TinkerCAD had its first release all the way back in 2011 and it has come a long way since then. The latest release has introduced a raft of new, interesting features, and [HL ModTech] has been nice enough to sum them up in a recent video.

He starts out by explaining some of the basics before quickly jumping into the new gear. There are two headline features: intersect groups and smooth curves. Where the old union group tool simply merged two pieces of geometry, intersect group allows you to create a shape only featuring the geometry where two individual blocks intersect. It’s a neat addition that allows the creation of complex geometry more quickly. [HL ModTech] demonstrates it with a sphere and a pyramid and his enthusiasm is contagious.

As for smooth curves, it’s an addition to the existing straight line and Bézier curve sketch tools. If you’ve ever struggled making decent curves with Bézier techniques, you might appreciate the ease of working with the smooth curve tool, which avoids any nasty jagged points as a matter of course.

While it’s been gaining new features at an impressive rate, ultimately TinkerCAD is still a pretty basic tool — it’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to see in the aerospace world or anything. ut it’s a great way to start whipping up custom stuff on your 3D printer.

youtube.com/embed/nMDNAysi5EE?…

hackaday.com/2025/11/18/a-quic…

I’m sitting in front of an old Sayno Plasma TV as I write this on my media PC. It’s not a productivity machine, by any means, but the screen has the resolution to do it so I started this document to prove a point. That point? Plasma TVs are awesome.

Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Bride

An Egyptian god might see pixels on an 8K panel, but we puny mortals won’t. Image “Horus Eye 2” by [Jeff Dahl]The full-colour plasma screens that were used as TVs in the 2000s are an awkward technological cul-de-sac. Everyone knows and loves CRTs for the obvious benefits they offer– bright colours, low latency, and scanlines to properly blur pixel art. Modern OLEDs have more resolution than the Eye of Horus, never mind your puny human orbs, and barely sip power compared to their forbearers. Plasma, though? Not old enough to be retro-cool, not new enough to be high-tech, plasma displays are sadly forgotten.

It’s funny, because I firmly believe that without plasma displays, CRTs would have never gone away. Perhaps for that I should hate them, but it’s for the very reasons that Plasma won out over HD-CRTs in the market place that I love them.

What You Get When You Get a Plasma TV

I didn’t used to love Plasma TVs. Until a few years ago, I thought of them like you probably do: clunky, heavy, power-hungry, first-gen flatscreens that were properly consigned to the dustbin of history. Then I bought a house.

The house came with a free TV– a big plasma display in the basement. It was left there for two reasons: it was worthless on the open market and it weighed a tonne. I could take it off the wall by myself, but I could feel the ghost of OSHA past frowning at me when I did. Hauling it up the stairs? Yeah, I’d need a buddy for that… and it was 2020. By the time I was organizing the basement, we’d just gone into lockdown, and buddies were hard to come by. So I put it back on the wall, plugged in my laptop, and turned it on.

I was gobsmacked. It looked exactly like a CRT– a giant, totally flat CRT in glorious 1080p. When I stepped to the side, it struck me again: like a CRT, the viewing angle is “yes”.

How it Works

None of this should have come as a surprise, because I know how a Plasma TV works. I’d just forgotten how good they are. See, a Plasma TV really was an attempt to get all that CRT goodness in a flat screen, and the engineers at Fujitsu, and later elsewhere, really pulled it off.

Like CRTs, you’ve got phosphors excited to produce points of light to create an image– and only when excited, so the blacks are as black as they get. The phosphors are chemically different from those in CRTs but they come in similar colours, so colours on old games and cartoons look right in a way they don’t even on my MacBook’s retina display.

Unlike a CRT, there’s no electron beam scanning the screen, and no shadow mask. Instead, the screen is subdivided into individual pixels inside the flat vacuum panel. The pixels are individually addressed and zapped on and off by an electric current. Unlike a CRT or SED, the voltage here isn’t high enough to generate an electron beam to excite the phosphors; instead the gas discharge inside the display emits enough UV light to do the same job.

Each phosphor-filled pixel glows with its own glorious light thanks to the UV from gas discharge in the cell.
Image based on “Plasma-Display-Composition.svg” by [Jari Laamanen].Still, if it feels like a CRT, and that’s because the subpixels are individual blobs of phosphors, excited from behind, and generating their own glorious light.

It’s Not the Same, Though

It’s not a CRT, of course. The biggest difference is that it’s a fixed-pixel display, with all that comes with that. This particular TV has all the ports on the back to make it great for retrogaming, but the NES, or what have you, signal still has to be digitally upscaled to match the resolution. Pixel art goes unblurred by scanlines unless I add it in via emulation, so despite the colour and contrast, it’s not quite the authentic experience.

For some things, like the Atari 2600, the scanline blur really doesn’t matter. Image: “Atari 2600 on my 42 inch plasma TV” by [Jeffisageek] The built-in upscaling doesn’t introduce enough latency for a filthy casual like me to notice, but I’ll never be able to play Duck Hunt on the big screen unless I fake it with a Wii. Apparently some Plasma TVs are awesome for latency on the analog inputs, and others are not much better than an equivalent-era LCD. There’s a reason serious retro gamers pay serious money for big CRTs.

Those big CRTs don’t have to worry about burn in, either, something I have been very careful in the five years I’ve owned this second-hand plasma display to avoid. I can’t remember thinking much about burn-in with CRTs since we retired the amber-phosphor monitor plugged into the Hercules Graphics card on our family’s 286 PC.

The dreaded specter of burn-in is plasma’s Achilles heel – more than the weight and thickness, which were getting much better before LG pulled the plug as the last company to exit this space, or the Energy Star ratings, which weren’t going to catch up to LED-backlit LCDs, but had improved as well. The fear of burn-in made you skip the plasma, especially for console gaming.

This screen is haunted by the ghost of CNN’s old logo. Burning in game graphics was less common but more fun. Ironically, it’s an LCD. Image: “logo of CNN burnt on a screen” by [Nate]Early plasma displays could permanently damage the delicate phosphors in only a handful of hours. That damage burnt the unmoving parts of an image permanently into the phosphors in the form of “ghosting”, and unless you caught it early, it was generally not repairable. The ghosting issue got better over time, but the technology never escaped the stigma, and the problem never entirely went away. If that meant that after a marathon Call-of-Duty session the rest of the family had to stare at your HUD on every movie night, Dad wasn’t going to buy another plasma display.

By the end, the phosphors improved and various tricks like jiggling the image pixel-by-pixel were found to avoid burn-in, and it seems to have worked: there’s absolutely no ghosting on my model, and you can sometimes find late-model Plasma TVs for the low, low cost of “get this thing off my wall and up the stairs” that are equally un-haunted. I may grab another, even if I have to pay for it. It’s a lot easier to hide a spare flatscreen than an extra CRT, another advantage to the plasma TVs, and in no case do phosphors last forever.

But Where’s the Hack?

Is “grab an old flat screen instead of hunting around for an impossible CRT” a hack? Maybe it’s not, but it’s worth considering, though, because Plasma TVs don’t get the love they deserve. (And seriously, you’re not going to find the mythical 43-inch CRT, even if it technically existed. And you’ll never find a tube that could match the 152” monster Panasonic put out to claim the record back in the day.)

In the mean time, I’m going to enjoy the contrast ratio, refresh rate, and the bonus space heater. I’m in Canada, and winter is coming, so it’s hard to get too overworked about waste heat when there’s frost on your windowpanes.

Featured image: “IFA 2010 Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin 124” by [Bin im Garten].

hackaday.com/2025/11/18/in-pra…

You’ve probably seen the inflatable frogs, the dance parties, the naked bike ride. Maybe you’ve also seen the darker images: a federal officer aiming a weapon at protesters, or federal agents hurling tear gas and flash bangs into peaceful demonstrations at a Portland, Oregon, immigration facility.

Local journalists have been attacked for bringing images like these to the world. They’re being tear-gassed and shot with crowd-control munitions by federal agents simply for doing their jobs.

Photojournalist John Rudoff is among them. He’s been covering these protests since June, photographing both peaceful marches and violent responses from federal officers that often follow.

On Oct. 11, while documenting a protest, Rudoff was struck by a stinger grenade, even though he was clearly identifiable as press. He was bruised, but not deterred.

“If you cover protests, you’re going to have discomfort and hazard. Period. That’s just the way it is,” Rudoff told us. “They shoot 20-year-old girls, and they shoot 70-year-old men, and they shoot people in wheelchairs, and they shoot blind people,” he added, referring to federal agents using crowd-control munitions. “The word impunity seems to be coined for them.”

Despite the danger, Rudoff refuses to stop documenting. “The entire media ecosystem has been covered with the administration’s rantings about the war-ravaged hellscape of Portland, and the city is burning down, and ICE officers are being attacked, and on and on and on,” he said. “I feel some obligation to try and counter this frankly preposterous narrative that the city’s burning down. It isn’t.”

Independent journalist Kevin Foster, who has also been covering the Portland protests, shares that sense of duty and outrage. “It’s clear the Trump administration wants to paint Portland as a war zone to seize more control, but it’s a lot harder to do that when I’m showing you all the dancing inflatable frogs,” he told us. “At the end of the day, someone needs to be there to document abuses of power.”

Foster has felt the danger up close while reporting from protests. “I’ve seen other press members shot with pepper balls, I’ve had flash bangs go off at my feet, and tear gas canisters explode above my head,” he said. But he continues to work to keep the public informed, reporting on federal agents’ heavy use of force and escalatory tactics at the protests.

For Foster, the concerns go beyond federal agents at protests. “Right-wing influencers and agitators have reportedly doxxed people,” Foster said. “With the state of the presidency and the history of authoritarianism, I do sometimes worry about persecution as well, especially given that a lot of my coverage subverts the narrative produced by right-wing media.”

The incident in Portland that got the most attention involved Katie Daviscourt, a reporter for the conservative news site The Post Millennial. She reported being hit in the face by someone swinging a flagpole at a protest, blackening her eye. Police let the suspect go, prompting feigned outrage from the White House.

Holding federal agents accountable

Violence against the press, from any direction, is an attack on the First Amendment itself, especially when enabled by law enforcement. Unfortunately, those purportedly appalled by the Daviscourt incident have not shown similar concern over federal law enforcement attacks on journalists who don’t further their preferred political narratives.

Since the Portland protests began in June, for instance, photojournalist Mason Lake has been struck by crowd-control munitions twice, pepper-sprayed, and had a rifle aimed at him. Yet federal officials haven’t condemned these attacks, or the attack on Rudoff.

“It’s very disconcerting to see how free press has been trampled,” Lake told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). “The best we can do is push back and make sure the truth isn’t run over.”

In other cities, like Chicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California, federal court orders protect journalists from such assaults. But Portland currently has no such order. Legal precedent from 2020 protests in Portland recognized reporters’ First Amendment right to cover protests and shielded them from dispersal orders. But it has done little to rein in federal agents today.

“They have to be sued, and they have to be enjoined, and they have to be criminally prosecuted until they stop doing it,” suggested Rudoff.

Until that happens, however, journalists must keep speaking up, not just about what they see, but also for being attacked for witnessing it. “Most attacks on journalists aren’t reported,” explained Rudoff. But, he added, “I don’t know a single journalist out there who hasn’t been shot or hit or knocked over or tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed. It’s everybody.”

Foster put it even more bluntly: “Many Americans seem to have this impression that brutalizing protesters and targeting the press only happens in other countries. If that notion hasn’t shattered for you yet, wait until your ears are ringing from flash bangs and you’re enveloped in a cloud of tear gas so thick you can’t see 15 feet.”

This isn’t some distant dictatorship. It’s the city of Portland. And the First Amendment is under siege.

freedom.press/issues/journalis…

noblogo.org/transit/perche-non…

Transit

2025-11-18 15:39:36

Perché non posso scrivere di tutto (anche se mi sta a cuore.)

(181)

Spesso sui social capita che, se parli sempre e solo di una certa causa (per esempio la #Palestina) qualcuno ti accusi di non interessarti ad altri drammi, come quelli che succedono in #Sudan o in altri luoghi del mondo.Questa è una questione che merita un po’ di chiarezza, perché il punto vero è un altro: nessuno di noi è un’agenzia di stampa, e non parlare di una cosa non significa affatto fregarsene. La verità è che tutti noi abbiamo dei limiti: di tempo, di energie, ma anche di capacità emotiva.

Non possiamo essere costantemente presenti su ogni emergenza, su ogni ingiustizia, su ogni tragedia che si presenta nel mondo. E, sinceramente, provarci significherebbe anche rischiare di annullare noi stessi, perdendo quella sensibilità che ci spinge a interessarci davvero di alcune questioni.

La partecipazione emotiva è inevitabilmente selettiva: ci sentiamo più vicini e coinvolti in certe storie perché le conosciamo meglio, le capiamo, o semplicemente perché in quel momento sentiamo di poter fare qualcosa di più concreto.

Non è una questione di indifferenza verso le altre cause, ma una scelta, consapevole o meno, di dove concentrare le nostre forze, anche per proteggere la nostra salute mentale. E poi, diciamolo: sui #socialmedia la pressione è fortissima. Se non ti vedi parlare di tutto, c’è chi pensa che non ti importi. Ma questa è una falsa aspettativa.

La responsabilità di dare voce a ogni singola emergenza non spetta a noi singoli individui, ma a un sistema di informazione ben più complesso.Noi partecipiamo con ciò che possiamo, con quello che sappiamo, con quello che ci muove davvero.

Quando vedi qualcuno che si concentra spesso su una sola causa, non darla per scontata: può significare un impegno profondo, non una mancanza di interesse per il resto. E chi ti conosce sa che dietro quel silenzio ci sono comunque solidarietà, preoccupazione e rispetto. Non serve parlare di tutto per esserci davvero.

In fondo, la vera indifferenza è un’altra cosa: è non provarci nemmeno, è non farsi toccare da niente, è voltare le spalle senza nemmeno chiedersi come si potrebbe fare la differenza. La partecipazione selettiva, invece, è umana, corretta e spesso necessaria. Insomma, non siamo agenzie di stampa, ma persone. E va bene così.

#Blog #SocialMedia #Opinioni #EmpatiaSelettiva #PartecipazioneEmotiva

Mastodon: @alda7069@mastodon.unoTelegram: t.me/transitblogFriendica: @danmatt@poliverso.orgBlue Sky: bsky.app/profile/mattiolidanie…Bio Site (tutto in un posto solo, diamine): bio.site/danielemattioli

Gli scritti sono tutelati da “Creative Commons” (qui)

Tutte le opinioni qui riportate sono da considerarsi personali. Per eventuali problemi riscontrati con i testi, si prega di scrivere a: corubomatt@gmail.com

Transit

Il blog di Alessandra Corubolo & Daniele Mattioli. On line -in varie forme- dal 2005.

^Telegram

The Political Tech Summit is organised by Partisan, a Berlin-based hub for political professionals working at the intersection of tech, campaigning, and democracy. Through events, research, and community-building, Partisan brings together practitioners from across Europe to share tools, strategies, and insights that shape modern politics.

The post Political Tech Summit appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).

The conference will reflect on the DSA and European platform regulation, including in its broader legal and political context, under the overall theme of platform governance and democracy.

The post The DSA and Platform Regulation Conference 2026 appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).

@Signor Amministratore ⁂ ciao Super Admin, volevo sapere come mai non ci sono nuove versioni del software di friendica... ? Anche la release installata su poliverso.org è di dicembre 2024. Ho visto au GitHub che negli anni precedenti c'erano sempre varie release durante l'anno, ma nel 2025 nessuna! Ho visto che c'è un branch di luglio 2025, ho anche visto una sua preview su friendica.world e devo dire che è molto buona... Molto più usabile, accessibile e ottimizzata per smartphone. Resto in attesa ciao

#friendica #release #a11y #mobile