Mysterious Files PH

We’ll start things off this week with a story that’s developing more than 25 billion kilometers from Earth — on Friday, NASA announced that the command had been sent to shut down Voyager 1’s Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) instrument. As the power produced by the spacecraft’s aging radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) continues to dwindle, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been systematically turning off various systems to extend the mission for as long as possible. It’s believed that deactivating LECP should buy them another year, during which engineers hope to implement a more ambitious power-saving routine. If this sounds a bit familiar, you’re probably thinking of Voyager 2. The plug was pulled on its LECP instrument back in March of 2025.

The JPL engineers hope that their new plan may allow them to reactivate previously disabled systems on the twin space probes, but even if everything goes according to plan, there’s no fighting the inevitable. At some point, there simply won’t be enough juice in the RTGs to keep the lights on. Although it’s going to be a sad day when we have to bring you that news, surviving a half-century in space is one hell of a run.

Speaking of ending a run, just a week after Amazon announced that pre-2012 Kindles would no longer be supported, the company is letting users know that the Kindle software for PCs will be discontinued in June. In its current form, at least. As Good e-Reader reports, Amazon is developing a new client for users who want to access the Kindle ecosystem from their computers, but it will only run on Windows 11. Since older software could be used to strip DRM from purchased ebooks, it seems likely this is another attempt to lock the platform down.

We’re not fans of arbitrary limits being placed on ebooks and the devices that read them, but on the other hand, there are definitely systems out there that could stand to be tightened up a bit. For example, research out of Quarkslab has shown that the electronic control unit (ECU) from a wrecked vehicle can reveal a surprising amount of information.

After picking up a used ECU, they were able to dump its NAND flash chip and decode the log files it contained. It turns out the car had GPS logs going back to the day it rolled off the assembly line, and the researchers were able to reconstruct every trip it ever made.

By cross-referencing the last recorded coordinates with social media posts, they were even able to find pictures of the crash that took the vehicle out of commission. It’s bad enough that personal information can be scraped off of secondhand hard drives; now we’ve got to worry about what happens to our cars after they get hauled off to the junkyard.

If these are the sort of stories that keep you on two wheels rather than four, you may be interested in the latest innovation from Škoda Auto. In an effort to reduce collisions with pedestrians, they’ve developed a bike bell that penetrates active noise cancellation (ANC) systems. The logic goes like this: if someone is walking around with headphones that feature ANC, they might not hear the bell of an approaching bike. So they teamed up with researchers from the University of Salford to essentially find the weaknesses in existing ANC systems.

As you might have guessed, irregular noises are harder to block out than constant tones. Researchers uncovered a gap between 750 and 780 Hz where sounds could sneak through. The mechanical bell uses both principles to defeat ANC, and in testing, it was shown to provide headphone-wearing pedestrians  more time to react to an approaching bicycle.

Finally, we’ll bring this week’s post full circle by starting and ending on a space story: earlier this week, PBS released the hour-long documentary Artemis II: Return to the Moon on YouTube. Watching PBS programming on YouTube might seem a bit odd, but that’s the world we live in these days. At any rate, the video is a fascinating look into what went into the recently concluded Moon mission and has us even more excited for Artemis III and beyond.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

Noise cancelling headphones are a great way to insulate yourself from the bustle of the city, but due to their power requirements, continuous use means frequent recharging. [Alessandro Sgarzi] has an elegant and unique solution — powering the noise cancelling electronics by harvesting energy from the ambient noise of the city via a sheet of piezoelectric film.

This impressive feat is achieved using a LTC3588-1 power harvesting IC and a pair of supercapacitors, while an STM32L011K4T6 microcontroller processes the input from a MEMS microphone and feeds a low-power class D amplifier. This circuit consumes an astounding 1.7 nW, a power that a noisy city is amply able to supply. Audio meanwhile comes via a traditional 3.5 mm connector, which we are told is the cool kids’ choice nowadays anyway.

We like this project, and since it’s part of our 2026 Green Powered Challenge, it’s very much in the spirit of the thing. You’ve just got time to get your own entry in, so get a move on!

Sometimes, as hackers and makers, we can end up with messy lashed-together gear that is neither reliable nor tidy. Rackmounting your stuff can be a great way to improve the robustness and liveability of your setup. If you find this appealing, you might like CageMaker by [WebMaka].

This parametric OpenSCAD script can generate mounts for all kinds of stuff. Maybe you have a little network switch that’s just a tangle of wires on your desk, or a few pieces of audio gear that are loosely stacked on top of each other and looking rather unkempt. It would be trivial with this tool to create some 3D printed adapters to get all that stuff laced up nice and neat in a rack instead.

If you’re eager to get tinkering, you can try out the browser-based version quite easily. We’ve featured similar work before, too—many a maker has trod the path of rackmounting, as it turns out.

The Unity game development platform was first released in 2005, long after the PlayStation had ceased to be a relevant part of the console market. And yet, you could use Unity to develop for the platform, if you so desire, thanks to the efforts of [Bandwidth] and the team behind psxsplash. 

Yes, it really is possible to design games for the original PlayStation using Unity and Lua. Using a tool called SplashEdit, you can whip up scenes, handle scripting, loading screens, create UIs, and do all the other little bits required to lash a game together. You can then run your creation via the psxsplash engine, deploying to emulator or even real hardware with a single click. Currently, development requires a Windows or Linux machine and Unity 6000.0+, but other than that, it’s pretty straightforward to start making games with a modern toolset for one of the most popular consoles of all time. Just remember, you’ve only got 33 MHz and 2MB of RAM to play with.

We still love to see the legendary grey machine get used and hacked in new and inventive ways, so many decades after release.

Thanks to [Nick] for the tip!

Ever encountered a minor annoying bug in a video game? How about one dating back to 2018? Usually, you have no hope of fixing it, but this time is different. [Joey Cheerio] shows the first-time programmer approach to (with great difficulty) fixing a bouncy ball prop turning invisible when shot in Team Fortress 2.

It starts with a band-aid solution that hides the problem: just turn off jiggle physics! While that works, it also affects many other models in the game, and doesn’t tackle the root cause. Time to investigate. Because this ball often goes overlooked, [Joey Cheerio] didn’t even realize that it was supposed to have jiggle physics, accidentally removing it. Turns out, after scouring the internet for old footage, it’s supposed to jiggle after all.

Back to square one, [Joey Cheerio] infers that the jiggle bone accidentally removed was related to the problem, eventually figuring out that the specific type of jiggle bone used (is_boing) caused the issue. Time to dig in the code. Tracking down the problem is no small feat for someone who’s never programmed before, even with the help of LLMs, but eventually, at 4 in the morning, a breakthrough! The ball no longer turned invisible but retained the intended jiggle.

At the limits of his knowledge on the subject, [Joey Cheerio] posts his partial progress so far to GitHub, where [ficool2] tracks down the real problem and turns this second band-aid into a proper fix. [Joey Cheerio] finishes up by explaining the math of what exactly went wrong.

When Ridge Racer hit the arcades in the early 1990s, it came in a few different versions. The last variant used three large CRTs to create a wraparound display for the player. Incredibly rare, it’s believed that only a single-digit number of machines remain in existence. [beaumotplage] has secured a remaining example, and been working to preserve this historical artifact.

The first mission when it comes to this machine was to dump the ROMs, which have thus far not been preserved in any major archive. With that done, [beaumotplage] worked to hack a version of MAME that could emulate the Three Monitor Version’s unique mode of operation. As it turns out, each screen is driven by its own arcade board, with the three boards linked via C139 serial links. To emulate this, the trick was simply to write some C139 linkup code and run three versions of MAME all at once, letting them communicate with each other as the original boards would have. It’s a little janky in operation right now, but it does work!

You can download the hacked version of MAME for three-monitor operation here, though note that this does not include the ROM dumps from the machine itself. We look forward to seeing if the hardware ends up getting a full restoration back to operational standard, too.

Overall, this work goes to show that arcade preservation and archival work sometimes requires getting deep into the nitty-gritty technical stuff.

There are two UNIVAC 1219B computers that have survived since the 1960s and one of them is even operational. [Nathan Farlow] wanted to run a Minecraft server on it, so he did. After a lot of work, of course, which is described in a detailed blog post, and, a YouTube video by [TheScienceElf] we’ve embedded below.

The UNIVAC is a seriously weird architecture by modern standards: it’s got eighteen-bit words — yeah, not even a power of two — and one’s compliment arithmatic with a weird signed zero thing going on. There’s one 36-bit and one 18-bit register, and only 40,960 words of memory. Eighteen-bit words. Yeah, it was the 1960s and they were making it up as they went along.

[Nathan] wasn’t, entirely, as this weird system is both well-documented and already had an emulator — in BASIC, of all things. [TheScienceElf] used the docs and the existing emulator to recreate his own in Rust so he could test their somewhat crazy plan without wasting cycles on real hardware. The plan? Well, there are really only two options if you want to build modern software for a niche architecture: one is to add niche support to something like GCC, and the other is to write a RISC V emulator and compile to that. We’ve seen that second one before, and that’s the route [Nathan] took.

Of course, [Nathan] is a machine learning guy, so he made the best possible use of LLMs — though it’s interesting to see that unlike Z80 Assembly, Claude Code really couldn’t wrap its virtual head around the UNIVAC’s assembly language, and [Nathan] had to bang out the RISC V emulator himself. Emulator in hand, [Nathan] and friends had code to run on the museum UNIVAC. A single frame of an NES game took 40 minutes, but hey, at least it finished before they got back from lunch.

[TheScienceElf]’s YouTube treatment teases hosting Minecraft, but it wasn’t a full server, just the login portion. That they were able to get TCP/IP over serial and set up a handshake between a 2020s laptop and a 1960s computer is still mighty impressive. Just the work the Vintage Computer Federation put in to get and keep this antique running is mighty impressive all on its own, but it’s wonderful they let people play with it.