Acerola created a graphics to text shader. He talks about a number of interesting techniques beyond just ASCII lookups such as: edge detection, depth color falloff, blooming and tone mapping, color tones, color quantization, and other filters, etc.
Definitely worth a watch and you can check out a good amount of his code on his github repro.
It’s easy to get duped by home camera systems. Many of them sell you the equipment really cheap only to find out they have a limited trial and then require expensive long-term subscription services to even use the devices or store data.
Tapo cameras, however seem to still be bucking the subscription trend by selling fully operational cameras that don’t need a subscription.
Even better, it’s not like they are nerfed with expensive pay-to-play higher end features. The cameras are able to do person, vehicle, pet, package detection, capable of sound detection for a baby crying, glass breaking, and dog barking – all without paying a cent more or a subscription. It even has the ability to save to local or your own cloud storage.
It’s nice to see a company still keeping control in the hands of the users/owners.
My first video card was the original 8-bit Sound Blaster card. Besides upgrading to VGA graphics, nothing changed my gaming experience back in the day more than this one upgrade.
Enter the Snark Barker. It’s an open source project that gives you a complete bill of materials, circuit diagram, board fab files, and tons of other information you need to make your own. Yes, MAKE your own Soundblaster clone. It looks like a very doable project for those a little handy with a soldering iron.
Links:
David Larsson makes a bunch of clone ISA audio boards such as the Gravis Ultrasound, 8-bit ISA Soundblaster, MCA Sound Blaster, Disney Sound Source. He sells them on Tindie for pretty reasonable prices considering the ebay prices for the original boards.
Here’s a good review of his 8-bit Soundblaster card:
These aren’t the only sound card clones. Turns out there are lots of others too:
Links:
Texelec makes some amazing retro PC equipment. They make clone Adlib and soundblaster cards, EMS ram boards for 8 bit computers,
One of the things they make is an 8-bit ISA floppy controller board that control up to 4 floppy drives.
Here’s a collection of all the tools you’ll need to set up an old MFM style hard drive in a XT/286/386/486 computer.
Microsoft has recently release DOS 4.0 as MIT licensed OpenSource.
Dave’s Garage does a walkthrough of the history, sets up a dev environment (masm and C 5.1 compiler), builds the source, then bonus points for writing it to an actual 5.25″ floppy using a greaseweazle. He then boots it off an actual IBM XT.
Tech Tangents talks about how preservationists use tools like GreaseWeasle to back up disks.
It helped me a lot when learning how to back up and write my own disks.
Update: Using a Greaseweasle and a 5.25″ floppy drive turned out to be critical evidence/court records on a nearly 50-year-old floppy disk last written to in 1993 using a DEC PDP-11.
Have written previously about my experiments with the very excellent Greaseweazle; but that was reading things like my old Kings Quest 5.25″ floppy disks from my modern 12th Gen Intel PC running Windows 10.
Recently I acquired some old pc hardware and put together a retro 486-DX pc. To that end, I needed to create a DOS boot disk for this old system. That meant I needed to write a 1.2mb DOS boot disk.
Previously I used some boot disk images to create an old DOS virtual machine running Windows 1.0. For that, I used a bunch of archived boot disks images from WinWorld archive.
But how do I write these little beasts?
I floundered around with greaseweezle’s command line but this guide from Tech Tangents really helped out. There’s clearly a lot more I need to learn, but this got me a bootable 5.25″ 1.2mb floppy disk. I was able to test it on 2 different drives, and both worked. So, that’s pretty sweet!
How to write DOS 6.22 image to a 5.25″ 1.2m floppy drive attached to the ribbon cable right before the cable twist:
gw write --drive b --format ibm.1200 Dos6.22-5.25.img
To write a DOS 3.30 image to a 5.25″ 360k floppy drive attached to the ribbon cable right before the twist:
gw write --drive b --format ibm.360 DOS330-360k.img
Carnegie Mellon researchers have developed a real-time human tele-operation system. Using a simple camera, it is able to read the actions of a human person and then translate that into real-time full-body control of a robot.
Individuals can now seamlessly teleoperate full-sized humanoids to execute a myriad of actions. According to researchers, they can perform simple tasks like picking and placing objects to dynamic movements like walking, kicking, and even boxing.
Read the paper here: https://human2humanoid.com/resources/H2O_paper.pdf
There’s lots of possibilities for this kind of remotely operated humanoid robotic system. Remotely controlled humanoid robots could save countless lives operating in dangerous environments.
They could be used to go in and shut down equipment after dangerous chemical or industrial accidents. Search dangerous buildings for survivors after earthquakes. They could perform dangerous police or urban warfare operations without loss of life. Stop terrorist by defusing bombs. Another such place would be effecting repairs, shutdowns, and cleanup in highly radiated areas like Chernobyl, Fukushima, or when there are nuclear accidents. In the future, we may never need the horrors of Chernobyl’s biorobots to deal with such disasters.
Articles: