We lost a true legend this week with the passing of NASA astronaut Jim Lovell at the ripe old age of 97. Lovell commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission back in 1970, and along with crewmates Jack Swigert and Fred Haise — along with just about every person working at or for NASA — he managed to guide the mortally wounded Odyssey command module safely back home. While he’s rightly remembered for the heroics on 13, it was far from his first space rodeo. Lovell already had two Gemini missions under his belt before Apollo came along, including the grueling Gemini 7, where he and Frank Borman undertook the first long-duration space mission, proving that two men stuffed into a Volkswagen-sized cockpit could avoid killing each other for at least two weeks.
Many of us have boiled an egg at some point or another in our lives. The conventional technique is relatively straightforward—get the water boiling, drop the egg in, and leave it for a certain period of time based on the desired consistency. If you want the yolk soft, only leave it in for a few minutes, and if you want it hard, go longer.
Ultimately, though, this is a relatively crude system for controlling the consistency of the final product. If you instead study the makeup of the egg, and understand how it works, you can elicit far greater control over the texture and behavior of your egg with great culinary benefits.
You don’t have to be a Snow Crash or Tron fan to be familiar with the 3D craze that characterized the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular. From phrases like ‘surfing the information highway’ to sectioning websites as if to represent 3D real-life equivalents or sorting them by virtual streets like Geocities did, there has always been a strong push to make the Internet a more three-dimensional experience.
This is perhaps not so strange considering that we humans are ourselves 3D beings used to interacting in a 3D world. Surely we could make this fancy new ‘Internet’ technology do something more futuristic than connect us to text-based BBSes and serve HTML pages with heavily dithered images?
Enter VRML, the Virtual Reality Modelling Language, whose 3D worlds would surely herald the arrival of a new Internet era. Though neither VRML nor its successor X3D became a hit, they did leave their marks and are arguably the reason why we have technologies like WebGL today.
When I was a student, I was a diehard Commodore Amiga user, having upgraded to an A500+ from my Sinclair Spectrum. The Amiga could do it all, it became my programming environment for electronic engineering course work, my audio workstation for student radio, my gaming hub, and much more.
One thing that was part of my course work it couldn’t do very well, which was be exactly like the PCs in my university’s lab. I feel old when I reflect that it’s 35 years ago, and remember sitting down in front of a Tulip PC-XT clone to compile my C code written on the Amiga. Eventually I cobbled together a 286 from cast-off parts, and entered the PC age. Alongside the Amiga it felt like a retrograde step, but mastering DOS 3.3 was arguably more useful to my career than AmigaDOS.
It’s DOS, But It’s Not MS-DOS
Where do I want to go today?
I don’t think I’ve used a pure DOS machine as anything but an occasional retrocomputing curio since some time in the late 1990s, because the Microsoft world long ago headed off into Windows country while I’ve been a Linux user for a very long time. But DOS hasn’t gone away even if Microsoft left it behind, because the FreeDOS project have created an entirely open-source replacement. It’s not MS-DOS, but it’s DOS. It does everything the way your old machine did, but in a lot of cases better and faster. Can I use it as one of my Daily Drivers here in the 2020s? There is only one way to find out.
With few exceptions, an important part of using an OS for this series is to run it on real hardware rather than an emulator. To that end I fished out my lowest-spec PC, a 2010 HP Mini 10 netbook that I hold onto for sentimental reasons. With a 1.6 GHz single core 32 bit Atom processor and a couple of gigabytes of memory it’s a very slow machine for modern desktop Linux, but given that FreeDOS can run on even the earliest PCs it’s a DOS powerhouse. To make it even more ridiculously overspecified I put a 2.5″ SSD in it, and downloaded the FreeDOS USB installer image. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: FreeDOS 1.4”→
Australia is known for great beaches, top-tier coffee, and a laidback approach to life that really doesn’t square with all the rules and regulations that exist Down Under. What it isn’t known for is being a spacefaring nation.
As it stands, a startup called Gilmour Space has been making great efforts to give Australia the orbital launch capability it’s never had. After numerous hurdles and delays, the company finally got their rocket off the launch pad. Unfortunately, it just didn’t get much farther than that.
As is tradition, we’ve reserved 100 tickets priced at $148 (plus fees) for what we like to call the True-Believers. Those are the folks that are willing to sign up even without knowing who will be speaking or what this year’s badge looks like. Once those are sold out, the regular admission tickets will cost $296 (plus fees). We might be slightly biased, but even at full price, we like to think Supercon is a screaming deal.
Those who join us in Pasadena, California from October 31st through November 2nd can look forward to a weekend of talks, workshops, demos, and badge hacking. But what’s more, you’ll experience the unique sense of camaraderie that’s produced when you pack hundreds of hardware hackers into an alleyway and ply them with as much caffeine as they can handle. Some treat it like a normal hacker con, others as a social experiment, but nobody thinks of it as anything less than a fantastic time.
We’re still working closely with our friends at Supplyframe, DigiKey, and Framework to put together a full itinerary for Supercon 2025, so stay tuned over the coming weeks as things are finalized. But in the meantime, we’ve got a couple new additions this year that we’re pretty excited about.
Lightning is a powerful force, one seemingly capable of great destruction in the right circumstances. It announces itself with a searing flash, followed by a deep rumble heard for miles around.
Intuitively, it might seem like a lightning strike would be disastrous for something like a plane flying at altitude. And yet, while damage is possible, more often than not—a plane will get through a lightning storm unscathed. Let’s explore the physics at play.
