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Open Firmware For PinePhone LTE Modem – What’s Up With That?

July 12, 2022 by 30 Comments

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?” →

Where Are Our Video Phones?

July 11, 2022 by 72 Comments

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.

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Big Chemistry: Ultrapure Water

July 7, 2022 by 53 Comments

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.

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Windows 98 For Spaceships? Not Quite!

July 6, 2022 by 78 Comments

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!” →

Lenses: From Fire Starters To Smart Phones And VR

June 28, 2022 by 21 Comments

In antiquity, we see examples of magnifying crystals formed into a biconvex shape as early as the 7th century BC. Whether the people of that period used them either for fire-starting purposes or vision is unclear. Still, it is famously said that Emperor Nero of Rome watched gladiator games through an emerald.

Needless to say, the views we get through modern lenses are a lot more realistic. So how did we get from simple magnifying systems to the complex lens systems we see today? We start with a quick journey through the history of the camera and the lens, and we’ll end up with the cutting edge in lens design for smartphone cameras and VR headsets.

Continue reading “Lenses: From Fire Starters To Smart Phones And VR” →

Rogue Waves Are Mysterious And Big

June 1, 2022 by 34 Comments

Stand by the shore and watch the waves roll in, and you’ll notice that most come in at roughly the same size. There’s a little variation, but the overwhelming majority don’t stand out from the crowd. On all but the stormiest of days, they have an almost soothing regularity about them.

Every so often though, out on the high seas, a rogue wave comes along. These abnormally large waves can strike with surprise, and are dangerous to even the largest of ships. Research is ongoing as to what creates these waves, and how they might be identified and tracked ahead of time.

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Making The Case For COBOL

May 31, 2022 by 76 Comments

Perhaps rather unexpectedly, on the 14th of March this year the GCC mailing list received an announcement regarding the release of the first ever COBOL front-end for the GCC compiler. For the uninitiated, COBOL saw its first release in 1959, making it with 63 years one of the oldest programming language that is still in regular use. The reason for its persistence is mostly due to its focus from the beginning as a transaction-oriented, domain specific language (DSL).

Its acronym stands for Common Business-Oriented Language, which clearly references the domain it targets. Even with the current COBOL 2014 standard, it is still essentially the same primarily transaction-oriented language, while adding support for structured, procedural and object-oriented programming styles. Deriving most of its core from Admiral Grace Hopper‘s FLOW-MATIC  language, it allows for efficiently describing business logic as one would encounter at financial institutions or businesses, in clear English.

Unlike the older GnuCOBOL project – which translates COBOL to C – the new GCC-COBOL front-end project does away with  that intermediate step, and directly compiles COBOL source code into binary code. All of which may raise the question of why an entire man-year was invested in this effort for a language which has been declared ‘dead’ for  probably at least half its 63-year existence.

Does it make sense to learn or even use COBOL today? Do we need a new COBOL compiler?

Continue reading “Making The Case For COBOL” →