TechyMagThings

Back in 1996 the 3D gaming market on PC was beginning to heat up, with hot new titles like Tomb Raider coming out that year and requiring much more graphics power than what was needed for old titles like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D to experience good graphics. Thus you had to pick some kind of 3D accelerator card to buy. Here a common joke was that of the available options, the S3 Virge GPU was so bad that it was actually worse than running in software rendering, but was this true? Cue [Bits und Bolts]’s investigation to finally put this myth to rest.

On software rendering mode a zippy Pentium 166 would struggle to render at 640×480 resolution, so if you wanted more than 320×240, or really knock down graphical fidelity, you had to get that 3D accelerator card. After combining a P166 with an S3 Virge/DX – a minor update to the original Virge – the Tomb Raider game was first compared while running in 512×384 resolution, which the game offers you with an S3 card installed along with bilinear filtering.

After hitting a capped 30 FPS on that first test, 640×480 was tried and hit a solid 15 FPS with bilinear filtering enabled, but the conclusion is basically that the special 512×384 resolution mode is pretty good. Perhaps the main causes of the myth was the wide variability in quality of the various GPUs using the S3 Virge chip, as well as trying to run at anything other than this special resolution which appears to target the card’s strengths.

Unlike resin printers where you generally just pour the fresh resin into the easily accessible vat, FDM printers need to squirrel away at least one spool and its requisite holder somewhere. For bed slingers this generally means a top-mounted spool holder, while for CoreXY enclosed printers they can appear on the sides, top or – inexplicably – on the back. While a side-mounted spool is often convenient, access to the side can still be blocked, in which case you do what [3D Maker Noob] did and over-engineer a fancy top-mounted spool holder.

The problem started after converting a Prusa Mk4S to a Core One using the conversion kit, which changes the position of the spool, forcing him to work around not having access to the right side of the machine where the default position is. After a first version using many of the left-over parts of the original Mk4S to create a fancy box-shaped spool holder, he proceeded to upgrade it as detailed in the video. All project files and instructions are available on Printables.

The result is a box you stack on top of the printer somewhat like a multi-spool box, just flatter and with a flippy lid on the front from which a rail slides out with the magnetically attached spool holder. A spool holder which you naturally can further customize to fit different spools. Even if over-engineered, you can’t deny that it would fit in confined spaces and looks pretty good while doing its job.

It’s become an accepted truth amongst tapeheads that there’s no point looking at new hardware, because there’s only one tape mechanism being made anywhere in the world anymore, and that it sucks. [VWestlife] may enjoy German automobiles, based on the name, but he’s also a tapehead– and he took the time to demonstrate on YouTube that the accepted truth just ain’t so.

The supposed One Mechanism to Rule Them All in Lo-Fi is designed or made by Chinese company Tanishin. Certainly Tanishin does make a tape mechanism, but as [VWestlife] demonstrates with a few teardowns, there’s absolutely more than one on the market. That doesn’t mean any of the new offerings will out-compete your vintage Sony Walkman, but it does mean there are differences worth considering if you were to buy new.

Note that it is handhelds like the Walkman being talked about– it must be, since there are both slot-loading and flip-loading decks still being made, and even if you’re not a tapehead you should be able to tell that those won’t share the same part on the BOM.

With a few teardowns, he finds three separate mechanisms, followed by a deep-dive into the Tanishin. If you’re looking to buy a new walkman– or perhaps use its guts to build a mass storage device-– you might want to watch the whole thing to help you pick. On the other hand, the mechanism doesn’t matter that much, as he points out. It brings the tape over the head, but that’s not difficult. Everything else– from the motor that needs to draw the tape out evenly, to the pickup and the preamps and amplifiers–is where noise and poor quality sound tends to creep in, especially when something’s built to a budget.

Overall, [VWestlife] takes pains to point out that these ‘crappy’ new players aren’t any worse than the original Sony Walkman– we’ve just been spoiled by decades of better media than the humble compact cassette. That’s no slight against the cassette– people are still pushing its limits to this day, like this insanely fast vacuum-driven mechanism we featured.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip!

Although the thought of installing a modern operating system like Windows 11 on something as archaic as a Core 2 Quad Q6600 Intel CPU may seem ridiculous, it being the flagship CPU of the time means that it still chews up low-end Celeron systems that are on the supported hardware list like the N4020. Hence [Omores] commencing on this latest adventure, with the snag being that the chosen mainboard features an AGP bus that Windows 11 no longer supports.

This system is intended to multi-boot a range of Windows OSes starting with Windows 98, while also playing nice with DOS and even Windows 11. In addition to the quad-core, 2.4 GHz Q6600 there’s also an amazing 3 GB of DDR1 RAM in the system.

The mainboard is the 2003-era Asrock 865PE, with the GPU being the highest-end GPU that still came in AGP flavor: the Radeon HD 4650 from 2009. Since the sole reason that Windows 11 doesn’t support AGP any more is due to the supporting files not being included with Windows 11, hence you can track it down on a Windows 10 1507 release install – such as the Intel AGP440.sys driver here – and install them with some file editing.

Since Windows 11 still supports the WDDM driver model from Windows Vista and 7 you can then install the Catalyst drivers from 2012 and be up and running. You only get 1 GB of VRAM for this card, but you probably don’t need much more on this level of hardware.

One major stumbling block remains, however, as Windows 11 24H2 enforces SSE4.2 instructions which the CPU doesn’t support. Ergo 23H2 is the newest Windows 11 version that can run on this system, with only the Education and Enterprise still receiving security updates, making it a bit of a pyrrhic victory, especially as Windows 7 benchmarks a fair bit faster on the same hardware.

While it might seem that your computer malfunctions every few minutes, the reality is that modern computers are usually quite robust. Not so much for quantum computers, where qubit life is often measured in milliseconds. Now, the company claims to have qubits that last for about 20 seconds.

For example, Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum chip, which, incidentally, was mired in controversy, provided 8 qubits that were stable very briefly. This second-generation chip provides 12 qubits that average 20-second lifespans.

Microsoft claims to use topological superconductors based on Majorana modes. However, despite claims, some researchers think the technology is using Andreev modes and does not contain any Majorana modes, although this is apparently debatable. Despite retracting an earlier paper, the company appears to stand by its claim that it is producing Majorana fermions.

The biggest problem, of course, is that to be practical, you will need millions of qubits instead of 8 or 12. That’s in addition to better fault tolerance, error correction, and other operational details. So raw qubit count can be misleading, but Fujitsu has a 256-qubit system and is on track to install one with 1,000 qubits this year, although redundancy probably cuts the number of logical qubits quite a bit. Microsoft claims it will have a commercially viable machine by 2029.

Until you can get your hands on a real quantum computer, there’s always simulation.

Some security hacks require someone to have physical access to your computer. In many cases, that’s easy to mitigate. Other attack vectors can put you at risk from anywhere via the network. That’s what firewalls are for. But there is an in-between risk where an attacker just has to be “around” your computer. [Rasmus Moorats] found out that a Creative Sound Blaster sound bar could open up just such an attack.

[Rasmus] was poking around the firmware just to write custom software to control it. The possibility of an attack was just an accidental find.

The soundbar connects to USB, but it also has Bluetooth, which, for some reason, is always on. There’s an app that can communicate with the speaker using BLE, and Creative has a special protocol to control it. The same protocol works on USB or Bluetooth, but with an important difference.

On USB, you have to authenticate to send commands. However, you can easily decompile the provided apps and learn the authentication key. But on BLE, it doesn’t require authentication at all for some reason. You can simply send commands via BLE, and the speaker obeys. No pairing. No physical access. Just be close enough for a Bluetooth connection.

The worst of the commands lets you reflash the device firmware. So, if you were a bad actor, you could flash firmware to act as a USB keyboard and then inject lots of bad commands into the host system.

BLE seems to be a common vector in consumer electronics. Maybe now you have to air-gap your speakers, too.

Adding magnets to a 3D print can be very useful in a design, but there are some things that can trip you up if you’re not away of them. In a recent video by [Lost in Tech] some of the essentials are covered, including why you shouldn’t get magnets near most extruder nozzles or the printing bed.

The easiest method is of course to add magnets in after printing, using friction fit with or without ribs, or with a dab of glue. Here making sure that the magnet stays in place is the trick, as you do not want the magnet to get lost or end up in the tummy of a curious pet or toddler.

Things get spicy when you’re talking about adding magnets during the printing process, as some extruders are made of a ferromagnetic material and thus a magnet will happily stick to said nozzle if it’s not pure brass or similar. As seen in the video even some purported ‘brass’ nozzles aren’t pure enough to not be significantly ferromagnetic.

Another issue is that of heat, which is something that magnets generally do not like much. Using magnets like you’d use heat inserts for bolts is a recipe for disaster, as the heat from a soldering iron will demagnetize the magnet, which for the typical magnet is less than 200°C. At least this should mean that the magnet stuck to your extruder nozzle will eventually fall off by itself after it demagnetizes.

With the bed of the typical FDM printer these days you’re talking about magnetically attached plates, with the underlying heated bed using a Halbach array configuration as is typical of flat magnets, yet with the gotcha that these aren’t typically real Halbach arrays, but knock-offs with simply alternating north-south pole magnets. As it turns out, these types of magnetic arrays can be disturbed by another magnet, such as a powerful neodymium magnet near said printing bed, flipping polarity in a way that cannot be easily undone.

You can still install magnets during printing, but it’s recommended to use something like side-insertion, where the extruder nozzle cannot pull out a magnet. Regardless of your approach, it’s good to know of the risks with ferromagnetic nozzles, the magnetic bed and treating magnets like they’re just heat inserts. While you can get higher-temperature magnets, many of the same issues still remain here.