High-tech movie guides on CD-ROM; clearly the future had arrived in 1994.
In the innocent days of the early 90s the future of personal computing still seemed to be wide open, with pundits making various statements regarding tis potential trajectories. To many, the internet and especially the World Wide Web didn’t seem to be of any major significance, as it didn’t have the reach or bandwidth for the Hot New Thingtm in the world of PCs: multimedia. Enter the CD-ROM, which since its introduction in 1985 had brought the tantalizing feature of seemingly near-infinite storage within reach, and became cheap enough for many in the early 90s. In a recent article by [Harry McCracken] he reflects on this era, and how before long it became clear that it was merely a bubble.

Of course, there was a lot of good in CD-ROMs, especially when considering having access to something like Encarta before Wikipedia and broadband internet was a thing. It also enabled software titles to be distributed without the restrictions of floppy disks. We fondly remember installing Windows 95 (without Internet Explorer) off 13 1.44 MB floppies, followed by a few buckets of Microsoft Office floppies. All pray to the computer gods for no sudden unreadable floppy.

Inevitably, there was a lot of shovelware on CD-ROMs, and after the usefulness of getting free AOL floppies (which you could rewrite), the read-only CD-ROMs you got in every magazine and spam mailing were a big disappointment. Although CD-ROMs and DVDs still serve a purpose today, it’s clear that along with the collapse of the Internet Bubble of the late 90s, early 2000s, optical media has found a much happier place. It’s still hard to beat the sheer value of using CD-R(W)s and DVD-/+R(W)s (and BD-Rs) for offline backups, even if for games and multimedia they do not appear to be relevant any more.

If you’re interested in another depiction of this period, it’s somewhere we’ve been before.

There is perhaps no more important time to have a business card than when you’re in college, especially near the end when you’re applying for internships and such. And it’s vital that you stand out from the crowd somehow. To that end, Electrical & Computer Engineer [Ryan Chan] designed a tidy card that plays tic-tac-toe.

Instead of X and O, the players are indicated by blue and red LEDs. Rather than having a button at every position, there is one big control button that gets pressed repeatedly until your LED is in the desired position, and then you press and hold to set it and switch control to the other player. In addition to two-player mode, the recipient of your card can also play alone against the ATMega.

The brains of this operation is an ATMega328P-AU with the Arduino UNO bootloader for ease of programming. Schematic and code are available if you want to make your own, but we suggest implementing some type of changes to make it your own. Speaking of, [Ryan] has several next steps in mind, including charlieplexing the LEDs, using either USB-C or a coin cell for power, upgrading the AI, and replacing the control button with a capacitive pad or two. Be sure to check it out in action in the two videos after the break.

youtube.com/embed/G4o2sbfmwy4?…

youtube.com/embed/5EbTwoRA7A0?…

Displays are crucial to modern life; they are literally everywhere. But modern flat-panel LCDs and cheap 7-segment LED displays are, well, a bit boring. When we hackers want to display the progress of time, we want something more interesting, hence the plethora of projects using Nixie tubes and various incantations of edge-lit segmented units. Here is [upir] with their take on the simple edge-lit acrylic 7-segment design, with a great video explanation of all the steps involved.
Engraving the acrylic sheets by hand using 3D printed stencils
The idea behind this concept is not new. Older displays of this type used tiny tungsten filament bulbs and complex light paths to direct light to the front of the display. The modern version, however, uses edge-lit panels with a grid of small LEDs beneath each segment, which are concealed within a casing. This design relies on the principle of total internal reflection, created by the contrast in refractive indices of acrylic and air. Light entering the panel from below at an angle greater than 42 degrees from normal is entirely reflected inside the panel. Fortunately, tiny LEDs have a wide dispersion angle, so if they are positioned close enough to the edge, they can guide sufficient light into the panel. Once this setup is in place, the surface can be etched or engraved using a CNC machine or a laser cutter. A rough surface texture is vital for this process, as it disrupts some of the light paths, scattering and directing some of it sideways to the viewer. Finally, to create your display, design enough parallel-stacked sheets for each segment of the display—seven in this case, but you could add more, such as an eighth for a decimal point.

How you arrange your lighting is up to you, but [upir] uses an off-the-shelf ESP32-S3 addressable LED array. This design has a few shortcomings, but it is a great start—if a little overkill for a single digit! Using some straightforward Arduino code, one display row is set to white to guide light into a single-segment sheet. To form a complete digital, you illuminate the appropriate combination of sheets. To engrave the sheets, [upir] wanted to use a laser cutter but was put off by the cost. A CNC 3018 was considered, but the choice was bewildering, so they just went with a hand-engraving pick, using a couple of 3D printed stencils as a guide. A sheet holder and light masking arrangement were created in Fusion 360, which was extended into a box to enclose the LED array, which could then be 3D printed.

If you fancy an edge-lit clock (you know you do) check out this one. If wearables are more your thing, there’s also this one. Finally, etched acrylic isn’t anywhere near as good as glass, so if you’ve got a vinyl cutter to hand, this simple method is an option.

youtube.com/embed/Cg9MDF1VE2g?…

[Luizão] wanted to create some hardware to honour the memory of the technology used to put man on the moon and chose the literal core of the project, that of the hardware used to store the software that provided the guidance. We’re talking about the magnetic core rope memory used in the Colossus and Luminary guidance computers. [Luizão] didn’t go totally all out and make a direct copy but instead produced a scaled-down but supersized demo board with just eight cores, each with twelve addressable lines, producing a memory with 96 bits.

The components chosen are all big honking through-hole parts, reminiscent of those available at the time, nicely laid out in an educational context. You could easily show someone how to re-code the memory with only a screwdriver to hand; no microscope is required for this memory. The board was designed in EasyEDA, and is about as simple as possible. Being an AC system, this operates in a continuous wave fashion rather than a pulsed operation mode, as a practical memory would. A clock input drives a large buffer transistor, which pushes current through one of the address wires via a 12-way rotary switch. The cores then act as transformers. If the address wire passes through the core, the signal is passed to the secondary coil, which feeds a simple rectifying amplifier and lights the corresponding LED. Eight such circuits operate in parallel, one per bit. Extending this would be easy.

Obviously, we’ve covered the Apollo program a fair bit. Here’s a fun tale about recovering the guidance software from the real hardware. Like always, the various space programs create new technologies that we mere mortals get to use, such as an auto-dialling telephone.

(video in Brazilian Portuguese)

youtube.com/embed/TnKUSDZDZGY?…

[Ken Shirriff] likes to take chips apart and this time his target is an NFC chip used in Montreal transit system tickets. As you might expect, the tickets are tiny, cheap, and don’t have any batteries. So how does it work?

The chip itself is tiny at 570 µm × 485 µm. [Ken] compares it to a grain of salt. The ticket has a thin plastic core with a comparatively giant antenna onboard.

Working with such a tiny chip presented additional challenges. A few drops of boiling sulphuric acid freed the die. Then applications of phosphoric acid, Armour etch — nasty stuff, but better than hydroflouric acid — and hydrochloric acid took care of the rest.

With everything exposed, it was time to analyze the different parts. As you’d expect, the NFC tag draws power from the antenna and sends data from a EEPROM. There was some analog circuitry and also some digital gates used to control the output. But there isn’t room for much.

How are these so cheap? You can order an 8-inch wafer with 100,587 chips onboard. The price? Around $9,000 per wafer, so about nine cents per chip. Actually, you may be more because the wafer actually has 103,682 dice but a file included tells you which ones are bad. If you want to bargain shop, a 12-inch wafer is $19,000 but gives you 215,712 dice. What a steal!

Can’t get enough NFC? We understand. There are times you just want to make your own.

Avete mai provato a chiedere ad un surfista di qualsiasi parte del mondo che cosa rappresenta il surf per lei o per lui? Sono certa al 100% che tutti vi daranno la stessa risposta: Libertà. Perché nulla al mondo dona quella sensazione come scivolare su un’onda, come remare verso il largo, circondati dal rosso del cielo e dal caldo del sole che tramonta. Pensateci bene, che cos’è la libertà? Per davvero intendo. @Feddit Un'istanza italiana Lemmy

iyezine.com/gaza-surf-chronicl…

GAZA SURF CHRONICLES E1

GAZA SURF CHRONICLES E1 - Quante volte abbiamo sentito questi termini dando per scontato una certa distanza tra noi e i soggetti in questione. Come se ci fosse non solo una distanza fisica, ma anche e soprattutto morale.

^{Valentina Sala (In Your Eyes ezine)}

Non si poteva resistere al richiamo dei supereroi monobanda, e allora InYourEyes ha risposto "presente" a un appuntamento davvero imperdibile, @Musica Agorà

iyezine.com/bob-log-iii-one-ma…

BOB LOG III / ONE MAN BUZZ - LIVE REPORT (13-6-2024)

BOB LOG III / ONE MAN BUZZ - LIVE REPORT (13-6-2024) - Non si poteva resistere al richiamo dei supereroi monobanda, e allora InYourEyes ha risposto "presente" a un appuntamento davvero imperdibile, incentrato sulle "one man band", che si è tenuto a P…

^{Reverend Shit-Man (In Your Eyes ezine)}

Dopo la rivoluzione del 25 aprile 1974, il 2 maggio, con questo gesto, José P. Maia (1943-2013) ha dimostrato le potenzialità dell'occupazione collettiva e ha dato voce a una lotta che continua. Tanta gente senza casa, tante case senza gente.

Murale fotografato a Lisbona, agosto 2014.

Ilaria Salis è stata eletta al Parlamento Europeo dopo che il giorno precedente l'apertura dei seggi le gazzette l'hanno ritratta come una occupante abusiva di abitazioni. Uno dei peggiori stigmi che il gazzettaio "occidentalista" riesca a gettare.
Dopo qualche giorno dall'elezione Ilaria Salis ha fatto circolare questo scritto. Come nostro uso lo si riporta perché urta chi merita quantomeno di essere urtato. Dobbiamo anche lodare la concretezza della scrivente e il suo non ricorrere al linguaggio inclusivo.

Sì, lo confesso!
Sono stata una militante del movimento di lotta per la casa che negli anni ha dato battaglia sul tema del diritto all'abitare, a Milano e in tutta Italia.
Se qualcuno pensava di fare chissà quale scoop scavando nel mio passato, è solo perché è sideralmente lontano dalla realtà sociale di tale movimento, che si compone di decine di migliaia di abitanti delle case popolari e attivisti, i quali, per aver affermato il semplice principio di avere un tetto sulla testa, sono incappati in qualche denuncia.
Sarebbe auspicabile che l'informazione, piuttosto che gettare fango sul mio conto, si dedicasse al contesto di grave povertà e precarietà abitativa nel quale si ritrovano ampie fasce di popolazione.
Le pratiche collettive dell'occupazione di case sfitte, il blocco degli sfratti, la resistenza agli sgomberi, gli sportelli di ascolto e la lotta per la sanatoria rappresentano un'alternativa reale e immediata all’isolamento sociale e alla guerra tra poveri, strumentalizzate tanto dalle forze politiche razziste quanto dal racket.
Dare una risposta concreta al bisogno dell'abitare significa non solo trovare qui e ora una soluzione, benché precaria e provvisoria, ad una questione lasciata irrisolta dalla politica istituzionale, ma anche indicare una prospettiva politica di trasformazione delle condizioni materiali di vita nel segno della giustizia sociale.
E' con grande orgoglio, dunque, che rivendico di aver fatto parte di questo movimento e di continuare a sostenerlo!
Voglio anche fare chiarezza sulla mia situazione.
Come è stato ampiamente sbandierato sui media di destra, Aler reclama un credito di 90.000 euro nei miei confronti come "indennità" per la presunta occupazione di una casa in via Giosuè Borsi a Milano, basandosi esclusivamente sul fatto che nel 2008 sono stata trovata al suo interno. Sebbene nei successivi sedici anni (!) non siano mai stati svolti ulteriori controlli per verificare la mia permanenza, né sia mai stato avviato alcun procedimento civile o penale a mio carico rispetto a quella casa, Aler contabilizza tale credito e non si fa scrupolo a renderlo pubblico tramite la stampa il giorno prima delle elezioni.
Un gran numero di individui e famiglie, spesso prive dei mezzi necessari per reagire adeguatamente, sono tormentate da richieste infondate di questo genere. Il totale dei crediti contabilizzati da Aler ammonta infatti ad oltre 176 milioni di euro! La pratica di richiedere esose "indennità di occupazione" agli inquilini, basata su presupposti a dir poco incerti, è una strategia utilizzata sistematicamente per spaventare gli occupanti e tentare di fare cassa.
Mentre molte, troppe persone non vedono garantito il proprio diritto all'abitare e non hanno alternative dignitose se non occupare - in una della città con gli affitti più cari, ricordiamolo sempre -, l'ente che dovrebbe tutelare questo diritto sembra essere più interessato a criminalizzare il movimento di lotta per la casa e gli inquilini piuttosto che a trovare soluzioni concrete.
Nei prossimi giorni condividerò alcuni dati e spunti di riflessione sulla questione abitativa a Milano e in Italia.
Ringrazio Libero & co. per avermi servito questo assist per riportare l'attenzione mediatica su un tema che mi sta molto a cuore, perché così cruciale per le classi popolari e i giovani.

MAI PIÙ GENTE SENZA CASA, MAI PIÙ CASE SENZA GENTE!

Nuovo disco per il gruppo italo svizzero degli Houstones, dal titolo "A + C", in uscita per Soppressa Records, Collettivo Dotto e Entes Anomicos. @Musica Agorà

iyezine.com/houstones-a-c

Houstones - A + C

Houstones - A + C - Nuovo disco per il gruppo italo svizzero degli Houstones, dal titolo "A + C", in uscita per Soppressa Records, Collettivo Dotto e Entes Anomicos. - Houstones

^{Massimo Argo (In Your Eyes ezine)}