TechyMagThings

Copper sulfate crystals are probably among one of the prettiest crystals you can grow at home, with even just a simple setup with some copper scrap and vinegar already capable of producing lots of them. Yet what if you want to grow really big ones? In that case the [Crystalverse] has got your back, with a recent video that expands on an older blog post.

In lieu of the copper-and-vinegar approach you can also obtain copper sulfate directly, since it’s a common fungicide, rootkiller as well as drying agent. This means that your local brick-and-mortar retailer or favorite online store probably has a few kg of the stuff available for sale.

As with most large crystal growing procedures the key is to have a saturated solution, which for copper sulfate just takes near-boiling water, to create a mesmerizingly blue liquid if there are no contaminants in it. By adding slightly more copper sulfate there are also crystallization sites on the bottom of the jar to draw these away from your large crystal.

From there it’s the same as with growing other large crystals – even those from sugar – with a seed crystal suspended into the solution, along with a silent prayer to the crystal gods that said seed crystal continues to grow without any defects. One gotcha with copper sulfate crystals is that the intense blue color is largely due to the presence of water molecules. This means that once it dehydrates, it turns effectively white.

Also of note that is the slower the crystal grows, the better the result is likely to be. During the months that it takes for these large crystals to grow, you need to carefully manage the copper sulfate solution, remove competing crystals on the bottom of the container and keep the temperature as constant as possible.

Back in the old days the IBM-PC, like most of its contemporary computers, shipped with BASIC in ROM. Even after it stopped living in ROM, IBM-Compatibles shipped with GW-BASIC, and now we have a project that asks: what if they still did? Thoreau BASIC is GW-BASIC, but updated for the 21st century.

It’s meant to be code-compatible with all old GW-BASIC code — which means, yes, line numbers and GOTOs abound — but it can boot from a modern x86 PC’s UEFI or run under Windows and take full advantage of modern hardware with 64-bit memory and multithreading support. Graphics are 24-bit at any resolution your monitor can handle, and there are a number of handy built-in commands to handle file management, graphics — including sprites — mouse and keyboard input, 32-channel sound, and more. It is also not strictly an interpreted language. Programs can be compiled to run under Windows or bare-metal on UEFI x86 machines.

It’s not open source, but the project is “pay what you want” over on Itch.io, where you can also see a number of examples.

We’ve seen other attempts to revive BASIC over the years, like MoonBASIC or BASIC-256, but we have to admit it’s never going to be the dominant force it once was, regardless of how nostalgic we might get. That’s probably for the best, but it’s still nice to know you can boot to BASIC if you really, really want to. Do you think it would work with our preprocessor?

One fascinating thing about a pulsed laser is that, though the average power may be measured in watts or milliwatts, the peak power can easily reach millions of times that. This happens even in normal operation, but as [Les’ Lab] demonstrated, adding a Q-Switch can considerably enhance the peak power.

A Q-switch is an optical attenuator; when placed in the laser cavity, it keeps the cavity from reaching resonance. This greatly limits stimulated emission, allowing energy to build up in the chamber as the gain medium becomes increasingly saturated. Eventually, at some energy level, the Q-switch suddenly stops blocking light, and the cavity lases in a very short, powerful pulse. The Q-switch doesn’t increase the energy in a laser shot, but it does release it much more quickly. In this case, [Les] used chromium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet crystals as the Q-switch and compared performance across several different crystals.

[Les] used two sensors to measure the laser pulse: a pyroelectric energy sensor and a fast photodiode to measure the pulse’s shape. Without the Q-switch, [Les]’s laser produced a pulse about 150 µs long, with a total energy of about 137 mJ and a peak power just under one kilowatt. After adding a Q-switch, the pulse dropped to 14 ns, and the peak power rose to 1.3 megawatts, though the total energy dropped to 77 mJ. [Les] also built an absorption meter and used this to compare several Q-switches with different absorptions; in general, greater absorption increased the peak power when the laser did fire, reaching 2.25 MW at 92% absorption. Increased peak power didn’t translate into greater cutting power, though; when aiming at a metal target, the pulse was too short to do much more than ablate the metal’s surface. The energy output was, however, enough to ionize air or shatter glass at the laser’s focal point.

This isn’t the only enhancement [Les] made to his former tattoo-removal laser; this builds on a previous upgrade to the gain medium itself. For more background on why Q-switches work, check out our article on laser fundamentals.

If you’re interested in aerospace, there’s an excellent chance you’ve heard the rumor that NASA is trying to get its SR-71 flying again. Or at the very least, they are interested in what exactly it would take to bring the iconic Mach 3+ spy plane back online.

The story started a couple of weeks ago when NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the agency would be reinvesting in their famed “X-Plane” experimental aircraft program in an effort to get “back in the business of flying high and fast again.” Not long after, keen-eyed observers noted that the SR-71 that had been sitting on the tarmac at the Armstrong Flight Research Center in California had been moved to an unknown location. Several individuals who worked on the plane while it was operational have since claimed NASA representatives contacted them about potentially refurbishing it.

So will the Blackbird fly again? Almost certainly not. It would be hard enough getting even a normal plane airworthy after sitting dormant for nearly three decades. But when you’re talking about a bird as rare and secretive as the SR-71, the challenges would be almost insurmountable. Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some valuable lessons to be learned by studying the idea, and we imagine that’s what NASA’s really after.

The SR-71 is one of the fastest planes ever built, but it’s got nothing on an orbital spacecraft like the SpaceX Crew Dragon, which earlier this week set the record for the fastest rendezvous with the International Space Station by an American vehicle. The Crew-13 mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 11:10 AM Eastern and docked with the orbiting laboratory at 7:05 PM — a total elapsed time of just under eight hours.

While the crew was more than happy with the relatively speedy commute, their trip was still considerably longer than that of their Russian counterparts. The Soyuz capsule can reach the ISS in around three hours under ideal conditions, and even when it uses the slower rendezvous profile, docking takes place about six hours after launch. Counterintuitively, this doesn’t mean the Soyuz is actually faster or more capable than the Crew Dragon. Instead, it’s down to logistics with a sprinkling of the arcane magic that is orbital mechanics.

At the other end of the speed spectrum, Christie’s is currently running an auction for one of the printed packets sent via carrier pigeon by the Bergen Linux User Group in Norway in 2001. It is one of nine such physical packets that were sent as a real-world demonstration of RFC 1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers.

This packet in particular was later presented to the author of RFC 1149, David Waitzman, and comes in a golden frame befitting such an auspicious datagram. As of this writing, the auction still has nine days to go, and the high bid is sitting at $2,600 USD. We’ll keep an eye out and let you know what it sells for in the end.

We saw an interesting article on PCWorld a couple of days back about a player getting banned from Valorant once they tried running the game on a used CPU. After contacting support, they found out that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in question had been blacklisted by the game because it was previously used by a cheater. In addition, as the system had now detected it being used in a different computer, the identifiable components of that machine had also been added to the block list.

If you’re building a gaming machine on a budget, this is something of a nightmare scenario. But if this becomes more common, it strikes us that there’s some potential here for those of us interested in buying used hardware for more practical purposes. If you’re on the hunt for a good deal on a high-end CPU so you can crank out builds faster, the fact that it might be banned from the latest loot shooter isn’t really a problem. It’s a bit like looking for a phone with a bad ESN because you want to use it on WiFi or need some of its parts.

Finally, we’ll leave you with a fun little diversion: Hole Punch. This game tasks you with steering a spacecraft around various obstacles to reach a target location. Sounds easy, until you realize that you’re not the one flying the thing. Instead of having direct control over the vehicle, you play as an omnipotent creator who can create and place black holes at will.

Placing a black hole creates a gravitational field that will curve the spacecraft’s trajectory as it goes by, so by adjusting the size and placement of the holes, you have an indirect method of controlling the craft. Creating a black hole consumes matter, and you only have a finite amount to work with, so use it wisely. Let us know how far you get in the comments.

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.

When [Thomas] showed his 1960s-era Tektronix 545A oscilloscope in a recent video, it made us both nostalgic and happy. Nostalgic because we miss the days when our oscilloscopes were “mainframes” that could take plug-in modules. Happy because we noticed the two handles on top to manage hauling the almost 70 pounds of tubes, transformers, and glass around if you didn’t have the requisite cart.

Not only did old scopes have plugins so you could reconfigure them, but there were also handy plugins and racks that could power them so you could build different test setups easily. This scope was an early version of that idea, but it only accepted a vertical section plugin. The mainframe part of the scope has 75 tubes, and the plugin, a type D, has six tubes, too. The power consumption was about 500 watts!

If you’ve used a scope like this before, you’ll probably remember a lot of the oddities mentioned in the video. If not, you’ll gain a new appreciation for your modern, sophisticated, and lightweight scope. Of course, the old boat anchor wasn’t working. Apparently, these scopes had ceramic points that didn’t like regular solder, so there was a spool of silver solder inside the unit for repairs.

[Thomas] made a lot of progress, although it still needs work to get it working perfectly. We have no doubt he’ll get it working in time. Even the graticule on these old scopes was an issue.

It’s no secret that the size of webpages has been slowly — or not so slowly — creeping up over the years. Does a simple website need to span multiple floppy disks? [PortalRunner’s] doesn’t — or rather, he doesn’t want to burn that much of his limited mobile data. So he built a self-hosted HTTPS proxy to compress images and websites, block ads, and save his bandwidth.

The proxy itself is based on mitmproxy rather than reinventing the wheel. The biggest gains are, of course, from knocking images down to size — since he’s only going to be looking at them on a tiny screen, he can not only apply the better compression of .webp rather than the more common .PNG and .JPEG, but also toss unneeded information by reducing the resolution. Exactly how much quality to toss is left up to the individual user in a handy config.

Likewise, if you’re willing to wait a little longer for pages to load, you can force every webpage to get the highest possible level of compression — otherwise the server is only going to do that with ridiculous Java-heavy pages that absolutely need it. As a bonus, going through your home server means this acts like a private VPN to help protect your data on the go. If you want the details, check out the GitHub link above or the video embedded below.

This project is explicitly about saving data; it won’t help older hardware get online the way the publicly hosted FrogFind search engine or private-hosted MacProxy servers do. If you really want to escape the bloat of the modern internet, a proxy can also help you go way back.

Whereas PlayStation 3 and earlier were rather specialized consoles, today’s consoles like the PlayStation 5 are essentially x86-based gaming PCs in a fancy case, with custom firmware to lock it all down. Once you’re past those gates, however, you can use it to run pretty much anything. Naturally, this also means porting PlayStation 2 and Xbox 1 emulators to the PS5, in the form of the PS5X2 and XPSemu projects respectively.

In addition, Videocardz reports that Wine is being ported to the PS5 as its Proton iteration popularized by Valve’s SteamOS. This ‘PP’ project — for PS5 Proton — has no public releases yet, but it could mean that playing Windows games on your PS5 could also become reality.

The PS5X2 project is the most complete so far, offering a quite complete port of the PCSX2 PS2 emulator, including GPU acceleration via the Vulkan API using the PS5Vulkan project. Based on the list, quite a few games work at full speed, even when rendered at multiple times their original resolution.

In comparison, the XPSemu project – based on the xemu Xbox emulator – only just hit Alpha 1 level, with still sketchy game compatibility, though Halo 2 seems to run well at least. Unfortunately, none of these emulators seem to support playing the game directly from the original DVD, so you need to have that disc image taking up precious space on the PS5’s SSD.

Emulating one computer on another is an old technique. Games are the same way.