[Inkbox] briefly explains what BIOS is, then covers how UEFI replaces it. He talks about the genesis of UEFI from Intel in the late 90s. After Intel’s implementation of UEFI was made open source it got picked up by the TianoCore community who make tools such as the TianoCore EDK II.
[Inkbox] explains that the UEFI implementation provides boot services and runtime services. Boot services include things such as loading memory management facilities or running other UEFI applications, and runtime services include things like system clock access and system reset. In addition to these services there are many more UEFI protocols that are available.
If you’re a hacker you may well have a passing interest in math, and if you have an interest in math you might like to hear about the direction of mathematical research. In a talk on this topic [Kevin Buzzard], professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London, asks the question: Where is Mathematics Going?
It starts by explaining that in 2017 he had a mid-life crisis, of sorts, becoming disillusioned with the way mathematics research was being done, and he started looking to computer science for solutions.
He credits Euclid, as many do, with writing down some axioms and starting mathematics, over 2,000 years ago. From axioms came deductions, and deductions became mathematical facts, and math proceeded in this fashion. This continues to be the way mathematical research is done in mathematical departments around the world. The consequence of this is that mathematics is now incomprehensibly large. Similarly the mathematical proofs themselves are exceedingly large, he gives an example of one proof that is 10,000 pages long and still hasn’t been completely written down after having been announced more than 20 years ago.
The conclusion from this is that mathematics has become so complex that traditional methods of documenting it struggle to cope. He says that a tertiary education in mathematics aims to “get students to the 1940s”, whereas a tertiary education in computer science will expose students to the state of the art.
In the original Animal Crossing from 2001, players are able to interact with a huge cast of quirky characters, all with different interests and personalities. But after you’ve played the game for awhile, the scripted interactions can become a bit monotonous. Seeing an opportunity to improve the experience, [josh] decided to put a Large Language Model (LLM) in charge of these interactions. Now when the player chats with other characters in the game, the dialogue is a lot more engaging, relevant, and sometimes just plain funny.
How does one go about hooking a modern LLM into a 24-year-old game built for an entirely offline console? [josh]’s clever approach required a lot of poking about, and did a good job of leveraging some of the game’s built-in features for a seamless result.
[Manish’s] intention was to create a better-looking user interface solution for Python apps that was also accessible. He’d previously considered other Python GUI options to be unimpressive, requiring a lot of code and delivering undesirable results. His solution enables the use of just about any graphic you can think of as a UI object, creating all kinds of visually-appealing possibilities. He also was eager to make sure his solution would work with irregular-shaped buttons, sliders, and other controls—a limitation popular libraries like Tkinter never quite got around.
The system simply works by using layered image files to create interactive interfaces, with a minimum of code required to define the parameters and performance of the interface. You’re not strictly limited to using the GIMP image editor, either; some of the examples use MS Paint instead. Files are on Github for those eager to try the library for themselves.
The Etch A Sketch was never supposed to meet a Raspberry Pi, a camera, or a mathematical algorithm, but here we are. [Tekavou]’s Teka-Cam and TekaSketch are a two-part hack that transforms real photos into quite stunning, line-drawn Etch A Sketch art. Where turning the knobs only results in wobbly doodles, this machine plots out every curve and contour better than your fingertips ever could.
Essentially, this is a software hack mixed with hardware: an RPi Zero W 2, a camera module, Inkplate 6, and rotary encoders. Snap a picture, and the image is conveyed to a Mac Mini M4 Pro, where Python takes over. It’s stripped to black and white, and the software creates a skeleton of all black areas. It identifies corner bridges, and unleashes a modified Chinese Postman Algorithm to stitch everything into one continuous SVG path. That file then drives the encoders, producing a drawing that looks like a human with infinite patience and zero caffeine jitters. Originally, the RPi did all the work, but it was getting too slow so the Mac was brought in.
It’s graph theory turned to art, playful and serious at the same time, and it delivers quite unique pieces. [Tekavou] is planning on improving with video support. A bit of love for his efforts might accellerate his endeavours. Let us know in the comments below!
I think most of us who make or build things have a thing we are known for making. Where it’s football robots, radios, guitars, cameras, or inflatable textile sculptures, we all have the thing we do. For me that’s over the years been various things but has recently been camera hacking, however there’s another thing I do that’s not so obvious. For the last twenty years, I’ve been interested in computational language analysis. There’s so much that a large body of text can reveal without a single piece of AI being involved, and in pursuing that I’ve created for myself a succession of corpus analysis engines. This month I’ve finally been allowed to try one of them with a corpus of Hackaday articles, and while it’s been a significant amount of work getting everything shipshape, I can now analyse our world over the last couple of decades.
The Burning Question You All Want Answered
Battle of the Boards, over the decades.
A corpus engine is not clever in its own right, instead it will simply give you straightforward statistics in return for the queries you give it. But the thing that keeps me coming back for more is that those answers can sometimes surprise you. In short, it’s a machine for telling you things you didn’t know. To start off, it’s time to settle a Hackaday trope of many years’ standing. Do we write too much about Arduino projects? Into the engine goes “arduino”, and for comparison also “raspberry”, for the Raspberry Pi.
What comes out is a potted history of experimenter’s development boards, with the graph showing the launch date and subsequent popularity of each. We’re guessing that the Hackaday Arduino trope has its origins in 2011 when the Italian board peaked, while we see a succession of peaks following the launch of the Pi in 2012. I think we are seeing renewals of interest after the launch of the Pi 3 and Pi 4, respectively. Perhaps the most interesting part of the graph comes on the right as we see both boards tail off after 2020, and if I had to hazard a guess as to why I would cite the rise of the many cheap dev boards from China.
The creator of infinite vertical scrolling in social media, [Aza Raskin], infamously regrets his creation that has helped to waste a tremendous amount of human attention and time on the Internet. But that’s vertical scrolling. [bujna94] has created infinityTerminal, a program with infinite scrolling, but in the horizontal direction instead. This tool has had the opposite effect to go along with its opposite orientation: increased productivity and improved workflow.
The impetus for infinityTerminal is [bujna94]’s need for many simultaneous SSH sessions, and the fact that no other terminal program can support an indefinite number of visible terminal windows. This application starts with four terminal windows in a 2×2 grid, and allows the user to open more terminals, two at a time, to form a 2xN grid. As many terminals as needed will open in pairs in the horizontal direction with smooth, trackpad-compatible scrolling and automatic color-coded backgrounds for servers accessed by SSH.
For anyone with a similar dislike of tabs like [bujna94], this might be worth trying out. It’s built with Electron, xterm.js, and node-pty.
There are a few more details about the project on a Reddit post. [Bujna94] also made it completely open source and freely available with the files on a GitHub page, and welcomes anyone to try out his creation that wants to. For more terminal magic, we’d also recommend checking out Notcurses, a terminal application capable enough to output SNES-level detail natively.
