Cracking Open The Prince Floppy After The Purple Reign

November 23, 2021 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

Readers of a certain vintage will no doubt remember the time when Prince eschewed his royal position and became an unpronounceable symbol. People had no choice but to refer to him as TAFKAP, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, and members of the music press were sent a 3.5″ floppy disk with a font file containing a single character — that gender-transcending shape that would soon become another one of Prince’s guitars. But it’s 2021, and now you can get it from the Internet Archive. Fun fact: the file wasn’t ever locked down. In fact, the symbol was available on Prince’s Compuserve and fan club CD-ROM.

While some people trawl auction sites for overalls and weird keyboards, others look for ridiculous items from the zeitgeist, like a copy of this floppy. Take [Anil Dash] for instance. [Anil] finally pulled the trigger after 15 years of debating this particular purchase. [Anil]’s interest was reignited after reading this analysis of whether the symbol could ever be put into Unicode. (Between being trademarked, a logo, and a personal character, it’s ineligible for inclusion.)

Earlier this week, [Anil] teamed up with Adafruit to extract the data from the floppy. The Twitter thread that ensued led readers to another old source of the font — the 1994 game Prince Interactive. We wonder if they broke out the oscilloscope, though it doesn’t look like it.

Thanks for the tip, [pt and limor]!

Hacking When It Counts: Surgery Fit To Save A Future King

September 20, 2021 by Dan Maloney 41 Comments

When we picture the Medieval world, it conjures up images of darkness, privations, and sickness the likes of which are hard to imagine from our sanitized point of view. The 1400s, and indeed the entirety of history prior to the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, was a time when the merest scratch acquired in the business of everyday life could lead to an infection ending in a slow, painful death. Add in the challenges of war, where violent men wielding sharp things on a filthy field of combat, and it’s a wonder people survived at all.

But then as now, some people are luckier than others, and surviving what even today would likely be a fatal injury was not unknown, as one sixteen-year-old boy in 1403 would discover. It didn’t hurt that he was the son of the king of England, and when he earned an arrow in his face in combat, every effort would be made to save the prince and heir to the throne. It also helped that he had the good fortune to have a surgeon with the imagination to solve the problem, and the skill to build a tool to help.

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The Raspberry Pi Wearable Revolution

April 1, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 44 Comments

With the human URL [will.i.am] serving as Chief Creative Director of 3D Systems, and [Martha Stewart] selling her own line of 3D printer filament through MakerBot, more and more celebrities are piling onto the hacker, maker, and DIY revolution. Now, the partnership we’ve all been waiting for: the Raspberry Pi Foundation and [The Artist Formerly Known As ] are teaming up to produce a line of Pi-based wearable electronics. The first product from this new, fashionable line of electronics is beyond anything you would expect. It’s called the Raspberry Beret, and it’s shaping up to be a Revolution in wearables.

The wearable Raspberry Beret is exactly what you would expect: a habadasher’s masterpiece that pairs equally well with figure skating costumes and skin-tight cloud print suits. Inside, though, is a new piece of hardware based on the Raspberry Pi compute module. This module includes a Bluetooth module that will sync with any Windows phone. The Raspberry Beret also includes enough sensors that will blow away everything from a Fitbit to the new Apple Watch. The Raspberet will keep track of your heart rate, activity, and exercise routine.

The Raspberry Beret is just the beginning; the Pi Foundation and [The Artist Formerly Known As ] are also teaming up with OSH Park to produce a limited, special edition Raspberry Pi 2. This board will be clad in the beautiful OSH Park purple soldermask and sports 4GB of eMMC Flash. This Flash will not be usable; instead it will contain a remastered edition of Purple Rain that will play as a startup chime. There will be no option to skip the chime.

Pancakes.