Elastocaloric materials are a class of materials that exhibit a big change in temperature when exposed to mechanical stress. This could potentially make them useful as solid-state replacement for both vapor-compression refrigeration systems and Peltier coolers. The entire assembled elastocaloric device. (Credit: Guoan Zhou, Nature, 2026) So far one issue has been that reaching freezing […]
Guitar pedals are designed to take in a sound signal, do fun stuff to it, and then spit it out to your amplifier where it hopefully impresses other people. However, [Liam Taylor] decided to see what would happen if you fed video through a guitar pedal instead. The device under test is a Boss ME-50 […]
Disposable vapes aren’t quite the problem/resource stream they once were, with many jurisdictions moving to ban the absurdly wasteful little devices, but there are still a lot of slightly-smelly lithium batteries in the wild. You might be forgiven for thinking that most of them seem to be in [Chris Doel]’s UK workshop, given that he’s […]
This week Jonathan chats with Philippe Humeau about Crowdsec! That company created a Web Application Firewall as on Open Source project, and now runs it as a Multiplayer Firewall. What does that mean, and how has it worked out as a business concept? Watch to find out! https://github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec https://crowdsec.net https://www.linkedin.com/company/53443483 Did you know you can […]
The TX50U isn’t very Linux-friendly If you’ve used Linux for a long time, you know that we are spoiled these days. Getting a new piece of hardware back in the day was often a horrible affair, requiring custom kernels and lots of work. Today, it should be easier. The default drivers on most distros cover […]
Last summer we took a look at FreeDOS as part of the Daily Drivers series, and found a faster and more complete successor to the DOS of old. The sojourn into the 16-bit OS wasn’t perfect though, as we couldn’t find drivers for the 2010-era network card on our newly DOS-ified netbook. Here’s [Inkbox] following […]
In their recent announcement, NASA has made official what pretty much anyone following the Artemis lunar program could have told you years ago — humans won’t be landing on the Moon in 2028. It was always an ambitious timeline, especially given the scope of the mission. It wouldn’t be enough to revisit the Moon in […]
Phase-coherent lasers are crucial for many precision tasks, including timekeeping. Here on Earth the most stable optical oscillators are used in e.g. atomic clocks and many ultra-precise scientific measurements, such as gravitational wave detection. Since these optical oscillators use cryogenic silicon cavities, it’s completely logical to take this principle and build a cryogenic silicon cavity […]