El publisher Behaviour Interactive anunció hoy que la versión estándar de Islands of Insight, el aclamado título de aventura y puzzles desarrollado por el estudio Lunarch, se puede obtener en forma gratuita en PC vía Steam del 26 al 27 de junio hasta las 10 AM PT (2 PM ART).

Su costo regular es de US$ 29.99 o precio regional, mientra que su edición Deluxe cuesta US$ 39.99. Lamentablemente, no hay forma de actualizar la edición estándar a la deluxe, pero quizás el estudio agregue la opción en breve.

La Edición Deluxe de Islands of Insight incluye el juego, un conjunto cosmético prémium (incluye 2 conjuntos de disfraces, guantes, tocados, alas y rastros) y fondos de pantalla para escritorio y celulares.

«Para Trotamundos que busquen expandir sus horizontes, la Edición Deluxe incluye una colección de regalos y aventuras exclusiva diseñados para celebrar la belleza de las islas. Usa las inverosímiles creaciones que nos dejaron los antiguos con el conjunto cosmético argénteo y descarga fondos exclusivos para escritorio y celulares.»

Por otro lado, el estudio anunció hoy que el próximo 9 de julio se lanzará un parche que agregará modo offline al juego, ya que actualmente es solo online.

«Buscadores, ¡estamos muy felices de anunciar que nuestro modo sin conexión se lanzará el 9 de julio!

Esta adición les brinda a ustedes, a nuestros jugadores dedicados y a los nuevos jugadores más flexibilidad en cómo disfrutan de las islas y nuestros hermosos rompecabezas.

Juega en cualquier lugar‍

Con nuestro modo sin conexión, ya no necesitarás estar atado a una conexión a Internet. Puede experimentar Islands of Insight sin preocuparse por conexiones poco confiables y retrasos.

Un modo lleno de rompecabezas

Nuestro modo fuera de línea está lleno de acertijos. El modo tiene la misma cantidad y diversidad de biomas y acertijos que la versión en línea. Los rompecabezas también reaparecerán y podrás realizar misiones diarias.

Que esperar

Nuestro objetivo es tener una experiencia similar entre el modo online y la versión offline. Es importante comprender que cualquier funcionalidad social o en línea, como mostrar emociones o hacer ping a otros jugadores, no estará disponible en este modo. Dado que este modo está disponible exclusivamente para un jugador, parte del contenido se ha equilibrado, modificado o eliminado.

Si has estado jugando en línea y quieres cambiar al modo sin conexión, no te preocupes, tu progreso se guardará y se transferirá al modo sin conexión.

Una última cosa. El juego base está disponible GRATIS durante 24 horas, hasta mañana, 27 de junio a la 1 p. m., hora del Este. Esta es tu señal para unirte a otros Buscadores y comenzar a resolver acertijos.

¡Nos vemos en las islas!»

Acerca de Islands of Insight 

Te damos la bienvenida a Islands of Insight: un sublime juego de puzles de mundo compartido ambientado en un reino de fantasía plagado de maravillas ancestrales y naturaleza. Rebosante de puzles misteriosos que resolver, secretos que descubrir y hermosos paisajes que explorar, este pacífico mundo de islas flotantes es el lugar ideal para relajarte. Embárcate en la aventura que desees entre puzles, siempre a tu propio ritmo.

Características principales:

• Un mundo repleto de acertijos: Busca y resuelve una colección sinigual de más de 10 000 puzles divididos en 24 tipos. En cada rincón del mundo te aguarda una nueva serendipia. Estos puzles, desde enigmas de perspectiva a problemas lógicos, desafíos ambientales y mucho más, han sido ideados por las mejores mentes del diseño de puzles en un amplio rango de dificultades para crear una experiencia atractiva tanto para principiantes como para amantes de los puzles con más experiencia.
• Exploración y descubrimiento: Explora libremente el mundo abierto en expansión de la isla principal, donde se encuentran la mayor parte de los puzles y los secretos. Pasea por los hermosos paisajes de sus 5 biomas distintos o extiende tus alas para sobrevolarlos. Navega la verticalidad del entorno y lleva tu partida a nuevos lugares. Desbloquea nuevos tipos de puzle y zonas en la campaña al completar más de 20 Enclaves que contienen desafíos de puzles minuciosamente diseñados. Ve donde quieras. Resuelve lo que quieras. El camino correcto es el que tú decidas.
• Tu viaje: Controla a tu Trotamundos en una pacífica aventura llena de exploración y puzles. Embárcate en el Camino del Descubrimiento y deja que tu curiosidad te guíe por un asombroso mundo abierto donde la respuesta siempre está a la vista.
• Una experiencia imperecedera: Personaliza a tu personaje. Aumenta tus maestrías de puzles y súbelas de nivel mientras consigues chispas con las que desbloquear nuevas habilidades. Completa misiones diarias. Interactúa de manera continua con otros jugadores de nuestro mundo compartido para que te guíen o para guiarlos si lo necesitan, o trata de resolverlo todo sin ayuda. Los puzles se actualizan con el tiempo, así que te esperará un nuevo descubrimiento en cada visita a las islas.

Requisitos Mínimos:

• SO: Windows 10
• Procesador: Intel Core i5-7400 o AMD Ryzen 5 1400
• Memoria: 8 GB de RAM
• Gráficos: NVidia GeForce GTX 960 o Radeon R9 380 4GB VRAM
• DirectX: Versión 11
• Red: Conexión de banda ancha a Internet
• Almacenamiento: 35 GB de espacio disponible
• Notas adicionales: SSD Recomendado

Requisitos Recomendados:

• SO: Windows 10, Direct X 11 o superior
• Procesador: Intel Core i5-11600K o AMD Ryzen 5 5600
• Memoria: 16 GB de RAM
• Gráficos: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 o Radeon RX Vega 56 8GB VRAM
• DirectX: Versión 11
• Red: Conexión de banda ancha a Internet
• Almacenamiento: 35 GB de espacio disponible
• Notas adicionales: SSD Recomendado

La entrada Islands of Insight se puede canjear GRATIS en Steam hasta el 27 de Junio apareció primero en PC Master Race Latinoamérica.

OK, it’s official: the Quansheng UV-K5 is the king of hackable ham radios — especially now that a second version of the all-band hardware and firmware mod has been released, not to mention a new version of the radio.

If you need to get up to speed, check out our previous coverage of the all-band hack for the UV-K5, in which [Paul (OM0ET)] installs a tiny PCB to upgrade the radio’s receiver chip to an Si4732. Along with a few jumpers and some component replacements on the main board, these hardware mods made it possible for the transceiver, normally restricted to the VHF and UHF amateur radio bands, to receive everything down to the 20-meter band, in both AM and single-sideband modulations.

The new mod featured in the video below does all that and more, all while making the installation process slightly easier. The new PCB is on a flexible substrate and is considerably slimmer, and also sports an audio amplifier chip, to make up for the low audio output on SSB signals of the first version. Installation, which occupies the first third of the video below, is as simple as removing one SMD chip from the radio’s main board and tacking the PCB down in its footprint, followed by making a couple of connections with very fine enameled wire.

You could load the new firmware and call it a day at that point, but [Paul] decided to take things a step further and install a separate jack for a dedicated HF antenna. This means sacrificing the white LED on the top panel, which isn’t much of a sacrifice for most hams, to make room for the jack. Most of us would put a small SMA jack in, but [Paul] went for a BNC, which required some deft Dremel and knife work to fit in. He also used plain hookup wire to connect the jack, which sounds like a terrible idea; we’d probably use RG-316, but his mod didn’t sound that bad at all.

Keen to know more about the Quansheng UV-K5? Dive into the reverse-engineered schematics.

Thanks to [Sam] for the heads up on this one.

When life hands you a mysterious bit of vintage avionics, your best bet to identifying it might just be to get it in front of the biggest bunch of hardware hounds on the planet. After doing a teardown and some of your own investigation first, of course.

The literal black box in question came into [Ken Shirriff]’s custody courtesy of [David] from Usagi Electric, better known for his vacuum tube computer builds and his loving restoration of a Centurion minicomputer. The unit bears little in the way of identifying markings, but [Ken] was able to glean a little by inspecting the exterior. The keypad is a big giveaway; its chunky buttons seem optimized for use with the gloved hands of a pressure suit, and the ordinal compass points hint at a navigational function. The layout of the keypad is similar to the Apollo DSKY, which might make it a NASA artifact. Possibly contradicting all of that is the oddball but very cool electromechanical display, which uses reels of digits and a stepper-like motor to drive them.

Inside, more mysteries — and more clues — await. Unlike a recent flight computer [Ken] looked at, most of the guts are strictly electronic. The instrument is absolutely stuffed with PCBs, most of which are four-layer boards. Date codes on the hundreds of chips all seem to be in the 1967 range, dating the unit to the late 60s or early 70s. The weirdest bit is the core memory buried deep inside the stacks of logic and analog boards. [Ken] found 20 planes with the core, hinting at a 20-bit processor.

In the end, [Ken] was unable to come to any firm conclusion as to what this thing is, who made it, or what its purpose was. We doubt that his analysis will end there, though, and we look forward to the reverse engineering effort on this piece of retro magic.

If there was one question we heard most often this week, it was “Did you see it?” With “it” referring to the stunning display of aurora borealis — and australis, we assume — on and off for several days. The major outburst here in North America was actually late last week, with aurora extending as far south as Puerto Rico on the night of the tenth. We here in North Idaho were well-situated for prime viewing, but alas, light pollution made things a bit tame without a short drive from the city lights. Totally worth it:

Hat tip to Tom Maloney for the pics. That last one is very reminiscent of what we saw back in 1989 with the geomagnetic storm that knocked Québec’s grid offline, except then the colors were shifted much more toward the red end of the spectrum back then.

Despite this being the strongest solar storm in almost 20 years, the damage was nearly non-existent, with reports limited to minor power grid disturbances and some GPS and satellite outages. Starlink service was reportedly impacted, but luckily no satellites deorbited, a distinct possibility for recently launched satellites still in lower orbits due to increased atmospheric drag. Still, it feels like we dodged a cosmic bullet here, and if you have any doubt about that, check this out — it’s a comparison of the sunspot group that just got us with the Carrington Event sunspots from 1859. What a difference a few degrees of latitude makes.

From the “Not Everything Needs to be IoT” files comes a story about the perils of security as an afterthought. The condensed version: tech journalist Kevin Purdy’s new home came with a Rinnai tankless water heater. He hooked up the Rinnai Control-R WiFi module to control the appliance remotely from a smartphone app, and as any good home automation geek would, eventually tried integrating it into Home Assistant. But then he discovered that for an early version of Control-R, there was absolutely no security on the company’s cloud service, making it possible to control any connected Rinnai water heater knowing nothing more than the user’s email address. No auth tokens, no passwords, nothing. Rinnai seems to have added authentication to their newer Rinnai Central system, but the whole story is worth a read, not least for the weaselly responses from Rinnai through a PR firm.

If you thought Clippy, the annoying animated desktop assistant from the bad old days of Microsoft Office 97, had died a well-deserved death in obscurity, think again. Clippy is back, this time as a wise-cracking assistant in an open-source tool called Winpilot, which is designed to eliminate bloatware and turn off annoying defaults in Windows 11. The irony of including an icon of annoyance in an application designed to make your user experience less annoying is rich indeed. It’s not really clear how Winpilot’s author, Belmin Hasanovic, is getting away with using Clippy; we’d have thought Microsoft would protect their IP a little more vigorously, especially when it says things like, “You know something, champ? This is bullsh*t. I started this gig in ’97. My ultimate goal was to take over Bill Gates job.”

The list of announced talks for HOPE XV keeps growing. It’s hard to say how many talks were added since last week, but it looks like a lot. Better get your proposals in soon if you want to have a chance at a talk.

And finally, we’ve featured the work of Montana wheelwright Dave Engels before, specifically the process of shrink-fitting iron tires onto the massive wooden wheels he builds for things like timber carts and borax wagons. The whole thing is a ballet of fire, steel, wood, smoke, steam, and people, and never fails to entertain. But giant wheels aren’t the only thing Engels works on, and some of the smaller wheels have pretty interesting processes behind them too. Fitting rubber tires to cart wheels is a perfect example, and one with a lot of surprises. We had no idea that these tires have steel wires running through them, to keep them firmly seated on the wooden wheel, which also has a shrink-fit steel rim. The machine that tensions the wires while compressing the rubber is fascinatingly complex, too. We were also taken by the parallels between this machine and a modern tire machine, as well as the clear lineage between solid rubber buggy wheels and modern pneumatic tires.