Mysterious Files PH

Most larger ride-around landscaping machinery has a similar transmission, a transaxle containing a gearbox, or in some cases, a continuously variable drive. [Made In Garage] has a Toro lawn tractor with just such a setup, and when the transaxle failed he replaced it with a hydraulic drive.

The video below is a classic bit of workshop porn, as he fabricates both the hubs and the rear frame to fit a pair of hydraulic motors. The throttle pedal is a hydraulic valve with the lever swapped for a pedal, and the hydraulic reservoir, in a nice touch, is an old fire extinguisher.

We’re not so sure about the pipework in such an exposed position under the machine as we think it would inevitably be damaged, but you can’t argue with the results. Having used a rough service mower with a hydraulic drive in the past, we appreciate always being exactly at the right ratio for the engine.

We think perhaps he should complement it with a loader.

Thanks [Keith Olson] for the tip!

Pallets are a wonderful way to package goods and move them around, but especially the wooden ones have a very finite lifespan. This means that many of them are discarded every day, even though there is still good wood on them. Even if it’s not the highest quality wood, you can still use it for some nice wooden items, like the tea tray that [GR Woodworking] recently put together.

The reclaimed wood is the typical fast-growing, soft type, with the suspicion of it being paulownia here. Of course, wooden pallets use a wide variety of wood varieties, so not all reclaimed wood is equally suitable for applications like this, and identifying the type can be a challenge in itself.

In the video it’s shown how the wood is planed to make it smooth and straight, before the joints are created and it is married to the poplar or aspen base plate. Of note is that absolutely no power tools or bulky things like router tables are used here, just basic hand tools that should make this kind of woodworking accessible to people even without that kitted-out woodworking shop.

After assembly it’s finished with Vararhana oil-based stain to give it a darker look and really bring out the grain. Naturally, since it’s a tea tray it has to be commissioned with a proper tea ceremony, which it passes with flying colors.

Four years ago the EMF hacker camp in the UK released a new kind of event badge. The Tildagon was designed to be a recurring event badge, useful for the next EMF rather than destined to be e-waste. With the 2026 event coming up there’s a new Tildagon called the Spaceagon, and as you might expect it’s very familiar indeed.

Tildagon owners can update their badge with the Spaceagon front panel, while those without one can buy the new badge. It has a few minor updates from its predecessor, including better buttons, LEDs, and display mounting, and there’s a compass, a joystick, and touch sensitive areas.

The Tildagon introduced its own add-on format, the Hexpansion. This year there’s the first official Hexpansion, a keyboard, using the same rubber moulding we see on quite a few maker projects. We like the Hexpansion idea because it uses an edge connector rather than a set of pins on the device, but at the cost of more expensive badge parts.

If you’re going to EMF you should be able to order yourself a Spaceagon, or an upgrade kit if you already own a Tildagon. Meanwhile we covered the 2024 version back when it arrived, and surprisingly this isn’t the first keyboard add-on for it either.

While many operating systems seem to try to prevent you from peeking under the hood, Unix and Linux positively encourage it. One great tool that we’ve looked at before is strace. Using this tool, you can see details about every system call a program makes. As you might imagine, for any significant program, the output from strace can be huge.

While I’m not always a fan of GUIs, this is one of those cases where making the data easier to browse is a great idea. Enter strace-tui, a text-based GUI for strace from [Rodrigodd]. The program can parse output from strace or manage the strace execution itself, and either way, display the data in a useful way.

I started out looking at [janestreet’s] strace_ui, but the OCaml setup was throwing errors for me, so I just gave up. The strace-tui installs like many Rust programs, using cargo, and it went smoothly.

An Example

The only issue I had running the tool was that I don’t normally keep ~/.cargo/bin on my path. You can add it to your path, link the executable into your path, or solve that in any number of other ways.

As an example, I traced a symbolic link command (ln -sf nature.txt test.link). It is easy to pick out some essential information on the top line. The command took 112 system calls, 14 of them failed (which isn’t unexpected), there were no unfinished calls, no signals, and only a single PID.

The bottom shows things you can do. Arrows or j and k, along with the usual cursor control keys like Home and Page Down scroll through the list. The right and left arrows will expand or collapse items. That will show details about the call in question, including the arguments and return values. You can consult the help for all the details.

Useful Tools

The real power, though, lies in filtering out the noise and searching for specific things. If you are looking at something you don’t want to see, you can press a lowercase h to hide it, but note that it hides everything similar, not just an individual line. An uppercase H will bring up a filter dialog where you can include or exclude groups of data.

Searching is also a great way to find what you want. A slash key starts a search. The N key navigates with a lowercase entry moving forward and an uppercase one moving backward.

For example, if I only wanted to look at openat commands, I could open the dialog. Not only does it show filters, but it also shows how many things match (there are 30 instances of openat). Pressing a will toggle all entries off and then selecting openat greatly reduces the amount of output. I also selected symlinkat,  read, and fstat so I would only look at the file-related items.

Many of the file operations are related to loading shared libraries and locales. To find the actual line that makes the link, it was easy to press the slash key and some text from the file like test.link.

That will highlight the symlinkat line, which is no surprise, but this is a simple example. If you press Enter or the right arrow, you can see more detail, including arguments, the return value, the amount of time executing, and a backtrace that shows how your program made it to the call.

This is a simple example, but the program can also visualize multi-threaded or multi-process traces using graphs. That can be helpful for analyzing real programs.

Even this simple program has a lot of output. Sure, if you are trying to debug a locale-related problem, all of the lines about loading locale files that don’t exist might be gold. But most of the time, you don’t really care about all the standard loading scaffolding and a tool like this can help cut through the chatter.

Missing Links

According to the project page, there are some missing features, and we presume this is a roadmap for future development.

In particular, the program can’t filter traces for specific processes or threads. There’s also no way to copy details to the clipboard or export filtered traces out to a file. Of course, it is open source, so you can always volunteer to add some of this or your favorite feature.

If you give strace-tui a shot, or have other strace tips and tricks you’d like to share, let us know in the comments.

We do sometimes go on about how absurdly powerful microcontrollers are these days, but this time it’s technically a microprocessor, not a microcontroller, at the heart of the build — specifically, an STM32MP2. Still, you know you’re living in the future when an STM32 of any sort can not only run [John Cronin]’s gk handheld game console, but provide 3D acceleration to boot.

Full disclosure: you’ve seen this handheld here before — sorta. That was version 3, which was an STM32-based handheld.  V3 used the much less powerful STM32H7S7L8, with a single Cortex-M7 clocked at 600 MHz and a 2D NeoChrom GPU. The STM32MP2, by contrast, has dual Cortex-A35 cores running 1.5 GHz and a bonus Cortex-M33. It’s running a custom OS called gkos, which is mostly POSIX-compliant and boasts nigh-instantaneous boot times.

As with the last version, you can run a bevy of emulators from the 8-bit to the 32-bit era, but the added power and OpenGL support mean this handheld also runs N64 games via a fork of mupen64. There are also emulators for ‘real’ computers, namely Atari ST and XL, and a little-known thing known as a “PC”. DOSBox gets the equivalent performance of a 50 MHz 486, which means you can run all the classics, including DOOM, though that will be more performant running the native-running port of sdl-DOOM.

You also get extra inputs to play with and a bigger screen compared to the last version. Oh, and WiFi. There are accelerometers for tilt control, and did we mention the screen’s touch input is supported? If it weren’t for the form-factor, we’d call this a capable little computer. The GK handheld looks like an awesome handheld console, check it out in the demo video below.

[Bob] recently completed LanguageLearner, a desktop device that increases his exposure to a second language by offering up bite-sized news items in Italian, with a complementary English translation. Even better, it’s a project made almost entirely from inexpensive parts he had on hand; it consists of little more than a Raspberry Pi Pico W, a 4.2″ E-paper display, and a 3D-printed stand.

Here’s how it works: once every few hours, the system wakes up and uses its WiFi connection to fetch news from an Italian RSS feed. Having chosen a slice of current events, it translates to English with an API call then displays both versions on the display: original Italian up top, translated English below.

E-paper is ideal for a semi-passive project like this because once data is written to the display, there it remains without needing power or upkeep of any kind. Perfect for a device that only wakes up every few hours for an update before going right back to sleep.

Due to the limited RAM of the Raspberry Pi Pico [Bob] has to be purposeful about fetching data, so he relies on text from a simple RSS feed to avoid running out of memory while making web requests. The other minor quibble is that the driver for the display only handles plain ASCII; characters that cannot be rendered are displayed as grey boxes, which you can see in the image up top. Still, it gets the job done.

Increasing exposure to a language one is learning is beneficial, and people like to experiment. From trying to optimize human wait times by inserting language micro-lessons to a calculator that works in Toki Pona, technology offers new ways for folks to experiment with how we learn and play with language.

It’s possible to get a pretty good deal on used Toyota Prius cars, but as with all hybrid cars that also means a used battery pack and resulting issues. In the case of the Gen 2 Prius that [HubNut] recently acquired it was clear that its battery was effectively toast, with the engine running constantly and the car often giving up due to detected issues with the pack. After getting to an EV-focused garage for repairs, a spare NiMH module was used to replace a problematic module to bring it back to good health, while raising the question of how sensible such a repair is.

Certainly, compared to the average BEV where a much larger battery is generally integrated well into the frame, a Prius makes things very easy, with the compact battery readily accessible and removable from the trunk. It is also a very modular battery, with some elbow grease and bolt-twisting enough to disassemble it.

Even with that it still a high-voltage battery with all the associated risks, and as raised in the comments there’s a big question about putting a new(er) cell into a pack with more worn-out NiMH cells as generally the cells wear out fairly evenly. While this fix can give the pack some more life, the new cell won’t match the internal resistance and other parameters of the pack, leading to issues like voltage drift. Then there’s the issue that if one cell failed, others probably aren’t far behind, so this hack would soon become a regular ritual.

Much like swapping one bad 18650 Li-ion cell in a bigger battery, it’s probably a more sustainable solution to simply replace the entire battery at once, or at least replace all modules or cells to properly refurbish it. For [HubNut] this fix suffices because he suspects that this pack was already assembled from random modules, it’s an important consideration to make if you don’t enjoy ending up stranded during a trip.