Fast-forward a few decades and today the inverse is true, where it is your responsibility as a website visitor to have the latest browser and fastest internet connection, or you may even be denied access.

What exactly happened to flip everything upside-down, and is this truly the WWW that we want?

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