Cloudflare has gotten more active in its efforts to identify and block unauthorized bots and AI crawlers that don’t respect boundaries. Their solution? AI Labyrinth, which uses generative AI to efficiently create a diverse maze of data as a defensive measure. This is an evolution of efforts to thwart bots and AI scrapers that don’t […]
There’s many different reasons why somebody might have to hack together their own solution to a problem. It could be to save money, or to save time. Occasionally it’s because the problem is unique enough that there might not be an accepted solution, so you’re on your own to create one. We think the situation […]
Who hasn’t dreamed of serving on the bridge of a Star Trek starship? Although the EmptyEpsilon project isn’t adorned with the Universe-famous LCARS user interface, it does provide a comprehensive simulation scenario, in a multiplayer setting. Designed as a LAN or WAN multiplayer game hosted by the server that also serves as the main screen, […]
It all started with a gift idea: a star-field lamp in the form of a concrete sphere with lightpipes poking out where the stars are, lit up from the inside by LEDs. When you’re making one of these, maybe-just-maybe you’d be willing to drill a thousand holes and fit a thousand little plastic rods, but […]
What a long, strange trip it’s been for NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Bruce Wilmore, who finally completed their eight-day jaunt to space after 289 days. The duo returned to Earth from the ISS on Tuesday along with two other returning astronauts in a picture-perfect splashdown, complete with a dolphin-welcoming committee. For the benefit of […]
Surely by now you’ve at least heard of RTL-SDR — a software project that let’s cheap TV tuner dongles work as a software-defined radios. A number of projects and tools have spun off the original effort, but in his latest video, [Tech Minds] shows off a particularly unique take. It’s a Web browser-based radio application […]
Doing it yourself may not get you the most precise lab equipment in the world, but it gets you a hands-on appreciation of the techniques that just can’t be beat. Today’s example of this adage: [Stoppi] built an atomic force microscope out of mostly junk parts and got pretty good results, considering. (Original is in […]
Sound cards on PC-compatible computer systems have a rather involved and convoluted history, with not only a wide diversity of proprietary standards, but also a collection of sound cards that were never advertised as such. Case in point the 1985 Mindscape Music Board, which was an add-on ISA card that came bundled with [Glen Clancy]’s […]
Ever heard of VENIX? There were lots of variants of Unix back in the day, and VENIX was one for the DEC Professional 380, which was — sort of — a PDP 11. The 1982 machine normally ran the unfortunately (but perhaps aptly) named P/OS, but you could get VENIX, too. [OldVCR] wanted to put […]
Until the late 1990s, the concept of a 3D accelerator card was something generally associated with high-end workstations. Video games and kin would run happily on the CPU in one’s desktop system, with later extensions like MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, etc. providing a significant performance boost for games that supported it. As 3D accelerator cards (colloquially […]