TechyMagThings

Valve has always designed hacker-friendly hardware, and in that spirit, [NaKyle Wright] released Inkterface, a design for an E-ink faceplate to fit the recently released Steam Machine. As far as projects go, this one is meticulously documented, so give it a peek.

The system uses a selection of components that include a 5.83″ E-ink panel and driver board, a small lithium-polymer battery, and an ESP32-based controller board. A cleverly-designed 3D printed frame and bezel hold everything just so, creating a snug assembly with minimal wiring hassles.

The faceplate is wireless and self-contained, attaching with the help of four magnets. On the software side, the host machine communicates over Bluetooth, and a service takes care of pushing updates. An app for configuring and talking to the display will be available on Steam eventually, but in the meantime one can install that part manually.

[NaKyle]’s bill of materials calls for specific components, but the underlying design is very modular. Should one wish to make hardware or component changes, alterations to the 3D printed parts might be needed as well. Fortunately, [NaKyle] includes the .step files alongside the .stl models. We love to see that, because it makes tweaking or customizing so much more accessible. A homebrewed version of this E-ink panel might be just the thing to complement a homebrewed Steam machine.

Be sure to also check out the repository of Steam hardware, which contains drawings and 3D models of the Steam Deck and Steam Controller, useful for designing holders or custom brackets or whatever else one may need.

We all know the e-ink persistent displays, as they’re cheap and plentiful enough to have become ubiquitous in applications such as supermarket price labels. But we don’t often see some of the other technologies that almost did the same thing. The BBC Archive has a report from 1986 showing one of them, a prototype display from STC.

E-ink relies on flipping the arrangement of black and white particles in its pixels, while this one has a fluid in which the molecules are aligned to let light through, or dispersed randomly, at which point they block light. Frustratingly, we aren’t told what the liquid is, but we are given what might be the reason that we’ve never seen one. The activation voltage is rather high at 200 volts. It’s still a fascinating glimpse of something we might have had, with some tasty early-PC-era portables along the way.

The BBC archive has served up quite a bit of retro goodness over time, and we’ve certainly featured one or two of them over time. A recent one was this demonstration of email via a flight to Amsterdam, from the same year as today’s display.

Although there’s probably no good reason to want to run image editing software from 1996 other than for nostalgia’s sake, if you ever wanted to run the GIMP version 0.54 from back when Windows 98 was still called Windows 97, you can do so now from the comfort of a modern-day Linux desktop. What enables this is a Flatpak version of a beta release, assembled by [balooii] for everyone’s enjoyment.

It wasn’t a simple matter of compiling the old software’s code and packaging it up, with the repository for the project containing a series of patches that were required to make this possible. Also of note is that this is the first version of GIMP with full surviving source code. Back then, GIMP used the Motif widget toolkit. Later on, it switched to the GIMP Toolkit (GTK).

Bundled with this Flatpak release are a lot of plugins and tutorials that were created at the time, making it a veritable time capsule of a more innocent era. As noted by [balooii], this version of GIMP was very much Beta software, with all of the UI quirks you’d expect. It also features the multiple unconnected windows (not MDI) approach to its UI – dropped in more recent GIMP releases —  that has enraged proponents of the single window approach, as used by all commercial competitors, including Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop.

Optical media is great — it’s pretty high density, relatively durable, and decently long-lasting if

well cared for. If not well cared for, well, it’s only relatively durable, and we’ve probably all picked up a second-hand disk that’s too scratched to use. The X-Box 360 is notorious for causing circular damage, and while decent disk cleaners were easy to get in the 90s, we’re not sure how far we trust what’s on offer at retailers today. Hence [Dennis], aka [RetroGameRevival]’s RGR ezBuff polishing machine, which does exactly what it says on the tin: buffs disks to a polish, easily.

We’d say the whole thing is 3D printed, but of course you still need a motor and controller — if you had to turn a crank, that would just be a Buff polishing machine, no ez — and we’ve yet to see a printer poop out polishing compound. If you build it, keep in mind that you’re taking the top layer of material off the disk to polish scratches away, so don’t overdo it. It’s entirely possible to ruin a disk beyond repair with too-aggressive buffing; it’s also possible for disks to be scratched too deeply to save. Polishing can’t save genuine disk rot, though in our experience you’re more likely to find scratched disks than rotten ones. Still, [Dennis]’s birthday gift to the community — it was apparently released on his birthday — should keep more than a few disks out of the trash.

With Sony getting out of the disk game, physical media is becoming more precious than ever, so it’s good to see what looks like a quality polishing option for those of us who either never had a polisher or didn’t save theirs. If you really want your disks to last, maybe we should bring back CD caddies.

Thanks to [Dean] for the tip, via timeExtension.com.

Much like radio operators being encouraged to use the least possible amount of power to make a contact, chemists have a similar rule encouraging using the least amount of materials in experiments. Not only is this rooted in economics, but in safety as well; if something goes wrong it’s generally good if there’s not excess amounts of reactants. With modern techniques, though, it’s possible to bring experimental chemistry down to incredibly small scales, and [Marb’s lab] found that they needed a custom built still for these new, diminutive experiments.

The first step is to build the heating component of the still. This is provided with a few custom aluminum parts for the base and a pair of heaters originally meant for 3D printers, with the assembled unit wrapped in insulation. The heater accomodates a 25 mL round-bottom flask. Temperature control of the heating mantle is provided by a controller mounted to a DIN rail which receives power from a 24V power supply, and an additional temperature probe is added to measure the temperature of the distillate. A test run with water shows the small still quickly and efficiently evaporating the water up to a condenser.

Although building a still doesn’t have to be technically difficult, building something this small that’s effective and safe is a bit more challenging than a backyard moonshining operation. Scaling chemical reactions down can often be a challenge but is possible with the right mindset and equipment. We’ve seen miniaturization of many things that we might not have expected including hydrogen production, aluminum smelting, and even the construction of a microscope.

Humans are odd creatures, and no two are exactly alike, which is likely why so many different methods exist for tracking the progress of tasks that must be accomplished. [Simone Giertz] has graced us with her own spin on task tracking that adds an element of chance.

[Giertz] tells us that she started with written lists that she tackled in dice-determined order to keep her from overthinking or cherry-picking tasks. While this worked fine, she longed for a more elegant solution. Approaching the UI first, unlike any Open Source project ever, she determined that a marker that could randomly point to a task on a vertical list would be most pleasant.

The bulk of the project was evaluating different mechanisms to make the marker pick tasks at random while not selecting a task that had already been completed. A set of magnetic toggles that could repel the marker proved ineffective, but a simpler solution involving moving the completed tasks past a divider won the day. The finished product has a satisfying selection mechanism that makes interacting with the chore chart a joy, which probably helps make it more likely things get done.

We’ve seen many productivity hacks over the years, including Arya’s Hacking the Self, this rotary time tracker, or this e-ink macropad.

If you asked us to build you a KVM last week, we’d likely have reached for a Raspberry Pi. Now, thanks to [JonathanRowny], we’d seriously consider an ESP32-P4, because his IP KVM seems pretty capable.

He’s using the P4 hardware to its fullest, getting the supported 1080p graphics, and doing so in an interesting way– he’s got a commercial adapter board to try and translate HDMI signals to the camera input on his dev board. Conveniently enough, it’s the same ribbon-cable pinout as the RPi, which is not guaranteed by the CSI standard. Writing a driver to take that signal proved the hardest part– aside from the usual chip revision confusion that plagues this chip– and we can’t help but wonder if the client on the other side of the KVM-IP link might have an easier time doing the image processing that was required for a good image. Regardless, he’s got the code as it is now up on GitHub under the Apache license. 

As of this this writing, there’s no audio, and ironically for an ESP32 project networking is wired-only– but much more importantly, there is no security. So it’s a work in progress, but great to see the P4 in the wild doing something other than emulation. Not that we haven’t seen the P4 at work before–the Tanmatsu handheld also makes use of Expressif’s most powerful chip for a handy little terminal. Between the KVM and the handhelds, we cannot help but wonder how many of the projects that were once the provenance of a Pi will get squeezed into these overpowered microcontrollers. Sure, they can’t even match the original Pi in horsepower, never mind a modern Pi5, but how many times have you seen a Linux SBC seriously under-taxed in a project like this?

If you’re swapping Pi for P4– or doing anything else interesting– please let us know on the tips line.