While track pads and mice dominate the pointing device landscape today, there was a time when track balls were a major part of the scene. In order to really sell the retro chops of his portable computer, [Ominous Industries] designed a clip-on style track ball for his retro Raspberry Pi laptop.

Starting with a half circle shape, he designed the enclosure in Fusion360 to house the guts of a USB trackball. Using the pattern along a path feature of the software, he was able to mimic the groovy texture of the main device on the trackball itself. Flexures in the top of the track ball case with pads glued on actuate the buttons.

We appreciate the honesty of the cuts showing how often the Pi can get grumpy at the extra wide display in this video as well as the previous issues during the laptop build. The bezel around the screen is particularly interesting, being affixed with magnets for easy access when needing to work on the screen.

Retro portables are having a moment. We just covered the Pi Portable 84 and previously saw one inspired by the GRiD Compass . If you’re more interested in trackballs, maybe give this trackball ring or the Ploopy trackball a look?

Inspiration can strike a maker at any moment. For [Laura Kampf], it happened in the desert when she saw a tumbleweed.

Tumbleweeds roll through the western United States, hitting cars on the interstate and providing some background motion for westerns. [Kampf] found the plant’s intricate, prickly structure mesmerizing, and decided to turn it into a piece of contemplative kinetic art.

[Kampf] attached the tumbleweed to a piece of wood using epoxy and mounted it to what appears to be a worm drive motor nestled inside an interestingly-shaped piece of wood. As the tumbleweed turns, a light shines through it to project a changing shadow on the wall to “create silence, it creates calmness, it takes away from the noise that surrounds it.” While [Kampf] has some work to do to get the sculpture to its finished state, we can get behind her mantra, “The most important thing about the phase of execution is to get started.”

Are you looking for some projects of your own to help you find calm? How about some ambient lighting, a sand drawing table, or a music player that keeps things simple?

When monitors around the world display a “Blue Screen of Death” and you know it’s probably your fault, it’s got to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at work. That’s likely the situation inside CrowdStrike this weekend, as engineers at the cybersecurity provider struggle to recover from an update rollout that went very, very badly indeed. The rollout, which affected enterprise-level Windows 10 and 11 hosts running their flagship Falcon Sensor product, resulted in machines going into a boot loop or just dropping into restore mode, leaving hapless millions to stare at the dreaded BSOD screen on everything from POS terminals to transit ticketing systems.

Tales of woe from the fallout from what’s being called “the largest IT outage in history” are pouring in, including this very bewildered game developer who while stranded at an airport had plenty of ponder about why CrowdStrike broke the cardinal rule of software development by rolling a change to production on a Friday. The good news is that there’s a workaround, but the bad news is that someone has to access each borked machine and manually delete a file to fix it. Current estimates place the number of affected machines at 8.5 million, so that’s a lot of legwork. There’s plenty of time after the fix is rolled out for a full accounting of the impact, including the search for the guilty and persecution of the innocent, but for now, let’s spare a moment’s pity for the devs who must be sweating things out this weekend.

Back in 2011, Craig Fugate of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said of disaster response in the southern US, “If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad.” Thus was born the “Waffle House Index,” an informal measure of a natural disaster’s impact based on where individual restaurants in the chain that prides itself on always being open are actually up and running. With over 1,900 locations in 25 states, you’d think it would cover just about any emergency, but desperate Texans eschewed the index during the recent extensive power outages in the Houston area caused by Hurricane Beryl by inventing the “Whattaburger Index.” We haven’t had the pleasure of this particular delicacy, but it seems Texans can’t get enough of the hamburger chain, enough so that their online app’s location map provides a pretty granular view of a wide swathe of Texas. Plus, the chain thoughtfully color-codes each location’s marker by whether it’s currently open or closed, making it a quick and easy way to check where the power is on or off — at least during regular business hours. Hat’s off to the enterprising Texans who figured this out, and here’s hoping that life has returned to normal for everyone by now.

While we’re generally not fans of Apple products, which seem overpriced and far too tightly controlled for our liking, we’ve been pretty impressed by some of the results people have reported using their Apple AirTags to recover lost or stolen items — this recent discovery of a cache of stolen tools (fourth item) comes to mind. Results such as that require a “me too” response from the Android side of the market, resulting in the Find My Device network that, perhaps unsurprisingly, doesn’t appear to work very well. The test was pretty much what you’d expect — drop an Android-compatible tag in the mail along with an AirTag and track their journey. The Android tag only reported in a couple of times, while the AirTag provided a comprehensive track of the parcel’s journey through the USPS. Our first thought is that this speaks mostly to the power of being first to market, allowing Apple to have a more completely built-out infrastructure. But this may say more about the previously mentioned flexibility of Android compared to Apple; we know we noped the hell out of participating in Find My Device as soon as it rolled out on our Android phone. Seems like a lot of Android users feel the same way.

And finally, while we haven’t checked out comments on this week’s podcast, we’re pretty sure we’re getting raked over the coals for betraying our ignorance of and lack of appreciation for the finer points of soccer, or football. Whatever you call it, we just don’t get it, but we do understand and agree with our own Lewin Day’s argument that instrument-enhanced officiating isn’t making the game any better. Our argument is that in any sport, the officials are like a third team, one that’s adversarial to both of the competing teams, hopefully equally so, and that giving them super-human abilities isn’t fair to the un-enhanced players on the field/pitch/court/ice. So it was with considerable dismay that we learned that Major League Baseball is experimenting with automatic umpires to call balls and strikes behind the plate. While you may not care about baseball, you have to appreciate the ability of an umpire to stand directly in the line of fire of someone who can hurl a ball fast enough to hit a strike zone about the size of a pizza box the ball in less than 500 milliseconds. Being able to determine if the ball ended up in or out of that box is pretty amazing, not to mention all the other things an umpire has to do to make sure the game is played by the rules. They’re not perfect, of course, and neither are the players, and half the fun of watching sports for us is witnessing the very human contest of wills and skills of everyone involved. It seems like a bad idea to take the humans out of that particular loop.

The good old fashioned game of football used to be a simple affair. Two teams of eleven, plus a few subs, who were all wrangled by a referee and a couple of helpful linesmen. Long ago, these disparate groups lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when VAR attacked.

Suddenly, technology was being used to adjudicate all kinds of decisions, and fans were cheering or in uproar depending on how the hammer fell. That’s only become more prevalent in recent times, with smart balls the latest controversial addition to the world game. With their starring role in the Euro 2024 championship more than evident, let’s take a look at what’s going on with this new generation of intelligent footballs.

The Balls Are Connected

Adidas has been a pioneer of so-called “connected ball” technology. This involves fitting match balls with motion sensors which can track the motion of the ball in space. The aim is to be able to track the instant of player contact with the ball, for investigating matters like calls of handball and offside. The German country first debuted the technology at the 2022 World Cup, and it showed up at the 2023 Women’s World Cup and the UEFA Euro 2024 championship, too.

According to Adidas, an inertial measurement unit is suspended in the middle of the ball. This is done with a delicate structure that holds the IMU stably in place without impacting the performance of the ball from the player’s perspective. Powering the TDK ICM-20649 IMU is a small battery that can be recharged using an induction system. The IMU runs at a rate of 500 Hz, allowing hits to the ball to be measured down to tiny fractions of a second. The ball also features a DW1000 ultra-wideband radio system for position tracking, developed by Kinexion.

No more must match officials rely on their own perception, or even blurry video frames, to determine if a player touched the ball. Now, they can get a graphical readout showing acceleration spikes when a players foot, hand, or other body part impinges on the motion of the ball. This can then be used by the on-field referee and the video assistant referee to determine the right call more accurately. The idea is that this data removes a lot of the confusion from the refereeing process, giving officials exacting data on when a player may have touched the ball and when. No more wondering if this ball came close, or if that ball ricocheted based on a rough camera angle. What really happened is now being measured, and the data is all there for the officials to see, clear as day. What could be better, right?

Case In Point

The UEFA Euro 2024 championship was the latest battleground to showcase this technology. As the national teams of Europe went in to play critical matches, players and fans alike knew that this technology would be on hand to ensure the fairest playing field yet. You might think that it would leave everyone feeling happier about how their favored team got treated, but as always, humans don’t react so predictably when emotions are hot and national pride is on the line.

The match between Germany and Denmark was the perfect example of how technology could sway a game, one way or the other. The Video Assistant Referee killed Denmark’s first goal with a ruling from the Semi-Automated Offside Technology system, and the ball technology would soon curse the Danes, too. As Germany’s David Raum crossed the ball, it ever so slightly clipped the hand of Danish player Joachim Andersen. In the past, this might have gone unnoticed, or at the least unpunished. But in today’s high-tech world, there was data to reveal the crime in explicit detail.

As the video replays showed the footage, we were treated to a graph indicating the spike picked up by the ball’s sensors just as it clipped Andersen’s hand in the video. The referee thus granted a penalty for the handball, which has duly slotted home by German striker Kai Havertz. Germany would go on to win the match 2-0, with midfielder Jamal Musiala scoring the follow-up.

The incident inflamed fans and pundits alike, with the aftermath particularly fiery on ITV. “If he didn’t pay that, if he did pay that, we’d be saying, okay, he saw it that way,” said football manager Ange Postecoglou, noting that the technology was creating frustration in a way that traditional referring decisions did not. Meanwhile, others noted that the technology is, to a degree, now in charge. “[Referee] Michael Oliver cannot go to that monitor and say I refuse to take that recommendation,” said VAR pundit Christina Unkel. “This has been issued by FIFA as what he needs to take for consistency across the world.”

Fundamentally, smart ball technology is not so different from other video assist technologies currently being used in football. These tools are flooding in thick and fast for good reason. They are being introduced to reduce variability in refereeing decisions, and ultimately, to supposedly improve the quality of the sport.

Sadly, though, smart balls seem to be generating much the same frustration as VAR has done so in the past. It seems when a referee is solely at fault for a decision, the fans can let it go. However, when a smart ball or a video referee disallows a goal because of a matter of some inches or millimeters, there’s an uproar so predictable that you can set your watch to it.

Given the huge investment and the institutional backing, don’t expect these technologies to go away any time soon. Similarly, expect fan outrage to blossom most every time they are they used. For now, smart balls and VAR have the backing they need to stay on, so you’d best get used to them for now.