The Amiga has a lot of fans, and rightly so. The machine broke a lot of ground. However, according to [Dave Farquhar], one of the most popular models today — the Amiga 600 — was reviled in 1992 by just about everyone. One of the last Amigas, it was supposed to be a low-cost home computer but was really just a repackaged Amiga 1000, a machine already seven years old which, at the time, might as well have been decades. The industry was moving at lightspeed back then.

[Dave] takes a look at how Commodore succeeded and then lost their way by the time the 600 rolled out. Keep in mind that low-cost was a relative term. A $500 price tag was higher than it seems today and even at that price, you had no monitor or hard drive. So at a $1,000 for a practical system you might as well go for a PC which was taking off at the same time.

By the time Commodore closed down, they had plenty of 600s left, but they also had refurbished 500s, and for many, that was the better deal. It was similar to the 500 but had more features, like an external port and easy memory expansion. Of course, both machines used the Motorola 68000. While that CPU has a lot of great features, by 1992, the writing was on the wall that the Intel silicon would win.

Perhaps the biggest issue, though, was the graphics system. The original Amiga outclassed nearly everything at the time. But, again, the industry was moving fast. The 600 wasn’t that impressive compared to a VGA. And, as [Dave] points out, it couldn’t run DOOM.

There’s more to the post. Be sure to check it out. It is a great look into the history of the last of a great line of machines. Maybe if Commodore had embraced PC interfaces, but we’ll never know. [Dave’s] take on the end of the Amiga echos others we’ve read. It wasn’t exactly Doom that killed the Amiga. It was more complicated than that. But Doom would have helped.

hackaday.com/2025/03/16/the-am…

If you think of old recording technology, you probably think of magnetic tape, either in some kind of cassette or, maybe, on reels. But there’s an even older technology that recorded voice on hair-thin stainless steel wire and [Mr. Carlson] happened upon a recorded reel of wire. Can he extract the audio from it? Of course! You can see and hear the results in the video below.

It didn’t hurt that he had several junk wire recorders handy, although he thought none were working. It was still a good place to start since the heads and the feed are unusual to wire recorders. Since the recorder needed a little work, we also got a nice teardown of that old device. The machine was missing belts, but some rubber bands filled in for a short-term fix.

The tape head has to move to keep the wire spooled properly, and even with no audio, it is fun to watch the mechanism spin both reels and move up and down. But after probing the internal pieces, it turns out there actually was some audio, it just wasn’t making it to the speakers.

The audio was noisy and not the best reproduction, but not bad for a broken recorder that is probably at least 80 years old. We hope he takes the time to fully fix the old beast later, but for now, he did manage to hear what was “on the wire,” even though that has a totally different meaning than it usually does.

It is difficult to recover wire recordings, just as it will be difficult to read modern media one day. If you want to dive deep into the technology, we can help with that, too.

youtube.com/embed/WJUOWRTBf0I?…

hackaday.com/2025/03/16/wire-r…

“The brickings will continue until the printer sales improve!” This whole printer-bricking thing seems to be getting out of hand with the news this week that a firmware update caused certain HP printers to go into permanent paper-saver mode. The update was sent to LaserJet MFP M232-M237 models (opens printer menu; checks print queue name; “Phew!) on March 4, and was listed as covering a few “general improvements and bug fixes,” none of which seem very critical. Still, some users reported not being able to print at all after the update, with an error message suggesting printing was being blocked thanks to non-OEM toner. This sounds somewhat similar to the bricked Brother printers we reported on last week (third paragraph).

The trouble is, some users are reporting the problem even if they had genuine HP toner installed. Disturbingly, HP support seems to be fine with this, saying that older HP toner “may no longer be recognized due to new security measures.” Well, there’s your problem, lady! The fix, of course, is to buy yet more genuine HP toner, even if your current cartridge still has plenty of life left in it. That’s a pretty deplorable attitude on HP’s part, and more than enough reason to disable automatic firmware updates, or better yet, just disconnect your printer from the Internet altogether.

Here’s a pro-tip for all you frustrated coders out there: no matter how hard the job gets, planting a logic bomb in your code is probably not the right way to go. That’s the lesson that one Davis Lu learned after being convicted of “causing intentional damage to protected computers” thanks to malicious code he planted in his employer’s system. Apparently not optimistic about his future prospects with Eaton Corp. back in 2018, Lu started adding code designed to run a series of infinite loops to delete user profiles. He also went for the nuclear option, adding code to shut the whole system down should it fail to find an Active Directory entry for him. That code was apparently triggered on the day he was fired in 2019, causing global problems for his former employer. Look, we’ve all been there; coding is often lonely work, and it’s easy to fantasize about coding up something like this and watching them squirm once they fire you. But if it gets that bad, you should probably put that effort into finding a new gig.

Then again, maybe the reason you’re dissatisfied with your coding job is that you know some smart-ass LLM is out there waiting to tell you that you don’t know how to code. That’s what happened to one newbie Cursor user who tried to get help writing some video game code from the AI code editor. The LLM spat back about 750 lines of code but refused to reveal the rest, and when he asked to explain why, it suggested that he should develop the logic himself so that he’d be able to understand and maintain the code, and that “Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities.” True enough, but do we really need our AI tools to cop an attitude?

And finally, if you’re anything like us, you’re really going to love this walking tour of a container ship’s mechanical spaces. The ship isn’t named, but a little sleuthing suggests it’s one of the Gülsün-class ships built for MSC in 2019, possibly the MSC Mina, but that’s just a guess. This 400-meter monster can carry 23,656 twenty-foot equivalent units, and everything about it is big. Mercifully, the tour isn’t narrated, not that it would have been possible, thanks to the screaming equipment in the engine room. There are captions, though, so you’ll at least have some idea of what you’re looking at in the immaculately clean and cavernously huge spaces. Seriously, the main engine room has to have at least a dozen floors; being on the engineering crew must mean getting your steps in every day. The most striking thing about the tour was that not a single other human being was visible during the entire hour. We suppose that’s just a testament to how automated modern vessels have become, but it still had a wonderfully creepy liminal feeling to it. Enjoy!

hackaday.com/2025/03/16/hackad…

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander’s first look at the solar eclipse as it began to emerge from its Mare Crisium landing site on March 14 at 5:30 AM UTC. (Credit: Firefly Aerospace)
After recently landing at the Moon’s Mare Crisium, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander craft was treated to a spectacle that’s rarely observed: a total solar eclipse as seen from the surface of the Moon. This entire experience was detailed on the Blue Ghost Mission 1 live blog. As the company notes, this is the first time that a commercial entity has been able to observe this phenomenon.

During this event, the Earth gradually moved in front of the Sun, as observed from the lunar surface. During this time, the Blue Ghost lander had to rely on its batteries as it was capturing the solar eclipse with a wide-angle camera on its top deck.

Unlike the Blood Moon seen from the Earth, there was no such cool effect observed from the Lunar surface. The Sun simply vanished, leaving a narrow ring of light around the Earth. The reason for the Blood Moon becomes obvious, however, as the refracting of the sunlight through Earth’s atmosphere changes the normal white-ish light to shift to an ominous red.

The entire sequence of images captured can be observed in the video embedded on the live blog and below, giving a truly unique view of something that few humans (and robots) have so far been able to observe.

You can make your own lunar eclipse. Or, make your own solar eclipse, at least once a day.

youtube.com/embed/M2P-z_cXsOs?…

hackaday.com/2025/03/16/blue-g…

Current measurements are not as handy as voltage measurements. You typically need to either measure the voltage across something and do some math or break the circuit so a known resistor in your instrument develops a voltage your meter measures and converts for you. However, it is possible to get non-contact current probes. They are generally pricey, but [Kerry Wong] shows us one under $200 and, thus, budget compared to similar probes. Check out the review in the video below.

The OWON unit has three ranges: 4 A, 40 A, and 400 A. It claims a resolution of 10 mA and a bandwidth of 200 kHz. It requires a 9 V battery, which [Kerry] suspects won’t last very long given the rated power consumption number, although the measured draw was not as high as claimed. The specs aren’t great — this seems to be little more than a current probe meter with a connector for an oscilloscope, but if it meets your needs, that could be acceptable.

Stay tuned for the end if you want to see the insides. There’s not much on the PCB’s top side. There’s a hall-effect sensor, some adjustment pots, and an op amp. The other side of the board has many more components, but the circuit is purely analog.

It made us wonder if we should nip down to the local cheap tool store and buy a $40 meter with similar specs. It seems like you could find a spot to tap a voltage from that and save quite a bit of money.

It is possible to create a probe that doesn’t break the bank and manages at least 2 MHz of bandwidth. Or, make your own for about $25, although we can’t vouch for the specs on that one.

youtube.com/embed/ieQ-yPHMdo8?…

hackaday.com/2025/03/16/inside…

Oggi al rientro da una lunga passeggiata, mi sono fermata a curiosare nella #bibliocabina in piazza del mio paese. Fra i diversi libri, palesemente "svuota cantina" (tipo riviste di cucina degli anni 90, libri di giardinaggio in tedesco, calendari religiosi del 2018) ho trovato questo interessante volume:

"Il volume propone un insolito viaggio letterario tra le pagine di una settantina di scrittori italiani che negli ultimi due secoli hanno parlato della Svizzera e degli svizzeri.
Componimenti poetici, racconti o romanzi, note diaristiche o percorsi eterogenei di scritture.
#FabioSoldini
In co-edizione con Marsilio Editori, Venezia."

Sarà interessante anche per l'altra breve formazione che sto seguendo, dove si parla di #migrazione e #interculturalità 🙃

È uscito il nuovo numero di Domenike Famelike!
pdfhost.io/v/VRKseXPWu2_Basili…
Tra arte, cultura e storie da vivere, questo numero ti porterà in un viaggio dove ogni pagina è un’ispirazione.

👉 Segui i nostri social per anteprime e contenuti extra!
#DomenikeFamelike #CulturaCheRespira

Leggi, condividi, sogna. 🌟

Per tutelare i rider vogliamo che in caso di allerta si interrompa il servizio e si proceda col garantire i compensi ai lavoratori, affinché non paghino per un rischio di impresa che non può essere scaricato su di loro.

[...]

Infine invitiamo i consumatori ad evitare di utilizzare il servizio offerto loro tramite applicazione, per essere al fianco di coloro che rischierebbero la propria incolumità per un semplice panino o una pizza.

cgiltoscana.it/2025/03/14/alle…