Satellite imagery is in the news right now, but not all satellite constellations are the preserve of governments. Satellogic operates a series of CubeSats with Earth imaging payloads, and best of all, they maintain an open dataset. [Mark Litwintschik] takes us through using it. Starting with a script to recover the locations of the satellites, […]
There have been several attempts to make an unencumbered version of Windows. ReactOS is perhaps the best-known, although you could argue Wine and its progeny, while not operating systems in the strictest sense of the word, might be the most successful. Joining the fray is Free95, a GPL-3.0 system that, currently, can run simple Windows […]
In the early 2000s, the idea that you could write programs on microcontrollers that did things in the physical world, like run motors or light up LEDs, was kind of new. At the time, most people thought of coding as stuff that stayed on the screen, or in cyberspace. This idea of writing code for […]
Looking to write Rust on the ESP32? You’re in luck, a new challenger has entered the scene, looking to help you write code that lasts – [Scott Mabin] and the team from Espressif have brought us the esp-hal 1.0.0-beta. From a personal project to an Espressif-sponsored one to an effort under Espressif’s wing, [Scott] tells […]
These days, adding a little LCD or OLED to your project is so cheap and easy that you can do it on a whim. Even if your original idea didn’t call for a display, if you’ve got I2C and a couple bucks burning a hole in your pocket, why not add one? Surely you’ll figure […]
In 1997 a set of DEC tapes were provided by Dennis Ritchie, as historical artifacts for those interested in the gestation of the UNIX operating system. The resulting archive files have recently been analysed by [Yfeng Gao], who has succeeded in recovering a working UNIX version from 1972. What makes it particularly interesting is that […]
OpenSCAD has a lot of fans around these parts — if you’re unaware, it’s essentially a code-based way of designing 3D models. Instead of drawing them up in a CAD program, one writes a script that defines the required geometry. All that is made a little easier with the Belfry OpenSCAD Library (BOSL2). Designing a […]
There are a wide range of typing tutors out there that will educate you in the glorious skill of touch-typing. Many just focus on the basics, ranking you on accuracy and speed. However, there’s a nifty little online tutor that can help you with one skill specifically—it’s aim is to teach you to use the […]
Disk space is allocated in clusters of a certain size. When a file is written to disk and the file size is smaller than the cluster(s) allocated for it, there is an unused portion of varying size between the end of the file’s data and the end of the allocated clusters. This unused space is […]