Last week, we blogged about the making a very small RISC-V emulator. Folks asked the author the next logical question after finding out that the emulator works: Can it run Doom?

The original Doom is considered one of the first pioneering first-person shooter games, introducing to IBM-compatible computers features such as 3D graphics, third-dimension spatiality, networked multiplayer gameplay, and support for player-created modifications with the Doom WAD format. Over 10 million copies of games in the Doom series have been sold; the series has spawned numerous sequels, novels, comic books, board games, and film adaptations. The author fortunately had made a port of doom for small memory constrained systems and used that for tests.

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For years, a small pedantry war has been raging in our address bars. In one corner are brands like Google, Instagram, and Facebook. This group has chosen to redirect example.com to www.example.com. In the opposite corner: GitHub, DuckDuckGo, and Discord. This group has chosen to do the reverse and redirect www.example.com to example.com.

Does “WWW” belong in a URL? Some developers hold strong opinions on the subject. We’ll explore arguments for and against it after a bit of history.

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SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS is a long time. It’s so long that most of us don’t remember a time before the transistor, and long enough for many engineers to have devoted entire careers to its use and development. In honor of this most important of technological achievements, this issue’s package of articles explores the transistor’s historical journey and potential future.

In “The First Transistor and How it Worked,” Glenn Zorpette dives deep into how the point-contact transistor came to be. Then, in “The Ultimate Transistor Timeline,” Stephen Cass lays out the device’s evolution, from the flurry of successors to the point-contact transistor to the complex devices in today’s laboratories that might one day go commercial. The transistor would never have become so useful and so ubiquitous if the semiconductor industry had not succeeded in making it small and cheap. We try to give you a sense of that scale in “The State of the Transistor.”

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APIs for Personal Weather Station Contributors

The Weather Company Data APIs are served from our Enterprise Data Platform built upon the latest, most robust and globally distributed cloud technologies leveraging the core competence of our weather systems and next-generation globally distributed, highly available, low latency platforms. The Enterprise Data Platform has been architected from the beginning with extreme scale and performance as key factors of success and is automatically scaled to deliver tens of Billions average daily requests with extremely low latency.

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Culture shifts. But it’s held in place by norms, and those are driven by status and affiliation.

No one actually needs a car that can accelerate one second faster than most other cars. But having one confers status in some circles. But what happens when a new generation of technology makes that previously fast car not the fastest anymore? Is it still a luxury good?

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IF GRAIN MUST be dragged to market on an oxcart, how far can it go before the oxen eat up all the cargo? This, in brief, is the problem faced by any transportation system in which the vehicle must carry its own fuel. The key value is the density of energy, expressed with respect to either mass or volume.

The era of large steam-powered ocean liners began during the latter half of the 19th century, when wood was still the world’s dominant fuel. But no liners fired their boilers with wood: There would have been too little space left for passengers and cargo. Soft wood, such as spruce or pine, packs less than 10 megajoules per liter, whereas bituminous coal has 2.5 times as much energy by volume and at least twice as much by mass. By comparison, gasoline has 34 MJ/L and diesel about 38 MJ/L.

But in a world that aspires to leave behind all fuels (except hydrogen or maybe ammonia) and to electrify everything, the preferred measure of stored energy density is watt-hours per liter. By this metric, air-dried wood contains about 3,500 Wh/L, good steam coal around 6,500, gasoline 9,600, aviation kerosene 10,300, and natural gas (methane) merely 9.7—less than 1/1,000 the density of kerosene.

How do batteries compare with the fuels they are to displace?

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Welcome to MicroPython on Unicorn!

The terminal beside this is no ordinary REPL.

It utilizes the Unicorn CPU emulator converted

to Javascript by Unicorn.js in order to run MicroPython

"bare metal" on an ARM CPU emulation.

MicroPython on Unicorn is completely open source so

make sure to report bugs to the issue tracker!.

Source: https://github.com/micropython/micropython-unicorn

The user and reset buttons along with the LEDs and pins

on the pyboard below are fully functional. Unfortunately

that's not quite the case for the clock speed approximation

when delayed.

Try to write a script, paste some code or run a demo!

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Raspberry Pi Pico W brings WiFi to the Pico platform while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling, and now as of CircuitPython 8.0.0-beta.2, there is CircuitPython WiFi support for the Pico W! This guide includes examples for testing your WiFi connection, using requests to pull JSON feeds, ping API's and log sensor data for IoT projects; all using CircuitPython! Status Bar As of CircuitPython 8.0.0, if you have a smart terminal program like Thonny, tio or Screen, you will see the status of your CircuitPython board in the header bar of the terminal.

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LINUX Unplugged 396: How Linux Got to Mars

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Persistence-of-vision, or POV, displays work on the principle that if a light blinks in front of your eye, you perceive it for some amount of time after it’s gone. Blink lights in sequence when moving, and you can create what looks like a static image. “Programmer with a soldering iron” B45i found a deal on ATtiny13 microcontrollers for roughly $.30 each, and was able to create a POV display with one for less than a dollar.

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In this blog post, I want to refine your mental model for Flexbox. We'll build an intuition for how the Flexbox algorithm works, by learning about each of these properties. Whether you're a CSS beginner, or you've been using Flexbox for years, I bet you'll learn quite a bit!

Let's do this!

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Kiosks are designed to offer users specific information or a specific experience, while preventing access to any other activities on the device. They are often found in airports, shops, hospitals, cafes, and museums — any location where people need easy access to information or services like timetables, waiting times, product information, directions, self check-in machines, and so on.

Kiosk mode on your Raspberry Pi allows you to boot straight into a full-screen web page or an application without using the desktop environment. It’s the foundation for many different projects where you want to display information for a dedicated interaction with a user.

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When was a word first used in print? You may be surprised! Enter a date below to see the words first recorded on that year. To learn more about First Known Use dates, click here.

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Dutch daredevil Mark of The Flying Dutchmen shared stunning 4K POV footage of a coaster ride down a mountain into the Oeschinen Valley in the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland.

The mountain coasters is located next to the gondola ! Oeschinensee is one of the most beautiful lake in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland region. It is located 4 km east of Kandersteg in the Oeschinen valley.

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Pathfinding Visualizer Step 1: Select a maze algorithm from the maze dropdown or draw your own boundaries by clicking and holding on the tiles Step 2: Select an pathfinding algorithm from the pathfinding dropdown Step 3: Click the play button to see the pathfinding visualizer in action !

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Back in college I used to run part of my website from a Linux box in my room. I made it into a speech synthesiser, and people could connect to the machine to talk into my flat.

(Retrospective apologies to my flatmates.)

This is way back in 2000 so before smartphones, and before texting, and before always-on internet (college was an exception), and before camera phones or being able to reliably email photos let alone video. Decent text-to-speech still felt novel. We had a friend who was travelling in Australia at the time and he would visit internet cafes and type in messages to talk to us. Of course there was no way of talking back. It felt impossibly magical.

But what I remember feeling most magical was the idea that there was somebody visiting that server on my desk. There was somebody coming from a long way away and going inside. An electronic homunculus.

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NOVEMBER MARKS THE 50th anniversary of Pong. Why should we care?

For starters, Pong is the first video game that millions of people welcomed into their homes to play on their own televisions. Pong kick-started a global video-game industry that is now worth upwards of US $300 billion. And Pong still has a place in active research, for training AI algorithms, strengthening neural networks, and developing the brain-machine interface called Neuralink, among other things.

And yet as a Gen-Xer born too late to have enjoyed Pong as a child, I have trouble fathoming how anyone could sit in front of a TV watching a square dot—not even a round ball—bounce back and forth across the dark, featureless screen. Was this really fun? To celebrate the half-century persistence of Pong, I set out to discover why so many people love the most boring video game of all time.

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This installation enables a live plant to control a machete. plant machete has a control system that reads and utilizes the electrical noises found in a live philodendron. The system uses an open source micro-controller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant’s leaves. Using custom software, these signals are mapped in real-time to the movements of the joints of the industrial robot holding a machete. In this way, the movements of the machete are determined based on input from the plant. Essentially the plant is the brain of the robot controlling the machete determining how it swings, jabs, slices and interacts in space.

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Now, you don't just go hooning any old EV around the strip, at least not if you're Ken Block. In this case, his ride is a stunning one-off electric Audi, the S1 Hoonitron, inspired by the 1987 Audi Sport quattro S1 Pikes Peak car.

"Developing a fully electric prototype for the unique requirements of our partner Ken Block was a big and exciting challenge to which the whole team rose with flying colors. It is great to see how ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ is presented in an all-new environment," said Oliver Hoffman, Audi's board member for technical development.

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Building and testing different types of Lego Pneumatic Engines that run on compressed air.

Chapters:

00:00 Concept 02:13 Starter Motor 02:35 Modifying Parts 03:20 Sliders 04:00 i2 05:06 Crank Radius 06:00 i3 07:15 i4 08:00 V6 09:27 V8 10:24 R12 11:26 Experiments 11:55 Montage

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A university group named the GreenTeam, from the University of Stuttgart set the Guinness World Record for the fastest 0-62 mph (0-100 kph) electric vehicle acceleration in a 1.461-sec 0-62 mph run.

For almost a year, the 20 members of the GreenTeam have been preparing for the world record.

The GreenTeam E0711 is a genuinely powerful device. The carbon fiber racer has in-house-built motors that drive all four wheels and combine to produce 180 kW (242 horsepower) when powered by the new high-voltage battery pack.

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Whether they are used for powering information displays, automating testing, controlling machinery, monitoring an environment, or doing other tasks, enterprises see Raspberry Pis as serious devices for doing serious tasks. Each model has a long product lifecycle—even the older models (1B+, 2B, 3A+, 3B, and 3B+) will remain in production until at least January 2026. There is little risk that they will go obsolete, so you can maintain a sufficiently large stock and treat them as modular components that you replace rather than fix.

Stable hardware vs. changing software

While you can rely on the hardware to remain constant, the same is not true for the software. The Raspberry Pi's official supported operating system is Raspberry Pi OS (previously called Raspbian), and it should be updated regularly to get the latest security and bug fixes.

This presents a problem. Because Raspberry Pis provide a bridge between the physical and virtual worlds, they are often installed in difficult-to-reach locations. They also tend to be installed by hardware folks, typically electricians for plants and assembly technicians for products. You do not want to waste their time by requiring them to connect a keyboard and monitor, log in to run raspi-config, install software with apt-get, and then configure the software.

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How can we “fingerprint” a codebase to see its structure at a glance? Let’s explore ways to automatically visualize a GitHub repo, and how that could be useful.

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The crossed spikes that you see in some images of stars are not actually parts of the stars. They are imaging artifacts that are created by the telescope itself and are called diffraction spikes. Certain telescopes have a large primary mirror that focuses the incoming beam of light onto a secondary mirror or a sensor that is held over the primary mirror. The secondary mirror diverts the light out of the telescope so it can be seen or further processed. Or, alternately, a sensor held above the primary mirror converts the image to an electrical signal that is delivered to a computer.

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The entire Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub and published by Apress, is available here. All content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license. Print versions of the book are available on Amazon.com.

The version found here has been updated with corrections and additions from hundreds of contributors. If you see an error or have a suggestion, patches and issues are welcome in its GitHub repository.

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