Mysterious Files PH

In the world of silicon semiconductors, the process of creating transistors and similar structures involves various rounds of modifications and additions in order to create the requisite functional layers. A less involved approach would simply create these structures in-situ, with research the past years having focused on transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) monolayers to do exactly this. Recently [Seok Young Min] et al. reported (paywalled, Phys.org summary) on creating transistors in-situ in a tungsten ditelluride (WTe₂) monolayer.

By selectively changing parts of the top layer into tungsten oxide (WO_x) as an insulator and other sections into n-type WS₂ and p-type WSe₂ the researchers were able to create functional MOSFETs, without the normally requisite grafting on of different materials. An obvious advantage of this is that this can be done at an atomic scale, potentially achieving densities significantly higher than with industry standard silicon semiconductor technology.

WTe₂ is not the only TMDC that could be viable here, of course, with other researchers investigating the use of MoSe₂ for a similar purpose, as in this research by [N. Lu] et al. from 2014. This being the creation of 2D semiconductors, referring to the thin layers of these monolayer TMDCs, along with potentially other materials such as graphene.

Some disappointing, but perhaps not entirely unsurprising news this week out of Denmark — after announcing last year that they would transition away from Microsoft’s proprietary software, the realities of making it work seem to have caught the government off guard. The word is that a trial program immediately ran into problems when government employees that had been given Collabora tried to collaborate with their peers running Office, and has since been quietly abandoned.

Although there’s probably a joke to be made about different parts of the government not knowing what the other ones are talking about, the reality is that if one group of staffers can’t reliably access the data being produced by another, that’s a pretty big problem. Of course, had they simply asked us nerds, we could have advised them that these sort of issues are inevitable if you don’t fully commit to the effort.

Had the entire government moved to the Open Document Format (ODF) at once they would have avoided the issue, at least when it came to newly created documents, but obviously that’s a considerably larger undertaking than installing Collabora or OpenOffice on a few dozen machines and calling it a day. There’s no word yet on how this stumble will impact Denmark’s larger effort to free themselves of proprietary software, but we’d hazard a guess it’s not a great sign. Hopefully things go better for the Dutch.

Speaking of users trying to improve their personal software situation, The Verge has an interesting article on a recent trend of frustrated users pointing AI tools like Claude at their smart TVs, with a few success stories posted to social media showing off interfaces that have been stripped of ads or replaced with something else entirely. It’s compelling stuff for anyone who’s unhappy with their current smart TV experience, but the whole thing isn’t quite as technically impressive as it might seem on the surface.

As the TV’s in question are running Android, all the AI tools need to do is connect to them over Android Debug Bridge (ADB) and uninstall any offending packages that might be providing ads, and similarly creating a customized launcher interface is a matter of spinning up an Android app and installing it over the network. The results may look like arcane magic to the uninitiated, so we appreciate The Verge pointing out that it’s all pretty basic stuff for anyone familiar with Android development.

On the subject of extracting unwanted components, a delicate operation to remove the masts of the sunken WWII cargo ship SS Richard Montgomery was completed successfully earlier this week off the coast of Sheerness, England. To those unfamiliar with this particular vessel that might not sound like a big deal, but when you’re dealing with a wreck holding an estimated 1,400 metric tons of explosives that have been deteriorating since 1944, even approaching the area needs careful planning and coordination.

There was a concern that the masts and their supporting structures were on the verge of collapsing into the hull of the wreck, which experts warned could potentially trigger an explosion large enough to endanger life and property. Actually removing the explosives from the ship itself will be a far larger undertaking, but at least for the time being, removing the masts has helped stabilize the situation.

Finally, if you’re looking to learn about something a little more local than a potentially explosive situation in Sheerness (apologies to anyone in Sheerness), check out Local Wikipedia. Created by [Ed Jefferson], the site lets you filter Wikipedia pages by their distance from your location or whatever other landmark you wish. By default it shows results that are within 1.5 miles, but if you don’t have anything too exciting within range it will start opening up the radius to pull in more results.

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.

With the topic of marble clocks having been quite well explored at this point, it raises the question of how easy it would be to take the basic principle and create a text display using black and white marbles. As [Ivan Miranda] found out in a recent marble text scroller project, this is far from easy.

The reason why a scrolling text display was picked comes down to not wanting to be limited to a fixed number of digits. This resulted in a round wheel design, with inner steel ball bearings and a stepper motor on both the wheel and an inner selector mechanism. These respectively align the marble channels and pick the right color of marbles to be dropped into any of the wheel’s slots, creating the right sequence of marbles for the target text.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about it is that it’s an absolutely massive structure, yet it’s all 3D printed and bolted together. It took a number of trial-and-error cycles, and debugging issues like the IR sensors getting confused by daylight, but it now mostly seems to work all right.

There are still some remaining issues, such as having to manually home the wheel before starting, and the ratio of black vs white marbles can cause unexpected gaps in the final text. Despite this the text is quite legible and definitely infinite.

Telephony is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, being able to talk to people in far off places is kind of neat, at least in theory. On the other hand, you’re usually reliant on a centralized network, which isn’t ideal to the mindset of most hackers.[Gautam]’s MeshLive project deals with that last one, offering a decentralized mesh network solution based on Bluetooth for Android phones that can handle both voice and video.

Rather than relying on dedicated hardware, this particular mesh piggybacks on your phone, and exists only as an Android application. Calls are end-to-end encrypted for both voice and video — though two-way video calling is still experimental. More testing has gone into video broadcasting, where a stream goes out one-way. The capability is available for voice, as well.

Each user has a unique identifier that can be scanned to create contacts, but it isn’t otherwise clearly identifiable to everybody. You’ll only appear with a random name that changes every 15 minutes to other users in range who aren’t your contacts. Range is of course the Achilles heel of this project, since it’s using the Bluetooth hardware of ordinary smartphones. It’s possible to extend the range of Bluetooth significantly with the right hardware, but we imagine most folks aren’t carrying directional antennas around with them. While every phone does forward the signal to as many others as it can, it can only do so for about 20 meters.

Of course LoRa remains the protocol of choice for mesh networking, though it’s normally used for text messages only. We have seen voice packets over LoRa, but anything LoRa requires dedicated hardware while this only requires an app.

The Nintendo DSi was released in November 2008, and boasted a new feature not formerly seen on the brand’s handhelds—it had two cameras, inside and outside. It let the console take photos, a feature rather fitting given it was an era in which phone cameras had become the norm. Only, it wasn’t so good out of the box. However, [gavff] recently found an accessory from way back when that aimed to make the DSi’s camera somewhat more capable.

For some reason, the console accessories company Nyko decided that that the Nintendo DSi deserved an 8x optical zoom lens. Never mind that the console’s cameras were limited to a resolution of just 640 x 480 pixels, it was deemed important that the handheld have the ability to capture images of things that were somewhat farther away. The lens mounted to a specially-designed case that fit around the original DSi’s shell. It’s not particularly clear what the intended use case was, but if you wanted to expand the capability of your DSi camera, this was one way to do it. You could get some pretty sharp photos if you knew what you were doing, as [gavff] demonstrates in the video.

The video then takes things farther, putting an even larger, sillier telescopic camera lens on the DSi. [gavff] used it to capture a photo of the Moon, with the benefit that unlike modern smartphones, there’s no AI faking the results. The video also touches on the goofy Mad Catz flash accessory that used the DSi’s charge port.

We love seeing silly lenses on cameras that were never supposed to host them. Also, isn’t it wonderful that our ancient “Nintendo DS Hacks” category is getting some love again after all this time? We’ve actually published a bunch of DS hacks this year.

There are two kinds of cyberdeck: the kind someone makes on a lark and operates purely on ‘rule of cool’, and the kind designed to do practical work. The Slurptop by [Slurpburgers] is decidedly in the second category — but that doesn’t mean it lacks for coolness. What’s cooler than a power-tool battery?

That last feature might make this closer to the Neuromancer definition of cyberdeck than most featured on these pages. You still can’t jack it into your cortex, but it does have the ‘assemble from off the shelf components at need’ vibe of the original concept. It also means there should be plenty of battery power to keep working with the power-hungry x86-based GMKtec MiniPC that runs this thing.

If the battery gets low, which it will after about 4 hours or so, swapping is easy — but not hot swapping. Luckily [Slurpburgers] grabbed a module meant for Uninterruptible Power Supplies to swap over to wall current, so this device can be plugged in whenever necessary. Alas, charging must be done on the factory charger, not the device, but that swapping really adds to the ‘future of the past’ cyberpunk flare of the device in our opinion.

Speaking of the past, why did we ever stop putting mechanical keyboards and trackballs onto laptops? The inputs on this thing are glorious, and this writer’s hands envy the ergonomic curve of it while typing away on an old HP Pavilion’s sad and squishy low-profile keys. The trackball itself is a minor hack, being made using the guts of an old gaming mouse. Not everyone will approve of every design choice here, but that’s the point of doing it yourself — so like [Slurpburger], you can have it your way.

This is hardly the first time we’ve seen a clacky laptop but we can’t recall a cyberdeck made with tool batteries before.

Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip!

These days we take high-speed networking for granted, but it can be difficult to get vintage computers talking to modern machines. To help solve this problem [jaime] came up with Meatloaf which can provide files to a Commodore regardless of their location or medium of storage.

Meatloaf is an ESP32 device at its core, which plugs in to any of several Commodore computers through their IEC serial port. Many similar systems exist to bridge the gap between the modern world and the now-retro one, but this one connects to a dedicated service which points towards files no matter where they’re stored. There is some local storage, but it can also retrieve files from any active URL, and Meatloaf retrieves the files and then sends them to the Commodore over that serial link.

Part of what makes this unique is that the user doesn’t need to configure Meatloaf in any particular way, everything is done from the Commodore as long as the URL is known to the user. The system can even parse nested files like archive file types and send them along to the computer just like it would if they were on a period-correct floppy drive. There’s a GitHub project page as well for anyone looking to get into the weeds of this serial data interface.