Looks like the Simpsons had it right again, now that an Australian radio station has been caught using an AI-generated DJ for their midday slot. Station CADA, a Sydney-based broadcaster that’s part of the Australian Radio Network, revealed that “Workdays with Thy” isn’t actually hosted by a person; rather, “Thy” is a generative AI text-to-speech system that has been on the air since November. An actual employee of the ARN finance department was used for Thy’s voice model and her headshot, which adds a bit to the creepy factor.
Classic demos from the demoscene are all about showing off one’s technical prowess, with a common side order of a slick banging soundtrack. That’s precisely what [BUS ERROR Collective] members [DJ_Level_3] and [Marv1994] delivered with their prize-winning Primer demo this week.
This demo is a grand example of so-called “oscilloscope music”—where two channels of audio are used to control an oscilloscope in X-Y mode. The sounds played determine the graphics on the screen, as we’ve explored previously.
The real magic is when you create very cool sounds that also draw very cool graphics on the oscilloscope. The Primer demo achieves this goal perfectly. Indeed, it’s intended as a “primer” on the very artform itself, starting out with some simple waveforms and quickly spiraling into a graphical wonderland of spinning shapes and morphing patterns, all to a sweet electronic soundtrack. It was created with a range of tools, including Osci-Render and apparently Ableton 11, and the recording performed on a gorgeous BK Precision Model 2120 oscilloscope in a nice shade of green.
If you think this demo is fully sick, you’re not alone. It took out first place in the Wild category at the Revision 2025 demo party, as well as the Crowd Favorite award. High praise indeed.
We appear to be edging ever closer to a solid statement of “We are not alone” in the universe with this week’s announcement of the detection of biosignatures in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b. The planet, which is 124 light-years away, has been the focus of much attention since it was discovered in 2015 using the Kepler space telescope because it lies in the habitable zone around its red-dwarf star. Initial observations with Hubble indicated the presence of water vapor, and follow-up investigations using the James Webb Space Telescope detected all sorts of goodies in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. But more recently, JWST saw signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), organic molecules which, on Earth, are strongly associated with biological processes in marine bacteria and phytoplankton.
Forth is popular on small computers because it is simple to implement, yet quite powerful. But what happens when you really need to shrink it? Well, if your target is the 6502, there’s milliForth-6502.
This is a port of milliForth, which is a fork of sectorforth. The sectorforth project set the standard, implementing a Forth so small it could fit in a 512-byte boot sector. The milliForth project took sectorforth and made it even smaller, weighing in at only 336 bytes. However, both milliForth and sectorforth are for the x86 architecture. With milliForth-6502, [Alvaro G. S. Barcellos] wanted to see how small he could make a 6502 implementation.
The user interface of things we deal with often makes or breaks our enjoyment of using a device. [Janne] thinks so, he has an espresso machine he enjoys but the default controls were not what he was looking for and so in true hacker fashion he took what was and made it his own.
Whilst recently perusing the fine wares for sale at the Vintage Computer Festival East, [Action Retro] ended up adopting a 1995 ProStar laptop. Unlike most laptops of the era, however, this one didn’t just have the typical trackpad and clicky mouse buttons, but also a D-pad and four suspiciously game controller looking buttons. This makes it rather like the 2002 Sony VAIO PCG-U subnotebook, or the 2018 GPD Win 2, except that inexplicably the manufacturer has opted to put these (serial-connected) game controls on the laptop’s palm rest.
Sony VAIO PCG-U101. (Credit: Sony)
Though branded ProStar, this laptop was manufactured by Clevo, who to this day produces generic laptops that are rebranded by everyone & their dog. This particular laptop is your typical (120 MHz) Pentium-based unit, with two additional PCBs for the D-pad and buttons wired into the mainboard.
Unlike the sleek and elegant VAIO PCG-U and successors, this Clevo laptop is a veritable brick, as was typical for the era, which makes the ergonomics of the game controls truly questionable. Although the controls totally work, as demonstrated in the video, you won’t be holding the laptop, meaning that using the D-pad with your thumb is basically impossible unless you perch the laptop on a stand.
We’re not sure what the Clevo designers were thinking when they dreamed up this beauty, but it definitely makes this laptop stand out from the crowd. As would you, if you were using this as a portable gaming system back in the late 90s.
It’s been a while since we’ve dunked on an autonomous taxi foul-up, mainly because it seemed for a while there that most of the companies field testing driverless ride-sharing services had either ceased operation or curtailed them significantly. But that appears not to be the case after a Waymo robotaxi got stuck in a Chick-fil-A drive-through. The incident occurred at the chicken giant’s Santa Monica, California location at about 9:30 at night, when the autonomous Jaguar got stuck after dropping off a passenger in the parking lot. The car apparently tried to use the drive-through lane to execute a multi-point turn but ended up across the entrance, blocking other vehicles seeking their late-evening chicken fix. The drive-through-only restaurant ended up closing for a short time while Waymo figured out how to get the vehicle moving again.
