Incontro internazionale per la pace: appello finale, “non c’è futuro se la guerra si sostituisce alla diplomazia e al dialogo nella soluzione dei conflitti”
“Chi non prega abusa della religione, persino per uccidere”. A lanciare il grido d’allarme è stato il Papa, nel suo discorso al Colosseo, a conclusione dell’Incontro internazionale di preghiera per la pace organizzato dalla Comunità di Sant’Egidio.
Alla preghiera ecumenica con il Papa, in corso al Colosseo a conclusione dell'Incontro internazionale per la pace organizzato dalla Comunità di Sant’Egidio, siedono in prima fila: sulla destra Theodoros II, papa e patriarca di Alessandria e di tutta …
The European Commission closed its Call for Evidence for the upcoming Digital Fairness Act (DFA) on 24 October 2025. EDRi urged the Commission to tackle deeply harmful forms of manipulation: addictive design, deceptive design, and unfair personalisation, which undermine people’s fundamental rights to privacy, data protection, autonomy and equality. EDRi calls for strong, binding rules that embed fairness-by-design, ban exploitative features, and reinforce Europe’s digital rulebook against growing deregulatory pressure.
Piraten Podcast 4 (27 okt 2025): Zorg en zorgen die we hebbenDeze Piraten Podcast werd opgenomen in het Blauwe Pand, Zaandam Met Sabrina, Angeline en Leontien!en dank aan: Bart
Although most modern cars have moved to using proprietary components nearly everywhere, especially when it comes to infotainment systems, for a brief moment which peaked in the 90s and 00s most cars shipped with radios that fit in a standard size opening called a DIN slot. If you wanted a new Pioneer or Kenwood stereo it was usually a simple matter to slide the factory radio out and put your choice of aftermarket head unit in its place. [Stefan] has an E39 BMW from this era and wanted to upgrade the factory radio but use the original hardware instead of replacing it.
This isn’t just a simple stereo upgrade either. [Stefan] has gone all-out for this build which he started in 2020. Beginning with a Kotlin/Jetpack Compose Linux application to handle control input from the vehicle’s various knobs and buttons he moved on to a map application and an on-screen keyboard. From there he implemented VGA to send video to the OEM screen, and now has a fully functional system based on a Raspberry Pi. It does everything the original unit can do including playing music and showing the feed from the backup camera, plus adds plenty of new, modern features like Bluetooth.
For a certain classic car enthusiast, this build hits a sweet spot of modernizing a true classic like the E39 without removing or permanently modifying any OEM components. The amount of work that went into it is pretty staggering as well, with [Stephan] putting in over 100 hours of work just to get the video signal timing correct. We also like it because it reminds us of the flash-in-the-pan “carputer” trend from the late 00s where people in the pre-smartphone age were shoving all kinds of computing horsepower in their trunks.
The flip-flop, in whichever of its several forms you encounter it, is a staple of logic design. Any time that you need to hold onto something, count, or shift bits, out it comes. We expect a flip-flop to be an integrated circuit if we use one, but most of us could knock one together with a couple of transistors.
The circuit is simplicity itself, a pair of incandescent bulbs in series, each in turn in parallel with a momentary action switch and a PTC fuse. On start-up both fuses are conducting, so one or other of them will do its job as a fuse and go high impedance. At that point its bulb will light and the other fuse will remain low impedance so its bulb will stay dark. Press the switch across the lit bulb for a few seconds however, and the circuit resets itself. The other fuse goes high impedance while the first fuse returns to low impedance, and the other bulb lights.
We’re not sure we can see much in the way of practical application for this circuit, but sometimes merely because you can is reason enough. It’s part of our 2025 Component Abuse Challenge, for which you just about still have time to make an entry yourself if you have one.
In previous episodes of this long-running series looking at the world of high-quality audio, at every point we’ve stayed in the real world of physical audio hardware. From the human ear to the loudspeaker, from the DAC to measuring distortion, this is all stuff that can happen on your bench or in your Hi-Fi rack.
We’re now going for the first time to diverge from the practical world of hardware into the theoretical world of mathematics, as we consider a very contentious topic in the world of audio. We live in a world in which it is now normal for audio to have some form of digital compression applied to it, some of which has an effect on what is played back through our speakers and headphones. When a compression algorithm changes what we hear, it’s distortion in audio terms, but how much is it distorted and how do we even measure that? It’s time to dive in and play with some audio files.
How Good A Copy Does A Copy Have To Be?
Abbey Road’s tape recorders would have been about as good as it gets. Josephenus P. Riley, CC BY 2.0. Were we to record some music with a good quality microphone and analogue tape recorder, we know that what came out of the speakers at playback would be a copy of what was heard by the microphone, subject to distortion from whatever non-linearities it has encountered in the audio path. But despite that distortion, the tape recorder is doing its best to faithfully record an exact copy of what it hears. It’s the same with a compression-free digital recording; record those musicians with a DAT machine or listen to them on a CD, and you’ll get back as good a copy as those media are capable of returning.
The trouble is that uncompressed audio takes up a lot of bandwidth, particularly when streaming over the Internet. Thus just as with any other data format, it makes sense to compress it such that it takes up less space. There are plenty of compression algorithms to choose from, but with analogue sources there are more choices than there are with text, or software. A Linux ISO has to uncompress as a perfect copy of its original otherwise it won’t run, while an image or an audio file simply has to uncompress to something that looks or sounds like the original to our meaty brains.
Those extra compression options for analogue data take advantage of this; they use so-called lossy compression in that what you get out sounds just like what you put in, but isn’t the same. This difference can be viewed as distortion, and if you have ever saved an image containing text as a JPEG file, you’ll probably have seen it as artifacts around sharply defined edges.
So if lossy compression algorithms such as MP3 introduce distortion, how can we measure this? The analogue distortion analyser featured in our last installment is of little use, because the pure sine wave it uses is very easy for the compression algorithm to encode faithfully. Compression based on Fourier analysis is always going to do a good job on a single frequency. Another solution is required, and here the Internet is of little help. It’s time to set out on my own and figure out a way to measure the distortion inherent to an MP3 file.
Math Will Give Us The Right Answer!
GNU Radio is an extremely convenient way to perform these types of measurement. At moments like these it’s great to be surrounded by other engineers, because you can mull it over and reach a solution. This distortion can’t be measured through my analogue instrumentation with a sine wave for the reasons discussed above, so it must instead be measured on a real world sample. We came up with a plan: measure the difference between two samples, compute the RMS value for that difference, then calculate the ratio between that and the RMS of the uncompressed sample.
As is so often the case with this type of task, it’s a relatively straightforward task using GNU Radio as a DSP workshop. I created a GNU Radio project to do the job, and fed it an uncompressed and compressed version of the same sample. I used a freely available recording of some bongo drums, and to make my compressed file I encoded it as a 128kbit MP3, then decoded it back to a WAV file. You can find it in my GitHub account, should you wish to play with it yourself.
Math Will Give Us The Wrong Answer!
The result it gives for my two bongo samples varies a little around 0.03, or 3%, depending upon where you are in the sample. What that in effect means is that the MP3 encoded version is around 3% different from the uncompressed one. If that were a figure measured on an analogue circuit using my trusty HP analyser I would say it wasn’t a very good quality circuit at all, and I would definitely be able to hear the distortion when listening to the audio. The fact that I can’t hear it raises a fundamental question as to what distortion really is, and the effect it has upon listeners.
What I would understand as distortion due to non-linearities in the audio path, is in reality harmonic distortion. Harmonics of the input signal are being created; if my audio path is a guitar pedal they are harmonics I want, while if it’s merely a very low quality piece of audio gear they’re unwelcome degradation of the listening experience. This MP3 file has a measurable 3% distortion, yet I am not hearing it as such when I listen. The answer to why that is the case is that this is not harmonic distortion, instead it’s a very similar version of the same sound, which differs by only 3% from the original. People with an acute ear can hear it, but most listeners will not notice the difference.
So In Summary: This Distortion Isn’t Distortion Like The Others
So in very simple terms, I’ve measured distortion, but not distortion in the same sense of the word. I’ve proven that an MP3 encoded audio source has a significant loss of information over its uncompressed ancestor, but noted that it is nowhere near as noticable in the finished product as for example a 3% harmonic distortion would be. It’s thus safe to say that this exercise, while interesting, is a little bit pointless because it produces a misleading figure. I think I have achieved something though, by shining some light on the matter of audio compression and subsequent quality loss. In short: for most of you it won’t matter, while the rest of you are probably using a lossless algorithm such as FLAC anyway.
It’s a truism that a computer must boot before it begins to operate. Nowadays that bootstrapping process is automatic, but in the case of the very first home computers, it was very much a hands-on affair. That’s what all those switches and blinkenlights are for on the front panel of the Altair 8800 — laboriously flicking each bit into memory as required to get your program going.
[Linus Åkesson] missed those very early days, and wanted to see what it was like, and clicking virtual switches on an emulator wasn’t going to cut it. He realized that he could set up an ATmega88 for front-panel booting, and proceeded to do just that.
The article linked above goes into good detail; for those of you who prefer video, we’ve embedded his presentation below. They say the book is always better, but to get the full story, you’ll really want both in this case. The video contains a lot more context and build details, but neglects to mention some issues he had with programming that are detailed in the text. In short, the Write Page bit needs to be written to the Command register to use the page buffer. Which does make sense, but tripped [Linus] up at first.
Then again, this use case isn’t exactly detailed in the datasheet. ATmega88 is an old chip, but not Intel 8008 old, so that’s no surprise. Which is exactly what makes this a good hack! The only thing lacking is blinkenlights to allow one to see the contents of the registers. [Linus] discusses the idea of putting them in, but is apparently happy with this more minimalist approach.
These days, most of the media we consume is digital. We still watch movies and TV shows, but they’re all packaged in digital files that cram in many millions of pixels and as many audio channels as we could possibly desire.
Back in the day, though, engineering limitations meant that media on film or tape were limited to analog stereo audio at best. And yet, the masterminds at Dolby were able to create a surround sound format that could operate within those very limitations, turning two channels in to four. What started out as a cinematic format would bring surround sound to the home—all the way back in 1982!
From The Silver Screen
Stereo optical sound tracks can be seen on the right of this scan of a 35 mm film print. On the far left is the SDDS digital audio track in blue, with the Dolby Digital audio track visible in between the sprocket holes. Modern film prints often include multiple audio formats like this so a single print can be sent to a wide range of cinemas, whatever their equipment. Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Dolby’s surround sound efforts were not initially aimed at the home, but at the cinema. Classically, movies were distributed on 35 mm film with a mono soundtrack encoded optically alongside the image frames themselves, with an upper frequency limit usually topping out at around 12 kHz. By the latter half of the 20th century, this was considered quite poor compared to the much richer stereo sound that filmgoers would otherwise be used to from media such as vinyl records or tape systems. A great deal of research and development was pursued by the industry, with all manner of alternative formats envisaged to make stereo sound viable for movie theatres.
Dolby’s solution was to team up with Kodak, finding a way to squeeze two optical audio tracks into the space where there was only one previously. Dolby’s well-developed noise reduction techniques came in handy in this regard, making the most of the lesser dynamic range available in the compressed space. In 1976, the technology became known as Dolby Stereo, or Dolby SVA, for Stereo Variable Area—the latter referring to the fact that the sound amplitude was encoded by variations in the area of transparency in the film’s audio track.
Dolby had successfully figured out how to distribute full stereo audio with 35 mm film prints. However, the work didn’t stop there. By applying similar techniques to those used in the burgeoning quadrophonic sound market, Dolby was able to create a rudimentary analog surround sound system. This was achieved with the use of a phase-matrix system, which could encode four channels into two stereo channels—left, right, center, and surround, with the latter sitting behind the viewer. A decoder would then split them back out to four channels for playback. This was achieved in a way that allowed the same stereo audio to be played back on regular stereo or mono systems without adding noticeable interference or noise. A Dolby SDU4 decoder, as typically used in mixing and production of Dolby Surround content. Credit: via eBayNote the two channel inputs – L and R – and outputs for all four channels – L, R, C, and S. Credit: via eBay In Dolby’s system, when producing the stereo soundtrack for a film print, the encoder would deliver audio for the left speaker directly to the left channel (L), and audio for the right speaker directly to the right channel (R). The center (C) speaker audio would be fed to both left and right channels equally, albeit attenuated by 3 dB. As for the surround (S) speaker audio, this would be attenuated by 3 dB, bandpassed from 100 Hz to 7 kHz, and then routed to the left and right channels, but with a phase shift of +90 degrees and -90 degrees, respectively. This method meant systems with only stereo or mono playback could play the same audio seamlessly as a two-channel or single-channel mix without issue. The surround content would cancel out, and the viewer would just get a regular stereo or mono output.
This method created a stereo recording which could then be decoded back into four channels, albeit not completely discretely—you weren’t getting four distinct channels, so much as two distinct channels with a center and surround channel derived from them with limited separation. In particular, the center channel was often used to deliver dialogue as if it was coming straight out of the screen, while the surround channel was used for more diffuse effects.
Dolby’s cinema audio decoders worked by using some basic logic circuitry to give priority to the channels that had the highest signal level by attenuating the others slightly, which created some additional separation. A time delay of up to 100 ms was also used on the surround channel installed behind the viewer. This ensured that sound leakage from the the left and right channels didn’t confuse the viewer by appearing to come from behind, thanks to the precedence effect—where the human auditory system perceives direction of a sound based on the first arriving waveform.
Bringing It Home
Dolby Surround decoders did not provide a center channel, instead just offering L, R, and S. Credit: author Dolby’s system was designed for cinema use, but it was by no means limited to such facilities. By 1982, with VHS and Betamax video cassettes started offering Hi-Fi stereo sound, it became entirely possible to deliver the same experience to home viewers in exactly the same way. This actually eased production of home releases for movie studios, which could simply reuse their existing stereo mixdown from the theatrical release. This technology was marketed as Dolby Surround. It came with some simplifications, using only passive decoding and most notably eliminating the center channel. This allowed home decoders to be cheaper, instead just turning the stereo audio into left, right, and a rear surround channel. The latter channel was still limited to 7 kHz, and was recovered by taking the difference of the left and right channels. This only provided separation of as little as 3dB between the surround and other channels. Dolby Pro Logic decoders performed more like the original cinema decoders, and offered the center channel as well. Things would improve just a few years later in 1987, with the advent of Dolby Pro Logic decoders. These used so-called “steering logic” that was more similar to the decoders used in original theatre implementations. This involved decoding the stereo tracks into four channels, and monitoring the dominant prevailing direction of the sound. Based on this, the amplifiers for each of the four channels (L,R, C, S) would be varied to create greater separation of up to 30 dB between channels. For example, if the sound was loudest on the left channel, the other channels might have their output lowered to emphasize the effect. This method involved careful control of the amplifiers to ensure total output levels remained relatively constant to avoid audible discontinuities. Dolby would continue to iterate on the system, later developing Pro Logic II decoding in 2000. This was designed to scale Dolby Surround content to suit 5.1 channel systems that were becoming popular with the rise of DVD and more advanced home theatre systems. Pro Logic IIx would follow soon after, doing the same but with 6.1 and 7.1 systems. Stereo-capable formats like Laserdisc often featured Dolby Surround encoding on releases. Credit: Dillan Payne, CC BY-SA 2.0 Dolby’s engineering trick was intended to make multi-channel surround sound possible in an economically and technically viable way, for both cinemas and home viewers alike. It largely succeeded, particularly because of its all-around compatibility. Movie studios and TV stations were able to sell or broadcast Dolby Surround content perfectly easily without impacting the larger install base of viewers that only had mono or stereo speaker setups. The only requirement was to spend some extra time finessing the mix at the encoding stage, something most were already doing for theatrical releases anyway. Many people never realized that their VHS tapes or Laserdiscs had surround sound capability, because they never invested in a decoder and a multi-speaker setup at home. A huge range of home media came complete with surround content from the 1980s onwards, but a lot of consumers didn’t notice. If you ever wondered how The Simpsons was broadcast in surround, now you know. Credit: screenshot Matrix decoding systems like Dolby Surround eventually fell out of style as technology moved on. With the advent of the DVD and other more contemporary digital formats, it became very simple to simply include extra audio channels in the media itself. There was no need to try and mix four down to two channels and then expand them back out—you could just include four, five, or even more audio channels right in the original content. This had the benefit of providing complete channel separation. There was no decoding process that would leave your surround channels with content from other channels in them.
Dolby Surround is one of those fun technologies from yesteryear. It reminds us that a bit of maths and creativity can enable impressive feats amidst even quite restrictive technological limitations. We might not have to work that way anymore, but it’s always instructive to learn these lessons from our recent past.
The earliest useful plastics were made out of natural materials like cellulose and casein, but since the Bakelite revolution, their use has dwindled away and left them mostly as curiosities and children’s science experiments. Fortunately, though, the raw materials for bioplastics are readily available in most grocery stores, and as [Ben] from NightHawkInLight demonstrates, it’s still possible to find new uses for them.
His first recipe was for a clear gelatine thermoplastic, using honey as a plasticizer, which he formed into the clear packet around some instant noodles: simply throw the whole packet into hot water, and the plastic dissolves away. With some help from the home bioplastics investigator [Giestas], [Ben] next created a starch-based plastic out of starch, vinegar, and glycerine. Starch is a good infrared emitter in the atmospheric window, and researchers have made a starch-plastic aerogel that radiates enough heat to become cooler than its surroundings. Unfortunately, this requires freeze-drying, and while encouraging freezer burn in a normal freezer can have the same effect, it’ll take a few months to get a usable quantity of the material.
The other problem with starch-based plastics is their tendency to absorb water, at least when paired with plasticizers like glycerine or honey. Bioplastics based on alginate, however, are easy to make waterproof. A solution of sodium alginate, derived from seaweed, reacts with calcium ions to make a cross-linked waterproof film. Unfortunately, the film forms so quickly that it separates the solutions of calcium ions from the alginate, and the reaction stops. To get around this, [Ben] mixed a sodium alginate solution with powdered calcium carbonate, which is insoluble and therefore won’t react. To make the plastic set, he added glucono delta lactone, which slowly breaks down in water to release gluconic acid, which dissolves the calcium carbonate and lets the reaction proceed.
Questa mattina verso le 8 e 20 mi hanno operato di ernia inguinale e tardo pomeriggio mi hanno fatto uscire.
Inizialmente mi sentivo bene, certo il dolore ci stava e difatti facevo passetti, ma alla fine ho girato senza problemi.
Però mentre stavo cucinando una frittata ho iniziato a non sentirmi bene, con giramenti di testa e leggera nausea. Mi sono messo seduto alla tavola sperando passare, ma andava sempre peggio e vedevo tutto luminoso come se fissassi il sole, Alla fine nel tentativo di andare sul letto sono caduto due volte, la seconda sono rimasto per terra a 4 di spade, sudavo tantissimo, ma piano piano mi sono sentito sempre meglio, poi dopo qualche minuto sulle fresche piastrelle mi sono rialzato in piedi e potuto cenare senza problemi, per per poi andare sul letto.
Ho dormito fino ad ora praticamente. Ora vi scrivo questo post sorseggiando un orzo alla scrivania del computer 🙂
Orban: 'io e Meloni d'accordo sulle grandi questioni
ne ero certa... purtroppo. già sappiamo che la meloni dice di si a tutti. è molto comprensiva. e non mettetemi in bocca parole di altri: è una banderuola. essa stessa si definirebbe "flessibile". nell'interesse dell'italia naturalmente. ma ahimé senza spina dorsale.
Nel pomeriggio di sabato 8 novembre presenteremo per la prima volta le quaranta osservazioni che abbiamo presentato nella valutazione di impatto ambientale contro l'inceneritore illegale.
Metteremo in piazza le forzature che Gualtieri commissario dai pieni poteri porta avanti in spregio al diritto.
Chi come noi si batte in difesa della terra dove viviamo non ha bisogno della messa in scena organizzata in Municipio dove ne tornano a parlare dopo 3 anni.
Un casco azzurro con gli unicorni. Ginocchiere fucsia. La richiesta di iscriversi a danza. Scelte semplici. Comuni, se a farle fosse una bambina. Ma quando a chiedere è un bambino...
L’uso della giustizia per consolidare il potere e attaccare l’opposizione ha subito una nuova accelerazione in questi giorni in Turchia con una serie di iniziative pilotate con ogni probabilità dal presidente Erdogan e dal suo partito AKP (Giustizia …
@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) Le linee guida per l’applicazione dei criteri di premialità incentivano l'adozione di tecnologie di sicurezza informatica. L'Acn ha messo anche a disposizione uno strumento in grado di interpretare i contenuti di una Bill of
Fermate le rotative! L'evento di moda del 2025 è qui! Decorate la vostra testa con questo elegante e disinvolto cappellino da baseball blu navy, con scritta di Phaedra Charles. La comunità accademica, scientifica e pro-fact globale.
Immagino che tu sia venuto a chiedermi scusa? Spero di sì, visti gli anni in cui ti sei preso gioco di me e ti sei lamentato di come stessi rovinando la conoscenza. Nel frattempo, hai trasformato il tuo ambiente informativo in un film snuff digitale ipercapitalista e post-verità.
Se ti interessano le discussioni sull'etica nelle nuove tecnologie o vuoi pubblicare i tuoi contributi, segui il gruppo Activitypub @Etica Digitale (Feddit)
Officina Stellare e Global Aerospace Technologies Group (Gatg) hanno annunciato un’operazione di integrazione che darà vita al primo polo della Difesa quotato in Italia nato dalla fusione di Pmi tecnologiche. L’operazione veste i panni di un reverse take-over, con Gatg che verrà incorporata in Officina
L’ammiraglio Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, presidente del Comitato militare della Nato, ha parlato alle commissioni Esteri e Difesa riunite per esporre la Strategia industriale europea per il settore della Difesa. Tono misurato e obiettivo operativo che mira a spiegare come cambiano minacce e
Dal 3 novembre LinkedIn addestrerà i suoi sistemi utilizzando i dati personali degli utenti che non si saranno opposti. Sul sito del #GarantePrivacy la scheda informativa per esercitare il diritto di opposizione
Gli utenti LinkedIn - e i non utenti i cui dati possono essere comunque presenti sul social network perché pubblicati da altri utenti - hanno il diritto di opporsi al trattamento dei propri dati personali per l’addestramento dei sistemi IA
Nel contesto di una competizione sempre più serrata tra droni da combattimento, Shield AI, società statunitense specializzata in sistemi di autonomia per la difesa, presenta X-bat, un velivolo a decollo verticale pensato per operare senza piste e con prestazioni da caccia. Svelato a
[quote]Nell’economia dei videogiochi esiste un flusso costante di denaro. Piccole transazioni che generano miliardi di ricavi. Servono per acquistare le monete virtuali da spendere durante il gameplay. Con questi gettoni… L'articolo Gioco sporco, se i videogame diventano il bancomat della criminalità su
Avio chiude i primi nove mesi del 2025 con risultati in forte progresso e un portafoglio ordini ai massimi storici, confermando la guidance per l’intero esercizio. I ricavi netti raggiungono 351 milioni di euro, in aumento del 26,3% rispetto allo stesso periodo del 2024,
Il colosso del software non ha inoltre risposto a una richiesta di accesso relativa a Microsoft 365 Education, ampiamente utilizzato nelle scuole europee. Microsoft ha invece cercato di trasferire tutta la responsabilità alle scuole locali. Sebbene le scuole interessate debbano fornire dati di accesso più dettagliati e ulteriori informazioni sulla privacy, secondo la decisione, spetta ora a Microsoft chiarire definitivamente in che modo utilizza i dati degli utenti per i propri scopi aziendali.
Favorable decision by the Austrian DSB: Microsoft Education 365 may not track school kids and Microsoft is ordered to provide full access to kids' data.
Ivan Bk
in reply to Max - Poliverso 🇪🇺🇮🇹 • • •