Mysterious Files PH

Microsoft has a history of taking accessibility options seriously for gaming controllers, and that trend continues with downloadable thumbstick toppers for Xbox controllers. Being straight from the source, the 3D models should fit as well as can be expected with a minimum of fiddling. Just make sure you select the right controller model, because they are each subtly different.

The toppers themselves come in different styles, and there’s a design to fit a variety of needs, from a thumb cradle to ones intended for more serious adaptations —  the perforated X-shaped topper, for instance, is meant to anchor a custom shape molded overtop it.

Microsoft does offer a remarkably hackable adaptive controller that is meant to make it easy to integrate with other hardware, and we’ve seen it used in some truly awesome ways. But it’s nice to see an easy way to extend and adapt normal thumbsticks on regular controllers, giving people even more options.

We love to see companies offer useful 3D models of their products, saving consumers from having to 3D scan or model things themselves. It’s a form of hacker-friendly hardware design, which we celebrate when we see it, while at the same time wishing it were more common.

Have you benefited from hacker-friendly design and made something useful that wouldn’t exist otherwise? Let us know on the tips line!

Fluoroscopy is probably the best-known method of X-ray imaging: an X-ray beam passes through the subject to be imaged, and the transmitted X-rays illuminate a phosphor screen. Dense objects, such as metal or bone, cast a shadow on the screen, which provides a real-time image of the subject’s interior. Already having access to X-ray sources, [MarcellF]’s next step was to investigate common phosphor materials, then synthesize his own.

Most common materials that fluoresce under ultraviolet light showed no activity under X-rays: fluorescein, quinine, UV fluorescent paint, and common fluorescent minerals emitted no noticeable glow under 80 kV X-ray stimulation. However, strontium aluminate phosphors did fluoresce well, with a strong afterglow, as did the phosphors in a fluorescent light bulb, some LEDs, and an electroluminescent panel. The electroluminescent panel, which used a zinc sulfide phosphor, was almost as bright as the gadolinium oxysulfide screen from a CT scanner’s detector and had no noticeable afterglow.

One well-known X-ray phosphor is scheelite (calcium tungstate), which [MarcellF] next synthesized. He had previously tested a sample of natural scheelite without success, probably due to impurities. The first step of the synthesis was to melt together potassium nitrate and sodium carbonate, in which [MarcellF] dissolved broken pieces of a tungsten TIG welding rod. This formed sodium and potassium tungstates, which were dissolved and reacted with a calcium chloride solution. This precipitated calcium tungstate, which [MarcellF] annealed to make fluorescent. This produced a blue glow under X-ray stimulation, and doping with lead atoms made it significantly brighter.

We’ve covered several methods of X-ray detection before; most modern fluoroscopes now use a phosphor screen in conjunction with a camera, or sometimes with a photomultiplier tube.

Times are tough out there, and many are starting to feel the pressure at the grocery store checkout line or the gas pump. But whenever you start to worry about affording life’s necessities, take comfort in the knowledge that somebody is so flush with cash that on Friday they decided to treat themselves and spend $3 million for a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Although we’re not going to say it necessarily justifies the insane price — a new record for the most ever paid for a video game, incidentally — Heritage Auctions does note in their press release that this is an exceptionally rare version of what’s admittedly one of the most iconic pieces of software ever produced. This is only one of three copies of this particular variant known to exist, which Nintendo apparently distributed to test markets in the United States ahead of the game’s official 1985 release.

In slightly more modern gaming news, Asha Sharma, the new head of Microsoft’s Xbox division, has been making some big swings to try and get Microsoft’s gaming division back on track after years of declining sales. As part of that effort, she recently penned an article detailing some of the challenges the company is facing, which includes some interesting hardware details.

According to the blog post, she claims that in February, the cost of memory and storage components for the Xbox console had doubled compared to the previous year. But those numbers have jumped again, and by the time the holidays roll around, she expects they’ll be paying five times what they did in 2024. That’s bad news for anyone looking to put an Xbox under the tree come Christmas, but even worse news as the company works on the console’s successor. Considering that today’s hardware from Sony and Microsoft can already set you back $700 USD depending on which version you get, it seems like we’re approaching a point where gaming consoles could price themselves out of the market.

Those thinking of mowing some lawns this summer to save up for their $1K next-generation consoles may be interested to hear that the Food and Drug Administration has put its stamp of approval on the first new sunscreen ingredient in the US in more than two decades. Bemotrizinol is a broad-spectrum UV absorber that knocks out 310 and 340 nm, and while Uncle Sam has taken his sweet time to give it the OK, the European Union has been slathering it on since 2000. The first company authorized to sell it in the US will be marketing it under the name Parsol Shield later this year, with other manufacturers set to follow in 2027.

While it seems the world has agreed on adding bemotrizinol to their sunscreens, many people are decidedly less enthusiastic about AI code in their open-source projects. One of those people is Drew DeVault, which is why he decided to fork Vim once he found out its maintainers were merging in code written by large language models (LLMs). Rather than break off at the last version untainted by clankers, Drew decided to divert from the upstream project at version 8.2.x. This means that some newer plugins may have compatibility issues, although security fixes and other selected updates from the 9.x branch have been back-ported to the newly coined Vim Classic. If you give it a shot, let us know in the comments.

Finally, if a non-AI fork of Vim is still too mainstream to scratch that itch for you, Phoronix is reporting that ReactOS can now run Half Life. If this were any other website, we might devote the next paragraph to explaining the significance of a nearly 30-year-old PC game being run on a free and open-source operating system designed to provide binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows. But it’s Sunday evening, and you’re reading Hackaday, so just take the win.

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.

Does anyone like Google’s AI summaries? If so, they weren’t on the Judge’s bench in a specific Bavarian courtroom recently, where it was ruled that yes, Google is liable for the hallucinations of its search engine AI.

This was a civil case brought by a pair of Munich companies, both of whom were wrongfully slandered by LLM hallucinations. Google took the position that this information must have existed somewhere, and like presenting links to libelous websites — something they have no obligation to avoid — they should not be held accountable for what the summary at the top of the search results says.

Understandably, the judges ruled otherwise: this isn’t content Google is linking to. This is text that Google has generated. That they’re using the crappiest LLM model this side of a Commodore 64 to generate it doesn’t matter — the company is creating the text, and the company is liable, just as if a human employee wrote it by hand. If that human employee was so inept that he was giving other meatbags a bad name, like the search summaries do with Gemini, it wouldn’t help Google’s liability, either.

This could be a landmark ruling, though it isn’t final; Google does have the chance to appeal, and they absolutely will. If the appeal falls through, it’s not unlikely that Google will pull the plug on AI summaries on searches from the Federal Republic. Finally, a reason to point your VPN at Berlin. Any Germans hosting their own AI agents may also want to take note of the final ruling.

Header Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

If you’re not into Wayland as a display manager, it seems like your options are slowly dwindling. Xorg isn’t exactly a hotbed of activity, and the one fork everyone knows about is best known as a political lightning rod. Luckily, Rust developers can apparently never see a tool without pulling it into their heavily oxidized bucket of crabs, so we now have another option: the creatively named yserver, released under the MIT license by [joske].

The name, yserver, for the record, is just a placeholder name, but we rather like the simple logic of “Y comes after X” — sure, you could call it X12, but that could imply continuity, and this is a clean break. It’s also not a full reimplementation of the huge, sprawling mess that Xorg has become over the decades. It can’t launch multiple screens and thus lacks full multi-monitor support. So, for now, it may be too bare-bones for some people’s use cases.

As it uses Vulkan, it is limited to relatively modern hardware, but has been tested on Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple chips. The target kernel is good old Linux, but the docs do cover compiling for FreeBSD; just be aware that that’s very much a secondary target. FreeBSD users are probably used to that, though.

On Linux, a standalone DRM/KMS yserver can successfully run not just window managers but full desktops — specifically MATE, Cinnamon, and XFCE, as they’re not on the Wayland bandwagon. It even supports Compiz, in case you missed the cube and wiggly window animations. You can also use yserver via Xwayland or even Xorg. Speaking of Xorg, [joske] has run the X.Org X Test Suite (xts5) against this proposed successor, and it currently scores 66.2%, which seems pretty good considering the project explicitly does not plan to copy all of Xorg’s functionality.

Aside from multiple screens, one thing that would have been neat to see is support for the Asterinas rust-based Linux-compatible kernel — though if that project achieves full Linux compatibility, that may be a non-issue. Even if you aren’t an oxidization enthusiast, you might find reasons to be happy to see more competition in the display-manager market — after all, Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User. If Xorg really is destined to the slow death critics predict, perhaps yserver could cover the holdouts.

We have seen a number of self-playing chess boards over the years, but the general theme has been standard chess pieces moved by either an internal electromagnet or an external robotic arm. This is, of course, a reasonable choice, as it reduces complexity, and sometimes you can even use standard chess pieces on a regular board. But what if each piece could move by itself? That seems cooler, so that’s what [3DprintedLife] did with 3D-printed chess pieces that are also tiny robots.

Although technically not the first, as you can buy the commercial Chessnut Move offering, this being an open hardware and source project makes it a lot more interesting, also because the general design is generic enough to be usable for applications other than just playing chess.

The MiniBots, as the individual pieces are called, are built around a custom PCB with an ESP32-C3 module, two PMO8-2 miniature stepper motors with requisite drivers, a magnetometer, and are powered by a 170 mAh LiPo battery. Communication with the central hub is done using ESP-NOW, with each MiniBot using its own dedicated channel.

This hub’s mainboard also runs on an ESP32-C3 for the wireless interface, while the processing is handled via a serial link with a Raspberry Pi SBC that runs the main Python-based software. Localizing the individual pieces on the board is done by scanning electromagnets embedded in the board and using the readings from the individual magnetometers to triangulate the positions.

Although at the end of the video a basic prototype sort of works, the ESP32-C3, being a single-core MCU, tripped up the firmware, necessitating some changes that should be in the next update, along with power saving and easier recharging being issues to address.

If you want to see a more conventional chess robot, we’ve seen plenty.

If you have a Bambu Labs printer and aren’t keen to send your files to Bambu’s servers with each print job, then check out Bambuddy, an open-source, self-hosted, cloud-free central command that offers a local alternative for managing Bambu Labs printers. It acts as a replacement for the official cloud services, allowing you to slice, print, and monitor with full local control and zero reliance on Bambu Labs’ servers.

To use it, one installs Bambuddy, then puts their printer(s) into LAN-only mode. Doing this disables cloud functionality, including remote access. Then one enables Developer Mode, which allows external software to control printer functions via a machine API. Once that’s done, the printers can be added to Bambuddy.

Bambuddy then acts as a full-featured control panel and management center for anywhere from one to forty printers. It runs on Linux, macOS, or Windows, and a Raspberry Pi is a common install target.

Bambu Labs makes indisputably high-quality printers, and using their software and official app is certainly convenient. But the fact that every print job goes through Bambu’s servers, and a software architecture that frustrates home-grown solutions? Not so much. Add AGPLv3 violations and some heavy-handed legal behavior to the mix, and it’s easy to understand the motivation for an alternative to the factory software.

Bambuddy has a huge number of features — including an integrated slicer and proxy mode for remote access — and it may look a little intimidating at first. Fortunately, the project’s website offers a live sandbox demo with simulated printers, which should be right up the alley of those who prefer to learn by clicking around in a consequence-free environment.