TechyMagThings

In a move that’s no doubt going to trigger a lot of confusion and nostalgia, Mklinux is back, in a sense. As the announcement makes clear, this is multikernel Linux, not microkernel Linux, which is an experimental OS designed to run the Linux kernel as a user-space server running on top of OS X’s Mach kernel.

Naming overlap niggles aside, this neo-mklinux lets multiple independent Linux kernels run simultaneously on bare metal. There is still a host kernel which handles the carving up of hardware resources to the newly spawned kernels, but unlike with a hypervisor there are no abstraction or translation layers.

In theory this should mean basically perfect isolation between kernels, which is one of the main selling points along with increased performance. Compared to running KVM guests the provided benchmarks show much lower latency, at between parity to two times faster.

A website is provided with instructions to get started, along with architectural details if that’s your thing.

The Honda Goldwing is one of the more famous motorcycles ever produced. It’s known for its reliability and comfort, but also for being one of the first motorcycles Honda rolls out new technology with. It was the first to have a factory-installed airbag as well as integrated GPS, and is now largely associated for being a sort of two-wheeled RV with how many creature comforts it supports for long-distance riders. [Matt] has a Goldwing of his own, and is taking that RV-like feeling to the extreme with a rooftop camper for this motorcycle.

Of course, motorcycles don’t have roofs, but if this Goldwing had one this camper would definitely be above that. Goldwings are already heavy enough without an enormous weight dramatically increasing the center of gravity, and [Matt] certainly had his problems with that along the way. But before this adventure he had modified it into a hill climber, removing a lot of the extraneous equipment from it. Attaching some metal frame and a lightweight camper shell to it didn’t seem like too much of a stretch from there, so he got to work with a welder. At the end he has a box that’s just barely big enough for him to sleep in but is more or less functional as a camper.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, [Matt] dropped this more than once on its maiden voyage, and one of those falls damaged a wiring harness that caused his battery to drain in the night. Luckily he was not too far from home on the test drive. We’d tend to think that this camper won’t be one that [Matt] keeps working on (although we’d imagine a tricycle kit might solve his center of gravity issues) but since he’s built some other interesting campers in the past we’re not too sure we’d count this one out just yet.

Recently [Tucker Osman] brought to life what once was just a meme created by the BBC as it poked fun at Apple’s push for ever smaller devices that also dropped many features along the path towards questionable innovation. This ‘Mactini’ was a super-small laptop, with just a single button that did everything, befitting the overpriced more-money-than-sense status symbol vibe that [Jony Ive] brought to Apple.

The input method suggested in the BBC video involves convoluted patterns using the single button, which would be functional, albeit cumbersome. Even as [Tucker] set out on this mission to make the Mactini real, he had to answer a lot of questions, while sticking to the rules that it had to follow the rough form factor of the original and have the same features.

In lieu of overcomplicating things, he opted to use a 1.69″ ST7789V2-based SPI LCD along with a small RP2350-based board from Waveshare for the brains. Rather than just slapping the LCD example for the Pico board on it as firmware, he actually used DMA to do the screen data copying, freeing up a lot of CPU cycles.

The rest of the hardware was cobbled together from e-waste parts, including an iPad speaker and an audio amplifier from a scrap board. Video was handled using Motion JPEG decoding for a not-horrible-framerate. All of this was put into a 3D printed case that was designed in FreeCAD, to make the Mac that [Ive] could only have dreamed of back in the 2000s.

Over the centuries there have been an incredible number of purported medical devices released onto the market, with some having more outrageous claims than others. Released in the 1910s and produced into the 1920s, the Farador electrotherapeutic device claimed to be a thermoelectric device that would cure all disease conditions. In a recent video over at the [Our Own Devices] channel we get an in-depth look at this device and its usage instructions.

On the Smithsonian’s website you can see the version they’ve got. It’s not identical, but the working principle remains the same — after bypassing the whole ‘is this the right treatment’ questionnaire because it’s a cure-all device, you take the main metal device and its connected electrodes out of the box.

Unlike similar devices of the era that applied an actual electrical current using batteries or similar, this Farador purportedly uses thermoelectric power generation, but there’s no clear hot or cold side to what would be the generator. Despite this, about 20-30 mV can be measured across the electrodes, so surely it’s working?

As it turns out, the Farador is just one of many fake medical devices that cloned the original Electropoise. Naturally such devices have been disassembled by many over the past decades, and as it turns out they are all empty inside, or at least devoid of any mechanisms. Much like many of such fake medical devices today, they mostly bank on the placebo effect. This placebo effect can be so strong that it’s even a confounding factor in real medical trials and medicine.

The more involved and complex the purported medical treatment seems, the stronger the effect tends to be. For the Farador the complex instructions, apparently high-tech thermoelectric generator and such all help to create the illusion and could thus be construed to be the main feature of this product.

The Universe is a large place, yet despite it being mostly empty space, there are still a lot of things to find and catalogue. This includes mildly terrifying things like supermassive black holes (SMBHs), one of the study subjects of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) project. In their 20th data release of the fifth all-sky survey (SDSS-V), the results of the Black Hole Mapper (BHM) program provides a lot of new insights into these SMBHs.

For a good primer on the SDSS’s ongoing survey, you can read this paper by [Kollmeier] et al. from 2017 in which this fifth survey and its three programs, including the BHM, are explained. This comes after four previous phases of the SDSS, all of them focusing on multispectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey with the 2.5 m Apache Point Observatory (APO) in New Mexico.

With SDSS-V a second 2.5 m observatory at Las Campanas (LCO) was added, with both observatories combined able to observe the entire sky, not just as static images, but also any changes over time. While these observations are in the near-infrared, combined with the data from other observatories this gives us probably one of the most comprehensive maps of the Milky Way and everything therein, including black holes.

This 20th data release gives us one of the clearest glimpses yet at the formation, growth and behavior of SMBHs and similar objects over time. A big part of this achievement are the automatic positioning robots at the observatories that handle the fiber optics that feed spectrographs, enabling faster and more accurate observations.

The TermDriver 2 is a USB-to-serial interface with a twist—it has a built-in screen for displaying relevant information. It can run at anywhere from 100 bit/s to 2Mbit/s, while showing you what’s happening on the wire. [James Bowman] worked on the TermDriver 2, and paid special attention to one feature—the visual look of the status indicators on the display.

[James] had hoped to make the status indicators look a little more old-school, a little more analog. His inspiration was the classic indicator panels from Apollo-era space hardware, which used bulbs behind plastic indicators. Incandescent bulbs don’t switch instantly on and off; they take time to warm and cool. This behaviour is both more pleasant, visually speaking, and would aid in making short-duration events on the TX, RX and other indicators more visible. Thus, [James] set about giving the LCD UI elements sixteen steps of brightness from off to fully on. The simulated bulbs get brighter the more rapidly activity is happening on a given pin. The indicator graphics, while tiny, are also given a nice superellipse shape, to recreate the warm centered glow of an incandescent indicator.

If you’re a UI fanatic who loves to make things as visually pleasing as possible, the work [James] has done is well worth looking at. We’ve featured other great GUI projects before, too, like this particularly visually pleasing effort. If you’ve had grand ideas in this space, be sure to tell us over on the tipsline.

These days there are emulators for all the great consoles of yesteryear, as well as old retrocomputers and arcade machines and so much else to boot. Now, though, a particularly popular MP3 player has an emulator of its own—by the name of clicky!

The name is a reference to the click wheel of the venerable Apple iPod, and as you might imagine, that’s precisely what clicky is built to emulate. [daniel5151] started the project as a neat technical challenge, following on from earlier work he’s done in the NES emulation space. The iPod is a bit of a difficult prospect to emulate, being very much a closed-source device that is very poorly documented in the public space. There are few projects to look to for help, since a complete open-source iPod emulator doesn’t already exist; however, various alternative firmware projects have offered a guiding light.

For now, clicky can boot into RetailOS, which is what you would have used on an iPod you bought from the factory. It can also run Rockbox and iPodLinux, though for now, running the Apple Diagnostics program is not yet achievable. Plenty of functionality still isn’t implemented, either, like USB communication or even audio, which was the iPod’s whole raison d’être. Still, you can play some Brick Breaker like it’s 2006 if you’ve been missing it badly.

We see all kinds of emulators around these parts; this 60 FPS NES emulator running on a microcontroller was a particularly impressive recent effort. If you’re cooking up your own emulators for unique platforms, or unique emulators for non-unique platforms, let us know on the tipsline!