Mysterious Files PH

Although the ReactOS project is in no rush to dethrone Windows as the desktop operating system of choice, this doesn’t mean that some real changes aren’t happening. Most recently two big changes got merged, the first pertaining to the separate boot- and live CD images that are now merged into a single image, and the second being a new PnP-aware ATA storage stack for ATA and AHCI devices, with NT6+ compatibility.

Although there is still a separate live CD for now, this first change means that testing and installing ReactOS becomes easier, and that the old-school text-based installer may soon be on its way out as well.

Having the new ATA storage stack in place will translate into much better compatibility with real hardware, including the ability to use more hardware to install on and boot from compared to the old UniATA driver.

Combined, these two changes should bring the ReactOS installation and usage experience a lot closer to that of Windows, as well as many Linux distros. If you had issues with the OS on real hardware, this might be just the right time to give it another shake and provide detailed feedback to the developers if any remaining issues are encountered.

Thanks to [jeditobe] for the tip.

Software that collects public data from the Internet and uses it to provide half-assed answers to your questions might seem like a modern craze, but today we bid farewell to a website that helped pioneer pretend conversations all the way back in 1997 — as of May 1st, Ask Jeeves is no more.

Well, technically they dropped the “Jeeves” part back in 2006. Since then it’s just been Ask.com, but as the name implies the idea was more or less the same. Rather than the relatively rigid parameters and keywords required by traditional search engines, you could ask Jeeves questions about the world using natural language. Early advertisements showed the virtual valet answering arbitrary questions like “How many calories in a banana?,” which of course today seems commonplace and utterly unimpressive, but was a pretty wild for the 1990s.

It might seem surprising that a site designed from day one to offer a human-like Q&A experience should fold right as such technology is becoming commonplace. But of course, that commonality is the problem. When Google can answer your questions just as well (or poorly…) as Jeeves or anyone else, what’s the benefit for the average Internet user to seek out another service? But it’s still somewhat ironic, which is probably why the farewell message on Ask.com ends with the line “Jeeves’ spirit endures.”

While on the subject of technology that’s potentially ahead of its time, MacRumors is reporting that Apple is giving up on their Vision Pro augmented reality googles. They haven’t been formally discontinued as of yet, but sources indicate that the internal development team for the entire product line has been disbanded and reassigned to other projects within the company. This comes after a October 2025 refresh of the hardware still failed to connect with consumers. Insiders have said that not only were sales sluggish on the ~$3,500 headsets, but that they were getting returned at a far higher rate than any of Apple’s other hardware products.

Now, we’re hardly Apple apologists here at Hackaday. It sort of goes without saying that the whole “Walled Garden” thing doesn’t really fit our ethos. But we can’t deny that the Vision Pro is an impressive piece of technology. After years of sticking our phones in crappy plastic headsets, or trying to force hardware designed for VR gaming to do literally anything else, the Vision Pro offered a practical way to put augmented reality to work. But even for a company known for producing expensive hardware, the price tag was just too much for most consumers.

We’ll go out on a limb here and predict that the Vision Pro will one day be looked back on like the Newton — a product that was too expensive and niche to be a commercial success when it came out, but still a technical milestone that gave us a glimpse into the shape of things to come.

Speaking of a technology that will inevitably become more common, the European Patent Office (EPO) released a report this week showing a seven-fold increase in the number of inventions intended for battery reuse and recycling over the last decade. Given our insatiable demand for rechargeable batteries, it should come as no surprise that there’s a huge push for new methods of squeezing more use out of cells. As noted several times by the EPO, it’s not purely about saving money either. Even if Europe produces the batteries domestically, they need to import the raw materials. Relying on foreign countries to provide critical infrastructure can be precarious in the best of times, and is likely to only become more politically onerous in the future.

Finally, we’ll leave you with a fun way to waste some time on a Sunday evening: Visible Zorker. Created by Andrew Plotkin, this website allows you to not only play through all three installments of Zork, but presents a debugger-style view of the source code as the game is running. Even if you’re not terribly interested in seeing how your responses are parsed, the map that shows your progress through the world is certainly handy. The project was actually started back in 2025, but Andrew just completed the trilogy by adding support for Zork III a couple days ago so now is the perfect time to check it out.

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.

Triple monitor workstations are pretty common these days, particularly for those wishing to maximise screen space for greater productivity. [Will It Work?] has put together a sillier take on this concept, however, hooking the diminutive iPod Nano up to three monitors instead.

The 6th-generation iPod nano brought forth a new form factor – it’s the postage stamp-sized one that you could clip to your workout gear. It’s not typically what you’d call a productivity device, but there is a way to get more out of it. The trick is to grab a 30-pin Keyboard Dock, which allows access to the composite video signal from the iPod. It was originally designed for the iPad, but it works with the iPad nano too with a 30-pin spacer adapter – just don’t expect the keys to do anything. This setup also allows access to the 3.5mm four-pole jack, which handles audio input and output. With a bunch of additional cables and adapters, the iPod was able to be hooked up to three screens, a set of Apple Pro speakers, and three Sharp LCD monitors.

What can you do with this setup? Fundamentally, not a whole lot. You can’t use the keyboard with the iPod Nano, so you’re limited to interacting with the tiny touchscreen. There also aren’t exactly a lot of apps to run on the platform, either. You can basically listen to music, watch a slide show, or record voice memos, while looking at the iPod’s display spread identically across three TVs. Still, it’s a fun joke build, because at a glance it genuinely looks like you’ve set up a triple-monitor workstation running off a tiny iPod from over a decade ago.

If you want to blow the mind of your next podcast guest, consider recording your next episode on this rig. Alternatively, explore some of the other hacks we’ve seen for the platform. Video after the break.

There’s a great reason 3D printers are made with things like extruded aluminum rails and other commodity, off-the-shelf parts. These things are designed not only for ease of construction and prototyping, but they’re also fairly strong especially given how modular they are. And they are excellent platforms for other projects as well. [CNCDan] has been using plenty of on-hand 3D printer parts to build a three-axis camera slider to film parts of his other projects, and this video documents his build and the latest upgrades to this platform.

After sorting out some issues with underpowered motors by improving their gear ratios, he found that many of the sizes and clearances on the existing platform changed enough that he needed to redo other parts of the carrier, including the mounting plate. He cut a new plate from steel and pressed bearings in, and then started putting together the other axes including a quick release mechanism for his camera. With a camera that weighs about 1.4 kg, getting the motors to move the camera smoothly was its own challenge. He re-worked all of his driver code over the course of a few weeks and eventually got his new system working much better than the original version.

With everything said and done, the camera slider can be controlled wirelessly with a GUI on another computer. Everything runs on an ESP32, and the slider can support other cameras besides his heavier one, including smartphones. He notes that this wasn’t the easiest way to build a project like this, but worked for him eventually because he had the parts and tools on hand to make it work. He’s also put the project files up on a GitHub page for anyone interested. Camera sliders like these have some niche uses as well; take a look at this high-speed camera slider for some examples.

Transistors in some circuit configurations work together and, frequently, need to be matched. This is so common that you can sometimes find ICs that are just a pair of transistors made with the same piece of silicon, so they should be matched very closely by default. But with discrete transistors, two devices of the same type are not always identical. [Learn Electronics Repair] covers the topic and explains how to match devices in the video below.

Depending on the circuit, the matching parameters may be different, but generally, the idea is that you want similar gains or matching saturation characteristics. The reason is that when you have multiple transistors working together, you don’t want one to do more work than the other device. This is inefficient and could drive the “better” component to fail.

The same idea applies in bridge circuits, where you might match resistors or capacitors to make sure that, for example, two 10% resistors are very close to the same value. A 10K resistor could be between 9K and 11K, and you might not care as long as they are both, say, 9.2K or both 10.8K.

This is different, by the way, from impedance matching, where you achieve maximum power transfer by matching a source to a load.

Once upon a time, someone set up a livestream wherein the messages from Twitch chat could control a game of Pokemon. Since then, we’ve seen Twitch control all sorts of things. If you’d like to have them play with some LEDs in your house, you might like this project from [pfeiffer3000].

The concept is simple enough. The heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller, which is easy to integrate with web services thanks to its onboard WiFi capability. It’s hooked upt o a string of WS2812B addressable RGB LEDs. The LEDs themselves are installed within table tennis balls to act as nice, spherical diffusers, and installed in a square frame made of PVC pipes. As for code, the rig uses the WLED library to drive the LED strings, and code from TwitchIO to interface with Twitch chat itself. It’s as simple as rigging up a bit of Python. With everything assembled, [pfeiffer3000] had an attractive LED grid that could be controlled directly by anyone watching their Twitch stream.

We’ve explored how to control things via Twitch before, too. It’s a fun way to add some interactivity to your livestream that really gets viewers involved. If you’ve been building your own audience-controlled projects, we’d love to hear about them on the tipsline!

Some people love CRTs to a degree that the uninitiated may find obsessive. We all have our thing, and for [Found Tech], it’s absolutely pointing particle accelerators at his face to play video games. He likes modern games, with modern resolutions– none of this 1080p nonsense. Today’s gamers demand 4K! Can a CRT keep up? The answer is a resounding “No, but actually, yes!”

[Found Tech] has an IBM P275 monitor, which is one of the last generation of CRTs.  Officially, the resolution maxes out at 1920 dots by 1440 lines. While one might (inaccurately) call that UHD output “2K”, you certainly cannot claim it is 4K. So, what’s the secret? Interlacing. Yes, interlacing, like old analog TV signals.

Apparently, in spite of what the manual says, getting the screen to absorb the 2880×2160 interlaced signal wasn’t the hard part, but generating it was. NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards are absolutely unable to create an interlaced signal, but Intel integrated GPUs are– if you get the right combo of chip and old driver. Sadly, the video doesn’t list exactly what he used. Of course an iGPU isn’t going to give you a very good gaming experience at this high resolution, so [Found Tech] has his games do their rendering on the discrete card before piping that over to the iGPU for display on the CRT.

Technically, you still can’t call the 2880×2160 picture “4K”, as that trademark refers to 2160p at 16:9, and this is both interlaced and 4:3. Still, close enough. In spite of the artifacting that turned us all against interlaced signals back in the day, this apparently has [Found Tech]’s eyes fooled– he says it’s as good as 2160p on his OLED, plus the extra magic that comes with glowing phosphors.

It certainly looks great in a recording, but the monitor in the recording isn’t displayed at a high enough resolution to say for sure if it’s 4K. Still, if you’re into CRT gaming, maybe give this high-res interlacing a try. If you still don’t get what’s so great about CRTs, check here, and remember it could be worse– at least we’re not going on about Plasma TVs.