[Ken] from the YouTube channel What’s Ken Making is back with another MiSTer video detailing the TapTo project and its integration into MiSTer. MiSTer, as some may recall, is a set of FPGA images and a supporting ecosystem for the Terasic DE10-Nano FPGA board, which hosts the very capable Altera Cyclone V FPGA.

The concept behind TapTo is to use NFC cards, stickers, and other such objects to launch games and particular key sequences. This allows an NFC card to be programmed with the required FPGA core and game image. The TapTo service runs on the MiSTer, waiting for NFC events and launching the appropriate actions when it reads a card. [Ken] demonstrates many such usage scenarios, from launching games quickly and easily with a physical ‘game card’ to adding arcade credits and even activating cheat codes.

As [Ken] points out, this opens some exciting possibilities concerning physical interactivity and would be a real bonus for people less able-bodied to access these gaming systems. It was fun to see how the Nintendo Amiibo figures and some neat integration projects like the dummy floppy disk drive could be used.

TapTo is a software project primarily for the MiSTer system, but ports are underway for Windows, the MiSTex, and there’s a working Commodore 64 game loader using the TeensyROM, which supports TapTo. For more information, check out the TapTo project GitHub page.

We’ve covered the MiSTer a few times before, but boy, do we have a lot of NFC hacks. Here’s an NFC ring and a DIY NFC tag, just for starters.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip!

They’re back! The San Francisco autonomous vehicle hijinks, that is, as Waymo’s fleet of driverless cars recently took up the fun new hobby of honking their horns in the wee hours of the morning. Meat-based neighbors of a Waymo parking lot in the South Market neighborhood took offense at the fleet of autonomous vehicles sounding off at 4:00 AM as they shuffled themselves around in the parking lot in a slow-motion ballet of undetermined purpose. The horn-honking is apparently by design, as the cars are programmed to tootle their horn trumpets melodiously if they detect another vehicle backing up into them. That’s understandable; we’ve tootled ourselves under these conditions, with vigor, even. But when the parking lot is full of cars that (presumably) can’t hear the honking and (also presumably) know where the other driverless vehicles are as well as their intent, what’s the point? Luckily, Waymo is on the case, as they issued a fix to keep the peace. Unfortunately, it sounds like the fix is just to geofence the lot and inhibit honking there, which seems like just a band-aid to us.

From the “Tech Doesn’t Make Everything Better” department, we’ve got news of a vulnerability in high-end racing bicycles that opens up a new vector for cheating. While our bike has been sitting sadly idle for the last twenty-odd years, apparently shifting technology has changed a lot, to the point where high-end derailleurs are no longer connected to handlebar-mounted shift lever by Bowden cables but now have servos that are linked to the shifters via Bluetooth. Anyone with more than a few minutes of experience with Bluetooth accessories and their default “123456” passwords can see where this is going. While there are no specific instances of cheating detailed in the story, one can imagine the hilarity to be had with a Flipper Zero while sitting on the side of a road at a course upgrade. To be sure, there are other ways to cheat, but we’re not sure we see the advantages of wireless shifting that offset the risks in this case.

Only 94 percent? A recent study claims to have quantified business spreadsheet errors, finding that 94% have critical problems. They came to this conclusion by mining literature from journal articles dating back to 1987, but rather than looking for papers with associated spreadsheets and analyzing them for errors, they looked for papers that discussed spreadsheet quality assurance. So this is sort of a meta-study, which makes us doubt the 94% finding. Still, we’d say it’s a safe bet that there are a lot of spreadsheets out there with critical errors, and that spreadsheet abuse is pretty rampant overall.

They say that if you’re not looking for your next job, you’re just waiting to get fired. That’s pretty much a tautology since there are only two — OK, three — ways out of any job, but it’s still good to always be looking for your next opportunity. So you might want to check out eejobboard, which allows you to do a parametric job search in the electrical engineering space. Pretty cool stuff.

And finally, we don’t have any information on this other than what you see in the video, but we’d love to learn more about these hardware FFTs. The video shows two implementations, one using a Zync 7020 FPGA, and one that uses over a thousand 74HC-series chips to do the same thing. If anyone out there knows the OP on this one, we’d love to get in touch.