On 31 March of this year we had to bid farewell to Charlotte Elizabeth “Betty” Webb (née Vine-Stevens) at the age of 101. She was one of the cryptanalysts who worked at Bletchley Park during World War 2, as well as being one of the few women who worked at Bletchley Park in this role. At the time existing societal biases held that women were not interested in ‘intellectual work’, but as manpower was short due to wartime mobilization, more and more women found themselves working at places like Bletchley Park in a wide variety of roles, shattering these preconceived notions.

Betty Webb had originally signed up with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), with her reasoning per a 2012 interview being that she and a couple of like-minded students felt that they ought to be serving their country, ‘rather than just making sausage rolls’. After volunteering for the ATS, she found herself being interviewed at Bletchley Park in 1941. This interview resulted in a years-long career that saw her working on German and Japanese encrypted communications, all of which had to be kept secret from then 18-year old Betty’s parents.

Until secrecy was lifted, all her environment knew was that she was a ‘secretary’ at Bletchley Park. Instead, she was fighting on the frontlines of cryptanalysis, an act which got acknowledged by both the UK and French governments years later.

Writing The Rulebook

Although encrypted communications had been a part of warfare for centuries, the level and scale was vastly different during World War 2, which spurred the development of mechanical and electronic computer systems. At Bletchley Park these were the Bombe and Colossus computers, with the former being an electro-mechanical system. Both were used for deciphering German Enigma machine encrypted messages, with the tube-based Colossus taking over starting in 1943.

After enemy messages were intercepted, it was the task of these systems and the cryptanalysis experts to decipher them as quickly as possible. With the introduction of the Enigma machine by the Axis, this had become a major challenge. Since each message was likely to relate to a current event and thus time-sensitive, any delay in decrypting it would render the resulting decrypted message less useful. Along with the hands-on decrypting work, there were many related tasks to make this process work as smoothly and securely as possible.

Betty’s first task at Bletchley was to do the registering of incoming messages, which she began with as soon as she had been subjected to the contents of the Official Secrets Act. This forbade her from disclosing even the slightest detail of what she did or had seen at Bletchley, at the risk of severe punishment.

As was typical at Bletchley Park, each member of the staff there was kept as much in the dark of the whole as possible for operational security reasons. This meant that of the thousands of incoming messages per day, each had to be carefully kept in order and marked with a date and obfuscated location. She did see a Colossus computer once when it was moved into one of the buildings, but this was not one of her tasks, and snooping around Bletchley was discouraged for obvious reasons.

Paraphrasing

Although Betty’s German language skills were pretty good thanks to her mother’s insistence that she’d be able to take care of herself whilst travelling on the continent, the requirements for the translators at Bletchley were much more strict, and thus eventually she ended up working in the Japanese section located in Block F. After decrypting and translating the enemy messages, the texts were not simply sent to military headquarters or similar, but had to be paraphrased first.

The paraphrasing task entails pretty much what it says: taking the original translated message and paraphrasing it so that the meaning is retained, but any clues about what the original message was from which it was paraphrased is erased. In the case that such a message then falls into enemy hands, via a spy at HQ, it is made much harder to determine where this particular information was intercepted.

Betty was deemed to be very good at this task, which she attributed to her mother, who encouraged her to relate stories in her own words. As she did this paraphrasing work, the looming threat of the Official Secrets Act encouraged those involved with the work to not dwell on or remember much of the texts they read.

In May of 1945 with the war in Europe winding down, Betty was transferred to the Pentagon in the USA to continue her paraphrasing work on translated Japanese messages. Here she was the sole ATS girl, but met up with a girl from Hull with whom she had to share a room, and bed, in the rundown Cairo hotel.

With the surrender of Japan the war officially came to an end, and Betty made her way back to the UK.

Secrecy’s Long Shadow

When the work at Bletchley Park was finally made public in 1975, Betty’s parents had sadly already passed away, so she was never able to tell them the truth of what she had been doing during the war. Her father had known that she was keeping a secret, but because of his own experiences during World War 1, he had shown great understanding and appreciation of his daughter’s work.

After keeping her secrets along with everyone else at Bletchley, the Pentagon and elsewhere, Betty wasn’t about to change anything about this. Her husband had never indicated any interest in talking about it either. In her eyes she had just done her duty and that was good enough, but when she got asked to talk about her experiences in 1990, this began a period in which she would not only give talks, but also write about her experiences. In 2015 Betty was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) and in 2021 as a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) in France.

Today, as more and more voices from of those who experienced World War 2 and who were involved the heroic efforts to stop the Axis forces fall silent, it is more important than ever to recognize their sacrifices and ingenuity. Even if Betty Webb didn’t save the UK by her lonesome, it was the combined effort from thousands of individuals like her that cracked the Enigma encryption and provided a constant flow of intel to military command, saving countless lives in the process and enabling operations that may have significantly shortened the war.

Top image: A Colossus Mark 2 computer being operated by Dorothy Du Boisson (left) and Elsie Booker (right), 1943 (Credit: The National Archives, UK)

It’s not often you’ll see us singing the praises of Microsoft on these pages, but credit where credit is due, this first-person account of how the software giant got its foot in the proverbial door by Bill Gates himself is pretty slick.

Now it’s not the story that has us excited, mind you. It’s the website itself. As you scroll down the page, the text and images morph around in a very pleasing and retro-inspired way. Running your cursor over the text makes it flip through random ASCII characters, reminding us a bit of the “decryption” effect from Sneakers. Even the static images have dithering applied to them as if they’re being rendered on some ancient piece of hardware. We don’t know who’s doing Billy’s web design, but we’d love to have them come refresh our Retro Edition.

Presentation aside, for those who don’t know the story: back in 1975, Gates and Paul Allen told the manufacturer of the Altair 8800 that they had a version of BASIC that would run on the computer and make it easier for people to use. Seeing the potential for increased sales, the company was very interested, and asked them to come give a demonstration of the software in a few weeks.

There was just one problem — Bill and Paul lied. They had never even seen an Altair in person, let alone wrote any code for one. So they set off on a mad dash to complete the project in time, with Allen famously still working on the code on the plane as they flew to the meeting. As you’ve probably guessed, they ended up pulling it off, and the rest is history.

At the very end of the page, you can download the actual source code for Altair BASIC that Gates and Allen co-delivered, presented as scans of the original printout. A little light reading as you wait to find out if that latest Windows update that’s installing is going to tell you that your machine is too old to use anymore.

You can salvage lithium 18650 cells from all sorts of modern gadgets, from disposable vapes to cordless power tools. The tricky part, other than physically liberating them from whatever they are installed in, is figuring out if they’re worth keeping or not. Just because an 18650 cell takes a charge doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any good — it could have vastly reduced capacity, or fail under heavy load.

If you’re going to take salvaging these cells seriously, you should really invest in a charger that is capable of running some capacity tests against the cell. Or if you’re a bit more adventurous, you can build this “Battery Health Monitor” designed by [DIY GUY Chris]. Although the fact that it can only accept a single cell at a time is certainly a limitation if you’ve got a lot of batteries to go though, the fact that it’s portable and only needs a USB-C connection for power means you can take it with you on your salvaging adventures.

The key to this project is a pair of chips from Texas Instruments. The BQ27441 is a “Fuel Gauge” IC, and is able to determine an 18650’s current capacity, which can be compared to the cell’s original design capacity to come up with an estimate of its overall health. The other chip, the BQ24075, keeps an eye on all the charging parameters to make sure the cell is being topped up safely and efficiently.

With these two purpose-built chips doing a lot of the heavy lifting, it only takes a relatively simple microcontroller to tie them together and provide user feedback. In this case [DIY GUY Chris] has gone with the ATmega328P, with a pair of addressable WS2812B LED bars to show the battery’s health and charge levels. As an added bonus, if you plug the device into your computer, it will output charging statistics over the serial port.

The whole project is released under the MIT license, and everything from the STL files for the 3D printed enclosure to the MCU’s Arduino-flavored firmware is provided. If you’re looking to build one yourself, you can either follow along with the step-by-step assembly instructions, or watch the build video below. Or really treat yourself and do both — you deserve it.

If your battery salvaging operation is too large for a single-cell tester, perhaps it’s time to upgrade to this 40-slot wall mounted unit.

There seems to be nothing a 555 can’t do. We’ve seen it before, but [electronzapdotcom] reminds us you can use a 555 and a few parts to make a reasonable touch switch in this video, embedded below.

The circuit uses some very large resistors so that noise from your body can overcome the logic level on the trigger and threshold inputs. You can easily adapt this idea if you need a simple touch switch. Though we imagine this circuit wouldn’t work well if you were in a quiet environment. We suspect 50 or 60 Hz hum is coupling through your finger and triggering the pins, but it could be a different effect.

How reliable is it? Beats us. The circuit is a bistable, so essentially your finger pumps a signal into a flip-flop. This is old trick, but could be useful. Of course, if you really need a touch switch, you have plenty of options. You can get little modules. Or, directly measure skin resistance.

The plethora of smart home devices available today deliver all manner of opportunities, but it’s fair to say that interfacing with them is more often done in the browser or an app than in the terminal. WattWise from [Naveen Kulandaivelu] is a tool which changes all that, it’s a command-line interface (CLI) for power monitoring smart plugs.

Written in Python, the tool can talk either directly to TP-Link branded smart plugs, or via Home Assistant. It tracks the power consumption with a simple graph, but the exciting part lies in how it can be used to throttle the CPU of a computer in order to use power at the points in the day when it is cheapest. You can find the code in a GitHub repository.

We like the idea of using smart plugs as instruments, even if they may not be the most accurate of measurement tools. It takes them even further beyond the simple functionality and walled-garden interfaces provided by their manufacturers, which in our view can only be a good thing.

Meanwhile, for further reading we’ve looked at smart plugs in detail in the past.

Somewhere in the universe, there’s a place that lists every x86 operating system from scratch. Not just some bootloaders, or just a kernel stub, but documentation to build a fully functional, interrupt-handling, multitasking-capable OS. [Erik Helin and Adam Renberg] did just that by documenting every step in The Little Book About OS Development.

This is not your typical dry academic textbook. It’s a hands-on, step-by-step guide aimed at hackers, tinkerers, and developers who want to demystify kernel programming. The book walks you through setting up your environment, bootstrapping your OS, handling interrupts, implementing virtual memory, and even tackling system calls and multitasking. It provides just enough detail to get you started but leaves room for exploration – because, let’s be honest, half the fun is in figuring things out yourself.

Completeness and structure are two things that make this book stand out. Other OS dev guides may give you snippets and leave you to assemble the puzzle yourself. This book documents the entire process, including common pitfalls. If you’ve ever been lost in the weeds of segmentation, paging, or serial I/O, this is the map you need. You can read it online or fetch it as a single 75-page long PDF.

Mockup photo source: Matthieu Dixte

Macro pads are handy for opening up your favorite programs or executing commonly used keyboard shortcuts. But why stop there?

That’s what [Jeroen Brinkman] must have been thinking while creating the Programmer’s Macro Pad. Based on the Arduino Pro Micro, this hand-wired pad is unique in that a single press of any of its 16 keys can virtually “type” out multiple lines of text. In this case, it’s a capability that’s being used to prevent the user from having to manually enter in commonly used functions, declarations, and conditional statements.

For example, in the current firmware, pressing the “func” key will type out a boilerplate C function:

int () { //
;
return 0;
}; // f 

It will also enter in the appropriate commands to put the cursor where it needs to be so you can actually enter in the function name. The other keys such as “array” and “if” work the same way, saving the user from having to enter (and potentially, even remember) the correct syntax.

The firmware is kept as simple as possible, meaning that the functionality of each key is currently hardcoded. Some kind of tool that would let you add or change macros without having to manually edit the source code and flash it back to the Arduino would be nice…but hey, it is a Programmers Macro Pad, after all.

Looking to speed up your own day-to-day computer usage? We’ve covered a lot of macro pads over the years, we’re confident at least a few of them should catch your eye.