A couple of weeks back, we covered an interesting method for prototyping PCBs using a modified CNC mill to 3D print solder onto a blank FR4 substrate. The video showing this process generated a lot of interest and no fewer than 20 tips to the Hackaday tips line, which continued to come in dribs and drabs this week. In a world where low-cost, fast-turn PCB fabs exist, the amount of effort that went into this method makes little sense, and readers certainly made that known in the comments section. Given that the blokes who pulled this off are gearheads with no hobby electronics background, it kind of made their approach a little more understandable, but it still left a ton of practical questions about how they pulled it off. And now a new video from the aptly named Bad Obsession Motorsports attempts to explain what went on behind the scenes.

To be quite honest, although the amount of work they did to make these boards was impressive, especially the part where they got someone to create a custom roll of fluxless tin-silver solder, we have to admit to being a little let down by the explanation. The mechanical bits, where they temporarily modified the CNC mill with what amounts to a 3D printer extruder and hot end to melt and dispense the solder, wasn’t really the question we wanted answered. We were far more interested in the details of getting the solder traces to stick to the board as they were dispensed and how the board acted when components were soldered into the rivets used as vias. Sadly, those details were left unaddressed, so unless they decide to make yet another video, we suppose we’ll just have to learn to live with the mystery.

What do mushrooms have to do with data security? Until this week, we’d have thought the two were completely unrelated, but then we spotted this fantastic article on “Computers Are Bad” that spins the tale of Iron Mountain, which people in the USA might recognize as a large firm that offers all kinds of data security products, from document shredding to secure offsite storage and data backups. We always assumed the “Iron Mountain” thing was simply marketing, but the company did start in an abandoned iron mine in upstate New York, where during the early years of the Cold War, it was called “Iron Mountain Atomic Storage” and marketed document security to companies looking for business continuity in the face of atomic annihilation. As Cold War fears ebbed, the company gradually rebranded itself into the information management entity we know today. But what about the mushrooms? We won’t ruin the surprise, but suffice it to say that IT people aren’t the only ones that are fed shit and kept in the dark.

Do you like thick traces? We sure do, at least when it comes to high-current PCBs. We’ve seen a few boards with really impressive traces and even had a Hack Chat about the topic, so it was nice to see Mark Hughes’ article on design considerations for heavy copper boards. The conventional wisdom with high-current applications seems to be “the more copper, the better,” but Mark explains why that’s not always the case and how trace thickness and trace spacing both need to be considered for high-current applications. It’s pretty cool stuff that we hobbyists don’t usually have to deal with, but it’s good to see how it’s done.

We imagine that there aren’t too many people out there with fond memories of Visual Basic, but back when it first came out in the early 1990s, the idea that you could actually make a Windows PC do Windows things without having to learn anything more than what you already knew from high school computer class was pretty revolutionary. By all lights, it was an awful language, but it was enabling for many of us, so much so that some of us leveraged it into successful careers. Visual Basic 6 was pretty much the end of the line for the classic version of the language, before it got absorbed into the whole .NET thing. If you miss that 2008 feel, here’s a VB6 virtual machine to help you recapture the glory days.

And finally, in this week’s “Factory Tour” segment we have a look inside a Japanese aluminum factory. The video mostly features extrusion, a process we’ve written about before, as well as casting. All of it is fascinating stuff, but what really got us was the glow of the molten aluminum, which we’d never really seen before. We’re used to the incandescent glow of molten iron or even brass and copper, but molten aluminum has always just looked like — well, liquid metal. We assumed that was thanks to its relatively low melting point, but apparently, you really need to get aluminum ripping hot for casting processes. Enjoy.

Fair warning, while the first item this week has no obvious connection to hacking, when 43 Rhesus monkeys escape from a lab, it’s just something that needs to be discussed. The tiny primates broke free from Alpha Genesis, a primate research facility in South Carolina. The monkey jailbreak seems to have occurred sometime on Wednesday, shortly after which the sheriff of Beaufort County was notified to be on the lookout for the tribe. Luckily, none of the animals has been used in any kind of infectious disease research, so this likely won’t be the origin story for anything apocalyptic. At least some of the animals were quickly located, doing their monkey thing in the woods and getting to swing from real trees for probably the first time in their lives. Alpha Genesis employees are trying to lure the monkeys back to captivity with food, but we suspect they’re too smart for that. They’ll probably come back on their own recognizance or when they get bored and realize that the real world isn’t all they thought it would be. When it’s all done we’d love to hear details about the breakout; was it something the monkeys got together and planned, or did one of the humans mess up?

With apologies in advance for the pun, there’s been a lot of buzz lately about tech billionaires falling over themselves to be the first to add “nuclear power mogul” to their CVs with reactor-powered AI data centers. In the early lead was Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, but it looks like he might have reached an unexpected hurdle in the form of a rare species of bee in residence near the site where he was planning to build the data center. The original article is aggressively paywalled and we haven’t been able to find out exactly what species of bee bested Zuck or what the specific concerns are, although we suspect that it’s disruption of habitat due to construction activities for the data center itself rather than anything related to the nuclear power aspect, since the deal was with an operator of an existing power plant. But fear not — Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all waiting in the wings with their own nuclear ambitions, so carbon-free AI searches thanks to controlled nuclear fusion will surely soon be a thing.

Although the bees may have thwarted Zuck, not so the Seven Seas, as news leaks indicate that Meta is in the process of building a globe-spanning underseas fiber optic cable. The cable is said to go from coast to coast in the USA the long way, starting in South Carolina across the Atlantic to a landing in Portugal, down the coast of Africa and around the Cape, up to India before heading through to Australia and back across the Pacific to California. The cable is said to carry 16 pairs of fibers and could provide Meta with 320 Tbps of data capacity. That’s a lot of memes.

While you’ve probably never heard of Elwood Edwards, who passed away this week at the age of 74, you’ve certainly heard his voice. Mr. Edwards was the announcer who recorded the famous “You’ve got mail!” email alert for AOL, along with other audio blurbs for the once-ubiquitous ISP. He worked in broadcasting, both AM radio and television, and voiced commercials and announcements before being recommended for the email gig by his wife, who worked at the company that would eventually become AOL, Quantum Computer Services. He got $200 for the session, which he recorded on a cassette tape in his living room, and which would be heard 35 million times a day at AOL’s peak. Not too shabby.

And finally, as proof that we’re living in the weirdest possible timeline comes the story of The Baguette Bandits. It seems that a hacker group — the other kind — broke into French company Schneider Electric and stole 40 GB of data, issuing a $125,000 ransom demand payable in baguettes. The hackers apparently penetrated Schneider via the company’s Jira system and claimed to have specific data on internal projects and issues along with 400,000 lines of user data, which they threatened to release unless they got the baked goods. They did stipulate that they’d halve the ransom amount if Schneider would publically acknowledge the breach. We’re not sure if they want half the number of baguettes or if they want the same number of loaves all cut in half, but either way, it’s a lot of bread. More puns are possible, but we think we’ll leave them all on the table. Seems the yeast we can do.

“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?” Perhaps not anymore, if this Ig Nobel-worthy analysis of the infinite monkey theorem is to be believed. For the uninitiated, the idea is that if you had an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing on an infinite number of keyboards, eventually the complete works of Shakespeare or some other famous writer would appear. It’s always been meant to be taken figuratively as a demonstration of the power of time and randomness, but some people just can’t leave well enough alone. The research, which we hope was undertaken with tongue firmly planted in cheek, reveals that it would take longer than the amount of time left before the heat death of the universe for either a single monkey or even all 200,000 chimpanzees in the world today to type the 884,647 words of Shakespeare’s complete works in the proper order.

We feel like they missed the point completely, since this is supposed to be about an infinite number of monkeys. But if they insist on sticking with real-world force monkey labor, what would really be interesting is an economic analysis of project. How much space would 200,000 chimps need? What would the energy requirements be in terms of food in and waste out? What about electricity so the monkeys can see what they’re doing? If we’re using typewriters, how much paper do we need, and how much land will be deforested for it? Seems like you’ll need replacement chimps as they age out, so how do you make sure the chimps “mix and mingle,” so to speak? And how do you account for maternity and presumably paternity leave? Also, who’s checking the output? Seems like we’d have to employ humans to do this, so what are the economic factors associated with that? Inquiring minds want to know.

Speaking of ridiculous calculations, when your company racks up a fine that only makes sense in exponential notation, you know we’ve reached new levels of stupidity. But here we are, as a Russian court has imposed a two-undecillion rouble fine on Google for blocking access to Russian state media channels. That’s 2×10³⁶ roubles, or about 2×10³³ US dollars at current exchange rates. If you’re British and think a billion is a million million, then undecillion means something different entirely, but we don’t have the energy to work that out right now. Regardless, it’s a lot, and given that the total GPD of the entire planet was estimated to be about 100×10¹² dollars in 2022, Google better get busy raising the money. We’d prefer they don’t do it the totally-not-evil way they usually do, so it might be best to seek alternate methods. Maybe a bake sale?

A couple of weeks back we sang the praises of SpaceX after they managed to absolutely nail the landing of the Starship Heavy booster after its fifth test flight by managing to pluck it from the air while it floated back to the launch pad. But the amazing engineering success was very close to disaster according to Elon Musk himself, who discussed the details online. Apparently SpaceX engineers shared with him that they were scared about the “spin gas abort” configuration on Heavy prior to launch, and that they were one second away from aborting the “chopsticks” landing in favor of crashing the booster into the ground in front of the launch pad. They also expressed fears about spot welds on a chine on the booster, which actually did rip off during descent and could have fouled on the tower during the catch. But success is a hell of a deodorant, as they say, and it’s hard to argue with how good the landing looked despite the risks.

We saw a couple of interesting stories on humanoid robots this week, including one about a robot with a “human-like gait.” The bot is from China’s EnginAI Robotics and while its gait looks pretty good, there’s still a significant uncanny valley thing going on there, at least for us. And really, what’s the point? Especially when you look at something like this new Atlas demo, which really leans into its inhuman gait to get work done efficiently. You be the judge.

And finally, we’ve always been amazed by Liberty ships, the class of rapidly produced cargo ships produced by the United States to support the British war effort during WWII. Simple in design though they were, the fact that US shipbuilders were able to ramp up production of these vessels to the point where they were building a ship every eight hours has always been fascinating to us. But it’s often true that speed kills, and this video shows the fatal flaw in Liberty ship design that led to the loss of some of the early ships in the class. The short video details the all-welded construction of the ships, a significant advancement at the time but which wasn’t the cause of the hull cracks that led to the loss of some ships. We won’t spoil the story, though. Enjoy.

Problem solved? If the problem is supplying enough lithium to build batteries for all the electric vehicles that will be needed by 2030, then a new lithium deposit in Arkansas might be a resounding “Yes!” The discovery involves the Smackover Formation — and we’ll be honest here that half the reason we chose to feature this story was to be able to write “Smackover Formation” — which is a limestone aquifer covering a vast arc from the Rio Grande River in Texas through to the western tip of the Florida panhandle. Parts of the aquifer, including the bit that bulges up into southern Arkansas, bear a brine rich in lithium salts, far more so than any of the brines currently commercially exploited for lithium metal production elsewhere in the world. Given the measured concentration and estimated volume of brine in the formation, there could be between 5 million and 19 million tons of lithium in the formation; even at the lower end of the range, that’s enough to build nine times the number of EV batteries needed.

There are still a lot of unknowns, not least of which is whether any of the lithium in the brine is recoverable, and there are surely technical and regulatory hurdles aplenty. But the mere existence of a brine deposit that rich in lithium that covers such a vast area is encouraging; surely there’s somewhere within the formation where it’ll be possible to extract and concentrate the brine in an environmentally sensitive manner. And, once again just for fun, Smackover Formation.

While not ones to cheer for interstellar catastrophes, we can’t say that we haven’t been rooting for Betelgeuse to go supernova these last few years. Ever since the red supergiant star that sits on Orion’s shoulder started its peculiar dimming a while back, talk among astronomy buffs was that the activity presaged an imminent explosion of the star, one that could make Betelgeuse the brightest object in the night sky for a few months, and possibly make it visible in the daytime as well. As thrilling — and foreboding, at least by ancient astronomy standards — as that sounds, it seems as if the unusual dimming recently observed has a more prosaic explanation: a “Betelbuddy” star. According to astronomers who pored over observations, after ruling out all the other possibilities to explain the dimming, it seems like there must be a smaller star orbiting Betelgeuse that’s periodically plowing a clear spot through the cloud of dust surrounding the dying star. That would explain the periodic dimming and brightening, but why have we not seen this Betelbuddy before? It could be that the smaller star is lost in the giant’s glare, hiding in its halo of incandescent gas. So, don’t hold your breath on seeing a supernova anytime soon.

Do you find password rules annoying? We sure do, and even using a password manager with a generator that can handle all sorts of restrictions like password length and special characters, being told how to generate a password seems silly, especially since the information on what characters a valid password would have seems like valuable clues to potential crackers. But if for some reason you haven’t had enough password pestering, try out the password game. You start by entering a password — we, of course, started with correct horse battery staple — and then deal with the consequences of your obviously poor choices. You’ll be asked to do all the silly stuff that only decreases the entropy of your password, which only makes it harder to remember and easier to guess. We haven’t played it through — it’s way too annoying — but we assume that if you ever actually manage to compose a suitable password, you’ll be asked to change it every 90 days.

And finally, we’ve managed to live long enough now to have cycled completely through all the major music recording modalities except wax cylinders. Having heard them all, we’ve got to agree with the hipsters: vinyl is the best. That’s especially true after watching this fascinating look at the LP record production process, which covers everything from mastering to packaging. The painstaking steps at the beginning are perhaps the most interesting, but anyone who doesn’t appreciate the hot vinyl squeezing out from the press is a cold, heartless monster. The video is only 15 minutes long and mercifully free of narration, so enjoy.

When all else fails, there’s radio. Hurricane Helene’s path of destruction through Appalachia stripped away every shred of modern infrastructure in some areas, leaving millions of residents with no ability to reach out to family members or call for assistance, and depriving them of any news from the outside world. But radio seems to be carrying the day, with amateur radio operators and commercial broadcasters alike stepping up to the challenge.

On the amateur side, there are stories of operators fixing their downed antennas and breaking out their field day gear to get on the air and start pitching in, with both formal and ad hoc networks passing messages in and out of the affected areas. Critical requests for aid and medication were fielded along with “I’m alright, don’t worry” messages, with reports from the ARRL indicating that Winlink emails sent over the HF bands were a big part of that. Unfortunately, there was controversy too, with reports of local hams being unhappy with unlicensed users clogging up the bands with Baofengs and other cheap radios. Our friend Josh (KI6NAZ) took a good look at the ins and outs of emergency use of the amateur bands, which of course by federal law is completely legal under the conditions. Some people, huh?

Also scoring a win were the commercial broadcasters, especially the local AM stations that managed to stay on the air. WWNC, an AM station out of Nashville, is singled out in this report for the good work they did connecting people through the emergency. As antiquated as it may seem and as irrelevant to most people’s daily lives as it has become, AM radio really proves its mettle when the chips are down. We’ve long been cheerleaders for AM in emergencies, and this has only served to make us more likely to call for the protection of this vital piece of infrastructure.

Windows 10 users, mark your calendars — Microsoft has announced that you’ve got one year to migrate to a more profitable modern operating system. After that, no patches for you! If Microsoft holds true to form, the scope of this “End of Life” will change as the dreaded day draws nearer, especially considering that Windows 10 still holds almost 63% of the Windows desktop market. Will the EOL announcement inspire all those people to migrate? Given a non-trivial fraction of users are still sticking it out with Windows 7, we wouldn’t hold our breath.

Speaking of Microsoft, for as much as they’re the company you love to hate, you’ve got to hand it to them for one product: Microsoft Flight Simulator. It seems like Flight Simulator has been around almost since the Wright Brothers’ day, going through endless updates to keep up with the state of the art and becoming better and better as the years go by. Streaming all that ultra-detailed terrain information comes at a price, though, to the tune of 81 gigabytes per hour for the upcoming Flight Simulator 2024. Your bandwidth may vary, of course, based on how you set up the game and where you’re virtually flying. But still, that number got us thinking: Would it be cheaper to fly a real plane? A lot of us don’t have explicit data caps on our Internet service, but the ISP still will either throttle your bandwidth or start charging per megabyte after a certain amount. Xfinity, for example, charges $10 for each 50GB block you use after reaching 1.2 TB of data in a month, at least for repeat offenders. So, if you were to settle in for a marathon flight, you’d get to fly for free for about 15 hours, after which each hour would rack up about $20 in extra charges. A single-engine aircraft costs anywhere between $120 and $200 to rent, plus the cost of fuel, so it’s still a better deal to fly Simulator, but not by much.

And finally, we were all witness to a remarkable feat of engineering prowess this week with the successful test flight of a SpaceX Starship followed by catching the returning Super Heavy booster. When we first heard about “Mechazilla” and the idea of catching a booster, we dismissed it as another bit of Elon’s hype, like “full self-driving” or “hyperloops.” But damn if we weren’t wrong! The whole thing was absolutely mesmerizing, and the idea that SpaceX pulled off what’s essentially snagging a 20-story building out of the air on mechanical arms was breathtaking. While the close-up videos of the catch are amazing, they don’t reveal a lot about the engineering behind it. Luckily, we’ve got this video by Ryan Hansen Space of the technology behind the catch, lovingly created in Blender. The work seems to have been done before the test flight and was made with a lot of educated guesses, but given how well the renders match up with the real video of the catch, we’d say Ryan nailed it.