Screens Of Death: From Diagnostic Aids To A Sad Emoji

There comes a moment in the life of any operating system when an unforeseen event will tragically cut its uptime short. Whether it’s a sloppily written driver, a bug in the handling of an edge case or just dumb luck, suddenly there is nothing more that the OS’ kernel can do to salvage the situation. With its last few cycles it can still gather some diagnostic information, attempt to write this to a log or memory dump and then output a supportive message to the screen to let the user know that the kernel really did try its best.

This on-screen message is called many things, from a kernel panic message on Linux to a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on Windows since Windows 95, to a more contemplative message on AmigaOS and BeOS/Haiku. Over the decades these Screens of Death (SoD) have changed considerably, from the highly informative screens of Windows NT to the simplified BSOD of Windows 8 onwards with its prominent sad emoji that has drawn a modicum of ridicule.

Now it seems that the Windows BSOD is about to change again, and may not even be blue any more. So what’s got a user to think about these changes? What were we ever supposed to get out of these special screens?

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The Blackberry Keyboard: How An Open-Source Ecosystem Sprouts

What could happen when you open-source a hardware project?

No, seriously. I hold a fair few radical opinions – one is that projects should be open-source to the highest extent possible. I’ve seen this make miracles happen, make hackerdom stronger, and nourish our communities. I think we should be publishing all the projects, even if incomplete, as much as your opsec allows. I would make ritual sacrifices if they resulted in more KiCad projects getting published, and some days I even believe that gently bullying people into open-sourcing their projects can be justified. My ideal universe is one where companies are unable to restrict schematics from people getting their hardware, no human should ever hold an electronics black box, by force if necessary.

Why such a strong bias? I’ve seen this world change for the better with each open-source project, and worse with closed-source ones, it’s pretty simple for me. Trust me here – let me tell you a story of how a couple reverse-engineering efforts and a series of open-source PCBs have grown a tree of an ecosystem.

A Chain Of Blackberry Hackers

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High-Stakes Fox Hunting: The FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division In World War II

With few exceptions, amateur radio is a notably sedentary pursuit. Yes, some hams will set up in a national or state park for a “Parks on the Air” activation, and particularly energetic operators may climb a mountain for “Summits on the Air,” but most hams spend a lot of time firmly planted in a comfortable chair, spinning the dials in search of distant signals or familiar callsigns to add to their logbook.

There’s another exception to the band-surfing tendencies of hams: fox hunting. Generally undertaken at a field day event, fox hunts pit hams against each other in a search for a small hidden transmitter, using directional antennas and portable receivers to zero in on often faint signals. It’s all in good fun, but fox hunts serve a more serious purpose: they train hams in the finer points of radio direction finding, a skill that can be used to track down everything from manmade noise sources to unlicensed operators. Or, as was done in the 1940s, to ferret out foreign agents using shortwave radio to transmit intelligence overseas.

That was the primary mission of the Radio Intelligence Division, a rapidly assembled organization tasked with protecting the United States by monitoring the airwaves and searching for spies. The RID proved to be remarkably effective during the war years, in part because it drew heavily from the amateur radio community to populate its many field stations, but also because it brought an engineering mindset to the problem of finding needles in a radio haystack.

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Supercon 2024: How To Track Down Radio Transmissions

You turn the dial on your radio, and hear a powerful source of interference crackle in over the baseline noise. You’re interested as to where it might be coming from. You’re receiving it well, and the signal strength is strong, but is that because it’s close or just particularly powerful? What could it be? How would you even go about tracking it down?

When it comes to hunting down radio transmissions, Justin McAllister and Nick Foster have a great deal of experience in this regard. They came down to the 2024 Hackaday Superconference to show us how it’s done.

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My Winter Of ’99: The Year Of The Linux Desktop Is Always Next Year

Growing up as a kid in the 1990s was an almost magical time. We had the best game consoles, increasingly faster computers at a pace not seen before, the rise of the Internet and World Wide Web, as well the best fashion and styles possible between neon and pastel colors, translucent plastic and also this little thing called Windows 95 that’d take the world by storm.

Yet as great as Windows 95 and its successor Windows 98 were, you had to be one of the lucky folks who ended up with a stable Windows 9x installation. The prebuilt (Daewoo) Intel Celeron 400 rig with 64 MB SDRAM that I had splurged on with money earned from summer jobs was not one of those lucky systems, resulting in regular Windows reinstalls.

As a relatively nerdy individual, I was aware of this little community-built operating system called ‘Linux’, with the online forums and the Dutch PC magazine that I read convincing me that it would be a superior alternative to this unstable ‘M$’ Windows 98 SE mess that I was dealing with. Thus it was in the Year of the Linux Desktop (1999) that I went into a computer store and bought a boxed disc set of SuSE 6.3 with included manual.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Windows is installed on all my primary desktop systems, raising the question of what went wrong in ’99. Wasn’t Linux the future of desktop operating systems?

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The H.R. Giger Keyboard

I had to bust out Brain Salad Surgery to write this one, folks. It was that, or put on some Ministry or something. Just look at all the industrial-ness dripping from [heinn_dev]’s creation.

An incredibly industrial-looking split keyboard. Like, almost H.R. Geiger-esque.
Image by [heinn_dev] via reddit
Apparently [heinn_dev] wasn’t completely satisfied with his Chocofi case, and instead of requesting a full refund, just went ahead and made a prettier one. It took a lot of printing and even more sanding, but here we are. And it looks fantastic.

The only downside, if you can call it one, is that adjusting the tenting is a slow operatiJKon. But then again that’s one of those things that you usually set and forget.

Oh, and those keycaps are printed, too. As one commenter said, those homing nipples look painful, but I think it’s part of the charm. I just hope that hand grime doesn’t end up clogging the holes under the palm area. Clean your keyboards, people. Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The H.R. Giger Keyboard”

The Potential Big Boom In Every Dust Cloud

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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