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Chinese Anti-Porn Helmet Raises Eyebrows, Questions

July 14, 2022 by 72 Comments

Did you know that pornography is completely illegal in China? Probably not surprising news, though, right? The country has already put measures in place to scour the Internet in search of explicit content, mostly using AI. But the government also employs human porn appraisers, called jian huang shi, whose job it is to judge images and videos to decide whether they contain explicit content. Also probably not surprising is that humans are better than AI at knowing porn when they see it — or at least, they are faster at identifying it. Weirdness and morality and everything else aside, these jian huang shi are regular people, and frankly, they get exhausted looking at this stuff all day.

So what is the answer to burnout in this particular field? Researchers at Beijing Jiaotong University have come up with a way to bring the technological and human aspects of their existing efforts together. They’ve created a helmet that can detect particular spikes in brainwaves that occur from exposure to explicit imagery. Basically, it flashes a combination of naughty and ho-hum images in rapid succession until a spike is detected, then it flags the offending image.

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Overwhelmed By Odd Inputs: The Contest Winners And More

July 13, 2022 by 1 Comment

The Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest wrapped up last week, and our judges have been hard at work sifting through their favorite projects. And this was no easy task – we had 75 entries and so many of them were cool in their own right that all we can say is go check them all out. Really.

But we had to pick winners, not the least because Digi-Key put up three $150 gift certificates. So without further ado, here are the top three projects and as many honorable mentions as you have fingers and toes – if you don’t count your thumbs.

The Prize Winners

Keybon should be a mainstream commercial product. It’s a macro keypad with an OLED screen per key. It talks to an application on your desktop that detects the program that you currently have focused, and adapts the keypress action and the OLED labels to match. It’s a super-slick 3D-printed design to boot. It’s the dream of the Optimus Maximus, but made both DIY and significantly more reasonable as a macro pad. It’s the coolest thing to have on your desk, and it’s a big winner!

On the ridiculous side of keyboards, meet the Cree-board. [Matt] says he got the idea of using beefy COB LEDs as keycaps from the bad pun in the name, but we love the effect when you press down on the otherwise blinding light – they’re so bright that they use your entire meaty finger as a diffuser. Plus, it really does look like a keypad of sunny-side up eggs. It’s wacky, unique, and what’s not to love about that in a macropad?

Finally, [Josh EJ] turned an exercise bike into a wireless gamepad, obliterating the choice between getting fit and getting high scores by enabling both at the same time. An ESP32-turned-Bluetooth-gamepad is the brains, and he documents in detail how he hooked up a homebrew cadence sensor, used the heart-rate pads as buttons, and even added some extra controls on top. Watching clips of him pedaling his heart out in order to push the virtual pedal to the metal in GRID Autosport, we only wish he were screaming “vroooom”. Continue reading “Overwhelmed By Odd Inputs: The Contest Winners And More” →

You Wouldn’t 3D Print A House, Would You?

July 13, 2022 by 66 Comments

Most houses built in the US today are platform construction: skinny two-by-fours are stacked and layered to create walls with studs. Each floor is framed on top of the other. It is fast, relatively cheap, and easy to learn how to do. However, it is not without drawbacks. Some estimates put the amount of waste generated per square foot (0.09 m2) at around 3.9 lbs (1.8 kg).

Timber framing is an older style where giant beams are used to create the structure of the house. Each timber is hand-carved and shaped, requiring skill and precision. Some cabins are still built this way because it is easy to source the timber locally and cutting into big logs is less work than cutting into lots of small logs. It’s relatively ecologically friendly, but slow and skilled-labor intensive.

We live in a world where there is a vast need for cheaper, faster, more eco-friendly housing, but finding a solution that can tick all the boxes is fiendishly difficult. Can 3D-printed housing accomplish all three of those goals? We’re not there yet, but we’re working on it.

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Airbus A380 Completes Flight Powered By Cooking Oil

July 12, 2022 by 79 Comments

Fossil fuels are making news for all the wrong reasons of late. Whether it’s their contribution to global climate change or the fact that the price and supply hinges on violent geopolitics, there are more reasons than ever to shift to cleaner energy sources.

In the world of aviation, that means finding a cleaner source of fuel. A test earlier this year took place in pursuit of that very goal, where an Airbus A380 airliner was flown solely on fuel derived from cooking oil.

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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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The Digital Ham Hack Chat

July 11, 2022 by 2 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, July 13 at noon Pacific for The Digital Ham Hack Chat with Rosy Schechter and John Hays!

For most of its existence, amateur radio has been the quintessence of the analog arts. From the very earliest days of radio, hobbyists have been piecing together circuits to ply the radio spectrum, using whatever bits of RF wizardry they managed to pick up — or invent — along the way. From the architecture of the radios to the nature of the conversations they had over the airwaves, ham radio was very much an analog experience.

But if hams are anything, they’re resourceful, and they’ve got a long history of leveraging whatever the current state of the art happens to be. And so when electrical engineering began to dive into the digital world, so too did the hams. Radioteletype, facsimile, and other text-and-data modes lead to things like packet radio, which in turn gave us powerful tools like APRS, FT8, and PACTOR, upon which the current rich infrastructure of location reporting, weak signal digital contacts and beacons, and email service independent of an Internet connection have been built. There’s even a complete TCP/IP network using amateur radio as the physical layer, which even predates the widespread public Internet by many years.

Amateur radio always has been at the forefront of digital communications, but it takes work to keep hams in their leadership position in the field. To help with that, Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) was established. ARDC is a non-profit dedicated to supporting amateur radio and digital communication science and technology, chiefly through their programs of grants that are available to fund the development of technically innovative open and non-profit projects in amateur radio.

join-hack-chatFor this Hack Chat, ARDC Executive Director Rosy Schechter (KJ7RYV) and Staff Lead John Hays (K7VE) will be joining us to discuss the world of digital communications on the ham bands. Here’s your chance to share your experiences with digital modes, find out about what’s new in digital comms, and find out how to participate in the ARDC grant program and possibly fund the next big thing for the digital ham.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, July 13 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

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