These are tough times for American hackers, and rife with uncertainty. Trade wars are on, off, on again– who can keep track? If you’re used to getting everything from China, that can really cramp your style. [Jeremy Cook] took the time to write up hisexperience prototyping with American-made PCBs , just in time for us to totally miss Independence Day.

The project was a simple nightlight, using a single LED, a photoresistor, a transistor, and a CR2032 battery. The CR2032 battery does complicate things, though: [Jeremy] figured out a neat way to hold the battery using a PCB cutout, but it needs to be a 0.8 mm board. (That’s going to matter in a moment.)He’s put that PCB on GitHub if you’re interested.

To start off, JLBPCB is the Chinese clearing house of choice for [Jeremy], and they quoted a very cheap $7.10 for 20 boards. The problem was that shipping across the Pacific Ocean, plus the ever-wavering tariff charge, brought the price to $48.08. About five dollars of which was from tariffs; the rest you can put down to the cost of jet fuel and the size of the Pacific Ocean.

On the other hand, OSH Park, was able to get [Jeremy] three of their pretty purple PCBs for $7.75 all-inclusive. Overall, since he’s prototyping and does not want 20 boards this revision, [Jeremy] saves quite a lot by staying local– including the environmental impact of shipping and laxer regulations in China, if that sort of thing matters to you.

The suprizing thing is the turnaround time: [Jeremy] got his pretty purple PCBs from OSH Park a full twenty days after ordering. Similar orders from China take only a week, which is just mind-blowing when you stop and think about the great honking ocean in the way. We could perhaps cut OSH Park some slack in that 0.8 mm boards are not the most common, but their quoted turnaround time for two-layer prototypes is minimum 12 days.

They do offer a “super-swift” option for two-layer boards, but then they lose on price. As [Jeremy] points out, there are always tradeoffs. If you’re really in a hurry, nothing’s faster thanmilling the boards yourself. Or you could go the old-schooltoner-transfer etching route.

Our thanks to [Jeremy] for the tip. If you’ve got a better way to prototype, dosend us a tip about it. Also, please us know in the comments if you’ve tried an in-country PCB fabricator, and how it compared to the usual offerings from the PRC.

hackaday.com/2025/07/06/does-m…

Un altro pezzo di storia sta finalmente abbandonando l’iconico sistema operativo. Microsoft ha avviato il processo di rimozione di PowerShell 2.0, la versione obsoleta dello strumento console, da Windows 11.

Questa edizione è apparsa ai tempi di Windows 7 e in seguito si è diffusa nelle generazioni precedenti della piattaforma, tra cui XP, Vista e soluzioni server come Windows Server 2003 e 2008. Nel corso degli anni, le funzionalità di PowerShell si sono ampliate in modo significativo e gli approcci all’amministrazione sono migliorati.

Tuttavia, l’implementazione obsoleta è stata mantenuta a lungo per motivi di compatibilità. È stata ufficialmente dichiarata obsoleta nel 2017, ma non c’è stata fretta di escluderla completamente dal sistema: ciò è stato impedito dalla dipendenza di diversi prodotti aziendali, tra cui singole edizioni di SQL Server, dalla seconda versione.

Ora l’azienda ha deciso di completare finalmente questa fase di transizione. PowerShell 2.0 non è più presente nelle ultime build di anteprima di Windows 11. A breve, gli sviluppatori prevedono di rimuoverlo completamente dalle versioni stabili. Promettono di annunciare le date esatte e ulteriori dettagli in seguito.

Strumenti moderni per lavorare con la console sono disponibili da tempo per gli utenti. La maggior parte dei dispositivi attuali ha PowerShell 5.1 installato e la versione multipiattaforma multifunzionale di PowerShell 7.x supporta sia Windows che altri sistemi operativi. Queste soluzioni offrono funzionalità di automazione avanzate, maggiore sicurezza e una migliore interazione con i software moderni.

Il rifiuto dei componenti obsoleti è un passo fondamentale nell’aggiornamento dell’ecosistema Windows. Microsoft sottolinea che l’eliminazione delle tecnologie obsolete contribuisce a rafforzare la protezione, semplificare la gestione dell’infrastruttura e ridurre il rischio di sfruttamento delle vulnerabilità . Ciò è particolarmente importante considerando che le vecchie versioni di PowerShell sono state a lungo utilizzate dagli aggressori per organizzare attacchi.

L'articolo PowerShell 2.0 riposa in pace! Microsoft avvia il processo di rimozione da Windows 11 proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Image of Sedna, taken by the Hubble Space telescope in 2004. (Credit: NASA)
While for most people Pluto is the most distant planet in the Solar System, things get a lot more fuzzy once you pass Neptune and enter the realm of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Pluto is probably the most well-known of these, but there are at least a dozen more of such dwarf planets among the TNOs, including 90377 Sedna.

This obviously invites the notion of sending an exploration mission to Sedna, much as was done with Pluto and a range of other TNOs through the New Horizons spacecraft. How practical this would be is investigated in a recent study by [Elena Ancona] and colleagues.

The focus is here on advanced propulsion methods, including nuclear propulsion and solar sails. Although it’s definitely possible to use a similar mission profile as with the New Horizons mission, this would make it another long-duration mission. Rather than a decades-long mission, using a minimally-equipped solar sail spacecraft could knock this down to about seven years, whereas the proposed Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) could do this in ten, but with a much larger payload and the ability do an orbital insertion which would obviously get much more science done.

As for the motivation for a mission to Sedna, its highly eccentric orbit that takes it past the heliopause means that it spends relatively little time being exposed to the Sun’s rays, which should have left much of the surface material intact that was present during the early formation of the Solar System. With our explorations of the Solar System taking us ever further beyond the means of traditional means of space travel, a mission to Sedna might not only expand our horizons, but also provide a tantalizing way to bring much more of the Solar System including the Kuiper belt within easy reach.

hackaday.com/2025/07/06/visiti…

There is always the promise of using more computing power for a single task. Your computer has multiple CPUs now, surely. Your video card has even more. Your computer is probably networked to a slew of other computers. But how do you write software to take advantage of that? There are many complex systems, of course, but there’s also Chapel.

Chapel is a reasonably simple programming language, but it supports parallelism in various forms. The run time controls how computers — whatever that means — communicate with one another. You can have code running on your local CPUs, your GPU, and other processing elements over the network without much work on your part.

What’s it look like? Here’s a simple distributed program from the project’s homepage:

// print a message per compute node
coforall loc in Locales do
on loc do
writeln("Hello from locale ", loc.id);

// print a message per core per compute node
coforall loc in Locales do
on loc do
coforall tid in 0..<here.maxTaskPar do
writeln("Hello from task ", tid, " on locale ", loc.id);

As you might guess, Locales is an array of locale objects that each describe some computing resource. The coforall statement splits a loop up to run on different locales or CPUs. You can even write GPU kernels:

coforall (gpu, row) in zip(here.gpus, localRowStart..) do on gpu {

You can try it in your browser, but for best results, you really want to download it or run it in a container. The license is Apache 2.0, so you can even contribute if you want to. If you want to really do distributed work, be sure to grab the package built for GASNet or Slurm.

While it is something new to learn, you might find it easier and more generally applicable than something like CUDA.

hackaday.com/2025/07/06/going-…

If the idea of reading a physical book sounds like hard work, [Nick Bild’s] latest project, the PageParrot, might be for you. While AI gets a lot of flak these days, one thing modern multimodal models do exceptionally well is image interpretation, and PageParrot demonstrates just how accessible that’s become.

[Nick] demonstrates quite clearly how little code is needed to get from those cryptic black and white glyphs to sounds the average human can understand, specifically a paltry 80 lines of Python. Admittedly, many of those lines are pulling in libraries, and some are just blank, so functionally speaking, it’s even shorter than that. Of course, the whole application is mostly glue code, stitching together other people’s hard work, but it’s still instructive and fun to play with.

The hardware required is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a camera (in this case, a USB webcam), and something to hold it above the book. Any Pi with the ability to connect to a camera should also work, however, with just a little configuration.

On the software side, [Nick] pulls in the CV2 library (which is the interface to OpenCV) to handle the camera interfacing, programming it to full HD resolution. Google’s GenAI is used to interface the Gemini 2.5 Flash LLM via an API endpoint. This takes a captured image and a trivial prompt, and returns the whole page of text, quick as a flash.

Finally, the script hands that text over to Piper, which turns that into a speech file in WAV format. This can then be played to an audio device with a call out to the console aplay tool. It’s all very simple at this level of abstraction.

Yes, we know it’s essentially just doing the same thing OCR software has been doing for decades. Still, the AI version is remarkably low-effort and surprisingly accurate, especially when handling unusual layouts that confound traditional OCR algorithms. Extensions to this tool would be trivial; for example, adjusting the prompt to ask it to translate the text to a different language could open up a whole new world to some people.

If you want to play along at home, then head on over to the PageParrot GitHub page and download the script.

If this setup feels familiar, you’d be quite correct. We covered something similar a couple of years back, which used Tesseract OCR, feeding text to Festvox’s CMU Flite tool. Whilst we’re talking about text-to-speech, here’s a fun ESP32-based software phoneme synthesiser to recreate that distinctive 1980s Speak & Spell voice.

youtube.com/embed/W-vDoOevl00?…

hackaday.com/2025/07/06/conver…

"Quando si tratta di mandare in bancarotta il nostro Paese con sprechi e corruzione, viviamo in un sistema monopartitico, non in una democrazia. Oggi, l'America Party è nato per restituirvi la libertà".

Tutto ciò è meraviglioso.

E comunque aveva ragione Yoda, "sempre due ci sono: un maestro e un apprendista".

rainews.it/articoli/2025/07/us…

Elon Musk annuncia la nascita del partito "America"

Ieri, nel giorno delle celebrazioni dell'Indipendenza Usa, aveva lanciato un sondaggio su X

^{Redazione di Rainews (RaiNews)}