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.

The list of countries to achieve their own successful orbital space launch is a short one, almost as small as the exclusive club of states that possess nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union was first off the rank in 1957, with the United States close behind in 1958, and a gaggle of other aerospace-adept states followed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Italy, Iran, North Korea and South Korea have all joined the list since the dawn of the new millennium.

Absent from the list stands Australia. The proud island nation has never stood out as a player in the field of space exploration, despite offering ground station assistance to many missions from other nations over the years. However, the country has continued to inch its way to the top of the atmosphere, establishing its own space agency in 2018. Since then, development has continued apace, and the country’s first orbital launch appears to be just around the corner.

Space, Down Under

The establishment of the Australian Space Agency (ASA) took place relatively recently. The matter was seen to be long overdue from an OECD member country; by 2008, Australia was the only one left without a national space agency since previous state authorities had been disbanded in 1996. This was despite many facilities across the country contributing to international missions, providing critical radio downlink services and even welcoming JAXA’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft back to Earth.

Eventually, a groundswell grew, pressuring the government to put Australia on the right footing to seize growing opportunities in the space arena. Things came to a head in 2018, when the government established ASA to “support the growth and transformation of Australia’s space industry.”

ASA would serve a somewhat different role compared to organizations like NASA (USA) and ESA (EU). Many space agencies in other nations focus on developing launch vehicles and missions in-house, collaborating with international partners and aerospace companies in turn to do so. However, for ASA, the agency is more focused on supporting and developing the local space industry rather than doing the engineering work of getting to space itself.

Orbital Upstarts

Just because the government isn’t building its own rockets, doesn’t mean that Australia isn’t trying to get to orbit. That goal is the diehard mission of Gilmour Space Technologies. The space startup was founded in 2013, and established its rocketry program in 2015, and has been marching towards orbit ever since. As is often the way, the journey has been challenging, but the payoff of genuine space flight is growing ever closer.

Gilmour Space moved fast, launching its first hybrid rocket back in 2016. The successful suborbital launch proved to be a useful demonstration of the company’s efforts to produce a rocket that used 3D-printed fuel. This early milestone aided the company to secure investment that would support its push to grander launches at greater scale. The company’s next major launch was planned for 2019, but frustration struck—when the larger One Vision rocket suffered a failure just 7 seconds prior to liftoff. Undeterred, the company continued development of a larger rocket, taking on further investment and signing contracts to launch payloads to orbit in the ensuing years.

Gilmour Space has worked hard to develop its hybrid rocket engines in-house. 

With orbital launches and commercial payload deliveries the ultimate goal, it wasn’t enough to just develop a rocket. Working with the Australian government, Gilmour Space established the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in early 2024—a launchpad suitable for the scale of its intended space missions. Located on Queensland’s Gold Coast, it’s just 20 degrees south of the equator—closer than Cape Canaveral, and useful for accessing low- to mid-inclination equatorial orbits. The hope was to gain approval to launch later that year, but thus far, no test flights have taken place. Licensing issues around the launch have meant the company has had to hold back on shooting for orbit.

The rocket with which Gilmour Space intends to get there is called Eris. In Block 1 configuration, it stands 25 meters tall, and is intended to launch payloads up to 300 kg into low-Earth orbits. It’s a three-stage design. It uses four of Gilmour’s Sirius hybrid rocket motors in the first stage, and just one in the second stage. The third stage has a smaller liquid rocket engine of Gilmour’s design, named Phoenix. The rocket was first staged vertically on the launch pad in early 2024, and a later “dress rehearsal” for launch was performed in September, with the rocket fully fueled. However, flight did not take place, as launch permits were still pending from Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA).

The Eris rocket was first vertically erected on the launchpad in 2024, but progress towards launch has been slow since then. 

After a number of regulatory issues, the company’s first launch of Eris was slated for March 15, 2025. However, that day came and passed, even with CASA approval, as the required approvals were still not available from the Australian Space Agency. Delays have hurt the company’s finances, hampering its ability to raise further funds. As for the rocket itself, hopes for Eris’s performance at this stage remain limited, even if you ask those at Gilmour Space. Earlier this month, founder Adam Gilmour spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald on his expectations for the initial launch. Realistic about the proposition of hitting orbit on the company first attempt, he expects it to take several launches to achieve, with some teething problems to come. “It’s very hard to test an orbital rocket without just flying it,” he told the Herald. “We don’t have high expectations we’ll get to orbit… I’d personally be happy to get off the pad.”

Despite the trepidation, Eris stands as Australia’s closest shot at hitting the bigtime outside the atmosphere. Government approvals and technical hurdles will still need to be overcome, with the Australian Space Agency noting that the company still has licence conditions to meet before a full launch is approved. Still, before the year is out, Australia might join that vaunted list of nations that have leapt beyond the ground to circle the Earth from above. It will be a proud day when that comes to pass.

Getting a look at the internals of a garden variety “wall wart” isn’t the sort of thing that’s likely to excite the average Hackaday reader. You’ve probably cracked one open yourself, and even if you haven’t, you’ve likely got a pretty good idea of what’s inside that sealed up brick of plastic. But sometimes a teardown can be just as much about the journey as it is the end result.

Truth be told, we’re not 100% sure if this teardown from [Brian Dipert] over at EDN was meant as an April Fool’s joke or not. Certainly it was posted on the right day, but the style is close enough to some of his previous work that it’s hard to say. In any event, he’s created a visual feast — never in history has an AC/DC adapter been photographed so completely and tastefully.

[Brian] even goes so far as to include images of the 2.5 lb sledgehammer and paint scraper that he uses to brutally break open the ultrasonic-welded enclosure. The dichotomy between the thoughtful imagery and the savage way [Brian] breaks the device open only adds to the surreal nature of the piece. Truly, the whole thing seems like it should be part of some avant garde installation in SoHo.

After he’s presented more than 20 images of the exterior of the broken wall wart, [Brian] finally gets to looking at the internals. There’s really not much to look at, there’s a few circuit diagrams and an explanation of the theory behind these unregulated power supplies, and then the write-up comes to a close as abruptly as it started.

So does it raise the simple teardown to an art form? We’re not sure, but we know that we’ll never look at a power adapter in quite the same way again.

It’s official, we’re living in the future. Certainly that’s the only explanation for how [wrongbaud] was able to write a three-part series of posts on hacking a cheap electric toothbrush off of AliExpress.

As you might have guessed, this isn’t exactly a hack out of necessity. With a flair for explaining hardware hacking, [wrongbaud] has put this together as a practical “brush-up” (get it?) on the tools and concepts involved in reverse engineering. In this case, the Raspberry Pi is used as a sort of hardware hacking multi-tool, which should make it relatively easy to follow along.

The first post in the series goes over getting the Pi up and running, which includes setting up OpenOCD. From there, [wrongbaud] actually cracks the toothbrush open and starts identifying interesting components, which pretty quickly leads to the discovery of a debug serial port. The next step is harassing the SPI flash chip on the board to extract its contents. As the toothbrush has a high-res color display (of course it does), it turns out this chip holds the images which indicate the various modes of operation. He’s eventually able to determine how the images are stored, inject new graphics data, and write it back to the chip.

Being able to display the Wrencher logo on our toothbrush would already be a win in our book, but [wrongbaud] isn’t done yet. For the last series in the post, he shows how to extract the actual firmware from the microcontroller using OpenOCD. This includes how to analyze the image, modify it, and eventually flash the new version back to the hardware — using that debug port discovered earlier to confirm the patched code is running as expected.

If you like his work with a toothbrush, you’ll love seeing what [wrongbaud] can do with an SSD or even an Xbox controller.

First of all, we’d like to give a big shout-out to [Afrotechmods]! After a long hiatus, he has returned to YouTube with an awesome new video all about op-amp characteristics, looking at the relatively awful LM741 in particular. His particular way of explaining things has definitely helped many electronics newbies to learn new concepts quickly!

Operational amplifiers have been around for a long time. The uA741, now commonly known as the LM741, was indeed an incredible piece of technology when it was released. It was extremely popular through the 1970s and onward as it saved designers the chore of designing a discrete amplifier. Simply add a few external components, and you have a well-behaved amplifier.

But as the years went on, many new and greatly improved op-amps have been developed, but either because of nostalgia or reticence, many in the field (especially, it seems, professors teaching electronics) have continued to use the LM741 in examples and projects. This is despite its many shortcomings:

• Large input offset voltage
• Large input offset current
• Low gain-bandwidth product
• Miserable slew rate of only 0.5V/uS

And that’s not even the full list. Newer designs have vastly improved all of these parameters, often by orders of magnitude, yet the LM741 still appears in articles aimed at those new to electronics, even in 2025. There are literal drop-in replacements for the LM741, such as the TLC081 (not to be confused with the similarly named FET-input TL081), which has 32 times the slew rate, 10 times the gain-bandwidth product, and an input offset voltage almost 2 orders of magnitude better!

So, check out the full video below, learn about op-amp parameters, and start checking out modern op-amps!

One of the most exciting trends we’ve seen over the last few years is the rise of truly personal computers — that is, bespoke computing devices that are built by individuals to fit their specific needs or wants. The more outlandish of these builds, often inspired by science fiction and sporting non-traditional layouts, tend to be lumped together under the term “cyberdecks”, but there are certainly builds where that description doesn’t quite stick, including the Cyber Writer from [Darbin Orvar].

With a 10-inch screen, you might think it was intended to be a portable, but its laser-cut Baltic birch plywood construction says otherwise. Its overall design reminds us of early computer terminals, and the 60% mechanical keyboard should help reinforce that feeling that you’re working on a substantial piece of gear from yesteryear.

The Cyber Writer is powered by the Raspberry Pi Zero W 2, which might seem a bit underpowered, but [Darbin] has paired it with a custom minimalist word processor. There’s not a lot of detail about the software, but the page for the project says it features integrated file management and easy email export of documents.

The software isn’t yet available to the public, but it sounds like [Darbin] is at least considering it. Granted, there’s already distraction-free writing software out there, but we’re pretty firm believers that there’s no such thing as too many choices.

If you’re looking for something a bit more portable, the impressive Foliodeck might be more your speed.

Early photography lacked the convenience of the stable roll film we all know, and instead relied on a set of processes which the photographer would have to master from film to final print. Photographic chemicals could be flammable or even deadly, and results took a huge amount of work.

The daguerreotype process of using mercury to develop pictures on polished metal, and the wet-collodion plate with its nitrocellulose solution are well-known, but as conservators at the British National Archives found out, there was another process that’s much rarer. The Pannotype uses a collodion emulsion, but instead of the glass plate used by the wet-plate process it uses a fabric backing.

We know so much about the other processes because they were subject to patents, but pannotype never had a patent due to a disagreement. Thus when the conservators encountered some pannotypes in varying states of preservation, they needed to apply modern analytical techniques to understand the chemistry and select the best methods of stabilization. The linked article details those analyses, and provides them with some pointers towards conserving their collection. We look forward to someone making pannotype prints here in 2025, after all it’s not the first recreation of early photography we’ve seen.

Lord Vetinari from the Discworld series is known for many things, but perhaps most of all a clock that doesn’t quite keep continuous time. Instead, it ticks away at random increments to infuriate those that perceive it, whilst keeping regular time over the long term. [iracigt] decided to whip up a real world version of this hilarious fictional timepiece.

The clock itself is an off-the-shelf timepiece purchased from Target for the princely sum of $5. However, it’s been deviously modified with an RP2040 microcontroller hidden away inside. The RP2040 is programmed to tick the clock at an average of once per second. But each tick itself is not so exact. Instead, there’s an erraticness to its beat – some ticks are longer, some shorter, in the classic Vetinari style. [iracigt] explains the nitty gritty of how it all works, from creating chaos with Markov chains to interfacing the RP2040 electronically with the cheap quartz clock movement.

If you’ve ever wanted to build one of these amusements yourself, [iracigt’s] writeup is a great place to start. Even better, it was inspired by an earlier post on these very pages! We love to see the community riff on a theme, and we’d love to see yours, too – so keep the tips coming, yeah? Video after the break.

History is rather dull and unexciting to most people, which naturally invites exciting flights of fancy that can range from the innocent to outright conspiracies. Nobody truly believes that the astounding finds and (fully functioning) ancient mechanisms in the Indiana Jones & Uncharted franchises are real, with mostly intact ancient cities waiting for intrepid explorers along with whatever mystical sources of power, wealth or influence formed the civilization’s foundations before its tragic demise. Yet somehow Plato’s fictive Atlantis has taken on a life of its own, along with many other ‘lost’ civilizations, whether real or imagined.

Of course, if these aforementioned movies and video games were realistic, they would center around a big archaeological dig and thrilling finds like pot shards and cuneiform clay tablets, not ways to smite enemies and gain immortality. Nor would it involve solving complex mechanical puzzles to gain access to the big secret chamber, prior to walking out of the readily accessible backdoor. Reality is boring like that, which is why there’s a major temptation to spruce things up. With the Egyptian pyramids as well as similar structures around the world speaking to the human imagination, this has led to centuries of half-baked ideas and outright conspiracies.

Most recently, a questionable 2022 paper hinting at structures underneath the Pyramid of Khafre in Egypt was used for a fresh boost to old ideas involving pyramid power stations, underground cities and other fanciful conspiracies. Although we can all agree that the ancient pyramids in Egypt are true marvels of engineering, are we really on the cusp of discovering that the ancient Egyptians were actually provided with Forerunner technology by extraterrestrials?

The Science of Being Tragically Wrong

In defense of fanciful theories regarding the Actual Truth about Ancient Egypt and kin, archaeology as we know it today didn’t really develop until the latter half of the 20th century, with the field being mostly a hobbyist thing that people did out of curiosity as well as a desire for riches. Along the way many comical blunders were made, such as the Runamo runes in Sweden that turned out to be just random cracks in dolerite.

Less funny were attempts by colonists to erase Great Zimbabwe (11th – ~17th century CE) and the Kingdom of Zimbabwe after the ruins of the abandoned capital were discovered by European colonists and explored in earnest by the 19th century. Much like the wanton destruction of local cultures in the Americas by European colonists and explorers who considered their own culture, religion and technology to be clearly superior, the history of Great Zimbabwe was initially rewritten so that no thriving African society ever formed on its own, but was the result of outside influences.

In this regard it’s interesting how many harebrained ideas about archaeological sites have now effectively flipped, with mystical and mythical properties being assigned and these ‘Ancients’ being almost worshipped. Clearly, aliens visited Earth and that led to pyramids being constructed all around the globe. These would also have been the same aliens or lost civilizations that had technology far beyond today’s cutting edge, putting Europe’s fledgling civilization to shame.

Hence people keep dogpiling on especially the pyramids of Giza and its surrounding complex, assigning mystical properties to their ventilation shafts and expecting hidden chambers with technology and treasures interspersed throughout and below the structures.

Lost Technology

The idea of ‘lost technology’ is a pervasive one, mostly buoyed by the axiom that you cannot disprove something, only find evidence for its absence. Much like the possibility of a teapot being in orbit around the Sun right now, you cannot disprove that the Ancient Egyptians did not have hyper-advanced power plants using zero point energy back around 3,600 BCE. This ties in with the idea of ‘lost civilizations‘, which really caught on around the Victorian era.

Such romanticism for a non-existent past led to the idea of Atlantis being a real, lost civilization becoming pervasive, with the 1960s seeing significant hype around the Bimini Road. This undersea rock formation in the Bahamas was said to have been part of Atlantis, but is actually a perfectly cromulent geological formation. More recently a couple of German tourists got into legal trouble while trying to prove a connection between Egypt’s pyramids to Atlantis, which is a theory that refuses to die along with the notion that Atlantis was some kind of hyper-advanced civilization and not just a fictional society that Plato concocted to illustrate the folly of man.

Admittedly there is a lot of poetry in all of this when you consider it from that angle.

People have spent decades of their life and countless sums of money on trying to find Atlantis, Shangri-La (possibly inspired by Shambhala), El Dorado and similar fictional locations. The Iram of the Pillars which featured in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception is one of the lost cities mentioned in the Qur’an, and is incidentally another great civilization that saw itself meet a grim end through divine punishment. Iram is often said to be Ubar, which is commonly known as Atlantis of the Sands.

 

All of this is reminiscent of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, and corresponding area at Fingal’s Cave on the Scottish isle of Staffa, where eons ago molten basalt cooled and contracted into basalt columns in a way that is similar to how drying mud will crack in semi-regular patterns. This particular natural formation did lead to many local myths, including how a giant built a causeway across the North Channel, hence the name.

Fortunately for this location, no ‘lost civilization’ tag became attached, and thus it remains a curious demonstration of how purely natural formations can create structures that one might assume to have required intelligence, thus providing fuel for conspiracies. So far only ‘Young Earth’ conspiracy folk have put a claim on this particular site.

What we can conclude is that much like the Victorian age that spawned countless works of fiction on the topic, many of these modern-day stories appear to be rooted in a kind of romanticism for a past that never existed, with those affected interpreting natural patterns as something more in a sure sign of confirmation bias.

Tourist Traps

One can roughly map the number of tourist visits with the likelihood of wild theories being dreamed up. These include the Egyptian pyramids, but also similar structures in what used to be the sites of the Aztec and Maya civilizations. Similarly the absolutely massive mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang in China with its world-famous Terracotta Army has led to incredible speculation on what might still be hidden inside the unexcavated tomb mound, such as entire seas and rivers of mercury that moved mechanically to simulate real bodies of water, a simulated starry sky, crossbows set to take out trespassers and incredible riches.

Many of these features were described by Sima Qian in the first century BCE, who may or may not have been truthful in his biography of Qin Shi Huang. Meanwhile, China’s authorities have wisely put further excavations on hold, as they have found that many of the recovered artefacts degrade very quickly once exposed to air. The paint on the terracotta figures began to flake off rapidly after excavation, for example, reducing them to the plain figures which we are familiar with.

Tourism can be as damaging as careless excavation. As popular as the pyramids at Giza are, centuries of tourism have taken their toll, with vandalism, graffiti and theft increasing rapidly since the 20th century. The Great Pyramid of Khufu had already been pilfered for building materials over the course of millennia by the local population, but due to tourism part of its remaining top stones were unceremoniously tipped over the side to make a larger platform where tourists could have some tea while gazing out over the the Giza Plateau, as detailed in a recent video on the History for Granite channel:

The recycling of building materials from antique structures was also the cause of the demise of the Labyrinth at the foot of the pyramid of Amenemhat III at Hawara. Once an architectural marvel, with reportedly twelve roofed courts and spanning a total of 28,000 m², today only fragments remain of its existence. This sadly is how most marvels of the Ancient World end up: looted ruins, ashes and shards, left in the sand, mud, or reclaimed by nature, from which we can piece together with a lot of patience and the occasional stroke of fortune a picture what it once may have looked like.

Pyramid Power

When in light of all this we look at the claims made about the Pyramid of Khafre and the persistent conspiracies regarding this and other pyramids hiding great secrets, we can begin to see something of a pattern. Some people have really bought into these fantasies, while for others it’s just another way to embellish a location, to attract more rubes tourists and sell more copies of their latest book on the extraterrestrial nature of pyramids and how they are actually amazing lost technologies. This latter category is called pseudoarcheology.

Pyramids, of course, have always held magical powers, but the idea that they are literal power plants seems to have been coined by one Christopher Dunn, with the publication of his pseudo-archeological book The Giza Power Plant in 1998. That there would be more structures underneath the Pyramid of Khafre is a more recent invention, however. Feeding this particular flight of fancy appears to be a 2022 paper by Filippo Biondi and Corrado Malanga, in which synthetic aperture radar (SAR) was used to examine said pyramid interior and subsurface features.

Somehow this got turned into claims about multiple deep vertical wells descending 648 meters along with other structures. Shared mostly via conspiracy channels, it widely extrapolates from claims made in the paper by Biondi et al., with said SAR-based claims never having been peer-reviewed or independently corroborated. On the Rational Wiki entry for these and other claims related to the Giza pyramids are savagely tossed under the category of ‘pyramidiots’.

Back in the real world, archaeologists have found a curious L-shaped area underneath a royal graveyard near Khufu’s pyramid that was apparently later filled in, but which seems to lead to a deeper structure. This is likely to be part of the graveyard, but may also have been a feature that was abandoned during construction. Currently this area is being excavated, so we’re likely to figure out more details after archaeologists have finished gently sifting through tons of sand and gravel.

There is also the ScanPyramids project, which uses non-destructive and non-invasive techniques to scan Old Kingdom-era pyramids, such as muon tomography and infrared thermography. This way the internal structure of these pyramids can be examined in-depth. One finding was that of a number of ‘voids’, which could mean any of a number of things, but most likely do not contain world-changing secrets.

To this day the most credible view is still that the pyramids of the Old Kingdom were used as tombs, though unlike the mastabas and similar tombs, there is a credible argument to be made that rather than being designed to be hidden away, these pyramids would be eternal monuments to the pharaoh. They would be open for worship of the pharaoh, hence the ease of getting inside them. Ironically this would make them more secure from graverobbers, which was a great idea until the demise of the Ancient Egyptian civilization.

This is a point that’s made succinctly on the History for Granite channel, with the conclusion being that this goal of ‘inspiring awe’ to worshippers is still effective today, simply judging by the millions of tourists each year to these monuments, and the tall tales that they’ve inspired.

Microsoft made gaming history when it developed Achievements and released them with the launch of the Xbox 360. They have since become a key component of gaming culture, which similar systems rolling out to the rest of the consoles and even many PC games. [odelot] has the honor of being the one to bring this functionality to an odd home—the original Nintendo Entertainment System!

It’s actually quite functional, and it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. What [odelot] created is the NES RetroAchievements (RA) Adapter. It contains a Raspberry Pi Pico which sits in between a cartridge and the console and communicates with the NES itself. The cartridge also contains an LCD screen, a buzzer, and an ESP32 which communicates with the Internet.

When a cartridge is loaded, the RA Adapter identifies the game and queries the RetroAchievements platform for relevant achievements for the title. It then monitors the console’s memory to determine if any of those achievements—such as score, progression, etc.—are met. If and when that happens, the TFT screen on the adapter displays the achievement, and a notification is sent to the RetroAchievements platform to record the event for posterity.

It reminds us of other great feats, like the MJPEG entry into the heart of the Sega Saturn.

After seeing some of the interesting clock builds we’ve featured recently, [shiura] decided to throw their hat in the ring and sent us word about their incredible 3D printed hybrid clock that combines analog and digital styles.

While the multiple rotating rings might look complex from the front, the ingenious design behind the mechanism is powered by a single stepper motor. Its operation is well explained in the video below, but the short version is that each ring has a hook that pushes its neighboring ring over to the next digit once it has completed a full rotation. So the rightmost ring rotates freely through 0 to 9, then flips the 10-minute ring to the next number before starting its journey again. This does mean that the minute hand on the analog display makes a leap forward every 10 minutes rather than move smoothly, but we think its a reasonable compromise.

Beyond the 28BYJ-48 geared stepper motor and its driver board, the only other electronics in the build is a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C6 microcontroller. The WiFi-enabled MCU is able to pull the current time down from the Internet, but keep it mind it takes quite awhile for the mechanism to move all the wheels; you can see the process happen at 60x speed in the video.

If you’re looking to recreate this beauty, the trickiest part of this whole build might be the 3D print itself, as the design appears to make considerable use of multi-material printing. While it’s not impossible to build the clock with a traditional printer, you’ll have to accept losing some surface detail on the face and performing some well-timed filament swaps.

[shirua] tells us they were inspired to send their timepiece in after seeing the post about the sliding clock that just went out earlier in the week.

A great many PlayStation 2 games were coded in C++, and there are homebrew SDKs that let you work in C. However, precious little software for the platform was ever created in Golang. [Ricardo] decided this wouldn’t do, and set about making the language work with Sony’s best-selling console of all time. 

Why program a PS2 in Go? Well, it can be easier to work with than some other languages, but also, there’s just value in experimenting in this regard. These days, Go is mostly just used on traditional computery platforms, but [Ricardo] is taking it into new lands with this project.

One of the challenges in getting Go to run on the PS2 is that the language was really built to live under a full operating system, which the PS2 doesn’t really have. However, [Ricardo] got around this by using TinyGo, which is designed for compiling Go on simpler embedded platforms. It basically takes Go code, turns it into an intermediate representation, then compiles binary code suitable for the PS2’s Emotion Engine (which is a MIPS-based CPU).

The specifics of getting it all to work are quite interesting if you fancy challenges like these. [Ricardo] was even able to get to an effective Hello World point and beyond. There’s still lots to do, and no real graphical fun yet, but the project has already passed several key milestones. It recalls us of when we saw Java running on the N64. Meanwhile, if you’re working to get LOLCODE running on the 3DO, don’t hesitate to let us know!

A spectrometer is one of those tools that many of us would love to have, but just can’t justify the price of. Sure there are some DIY options out there, but few of them have the convenience or capability of what’s on the commercial market. [Chris] from Zoid Technology recently found a portable spectrometer complete with Android application for just $150 USD on AliExpress which looked very promising…at least at first.

The problem is that the manufacturer, Torch Bearer, offers more expensive models of this spectrometer. In an effort to push users into those higher-priced models, arbitrary features such as data export are blocked in the software. [Chris] first thought he could get around this by reverse engineering the serial data coming from the device (interestingly, the spectrometer ships with a USB-to-serial adapter), but while he got some promising early results, he found that the actual spectrometer data was obfuscated — a graph of the results looked like stacks of LEGOs.

His next step was to decompile the Android application and manually edit out the model number checks. This let him enable the blocked features, although to be fair, he did find that some of them actually did require additional hardware capabilities that this cheaper model apparently doesn’t posses. He was able to fix up a few other wonky issues in the application that are described in the video below, and has released a patch that you can use to bring your own copy of the software up to snuff.

But that’s not all — while fiddling around inside the Android tool’s source code, he found the missing pieces he needed to understand how the serial data was being obfuscated. The explanation to how it works is pretty long-winded, so we’ll save time and just say that the end result was the creation of a Python library that lets you pull data from the spectrometer without relying on any of the manufacturer’s software. This is the kind of thing a lot of people have been waiting for, so we’re eager to see what kind of response the GPLv3 licensed tool gets from the community.

If you’d still rather piece together your own spectrometer, we’ve seen some pretty solid examples you can use to get started.