Windows has finally added a native screen recorder via an updated Snipping Tool – but apparently only for Windows 11.
Simply launch Snipping Tool and switch to the Record mode. Select the area to record and click Start.
Did you know that Microsoft provides free virtual machine images of the latest version of Windows – with developer tools, SDK’s, and samples all pre-installed? Microsoft provide regularly updated virtual machine images for VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, and Parallels.
A few important points. The images are not activated and cannot be activated – even with a valid product key.
If you want to install and run a Linux distro (Ubuntu for example), you can use Virtualbox/VMWare or the built in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). With WSL, you get a Linux command prompt mounted on your local Windows filesystem and can launch X-windows apps that pop up on your Windows desktop in separate windows.
The experience is kind of a weird mash-up of Windows and Linux on the same system at the same time. Kind of like a better/embedded version of cygwin. It’s not as contained as a virtual machine host app like Virtualbox/VMWare that keeps all your windows in the virtual machine host app; but this might be enough for most people.
I haven’t done any experiments, but would love to test out some OpenGL/Vulkan apps to see if you get full GPU accelerated rendering.
Captain Disillusion shows you the various modern video techniques that create the popular videos of very busy and populated locations that appear utterly devoid of people.
Sirrandalot is not the first person to use a film-grain/film-like shader effect to give a certain feel. He is, however, the first to use Blender’s Cycles path-tracing engine to create a highly detailed physical modeling of a 3D camera body, simulate the various properties of a glass lens (then multiple lens system), the properties of chemical film, and then render scenes through this highly complex setup to generate real film-like images. Check out the final not-photos here or on Imgur.
You can download the camera and play with it yourself.
Henry Segerman is a mathematician who likes to help visualize mathematical principles using 3D printing. He has a book that pairs the ideas and topics with 3D objects you can print out.
His YouTube channel covers an amazing number of topics. Different kinds of irregular dice (slant, skew, dLX, wild d6’s, and others) that are fair but look very different than the standard regular polyhedral style dice. He makes interesting puzzles, visualizing 3D printed objects of higher dimensions, impossible geometry, interesting gearing, topology, and many other cool topics.
What’s great about his channel is that he’s a mathematician so you get a healthy dose of the theory that makes the objects possible.
Most PC cooling solutions cool your CPU/GPU/memory using fans or water that exchange the generated heat with the surrounding air. This means you can never cool the components to any lower temperature than the surrounding ambient air temperature.
There are people who push those boundaries to hyper-low temperatures by pouring liquid nitrogen or other hyper-cool liquids into specially designed heatsinks; but it introduces a new set of issues. A big issue for cooling below ambient temperature is condensation.
As soon as a surface is cooler than the surrounding air temperature dew point, then water from the air may start forming as condensation on the surface. We see this every summer on the sides of iced drinks. As anyone with electronics experience knows, water and electricity don’t mix.
Many people have experimented with sub-ambient cooling solutions before. The latest is EKWB with their EK-QuantumX Delta TEC EVO water block. Instead of using just a normal water block connected to a radiator, this solution uses a Thermoelectric Cooler (TEC) with a controller that then dissipates that heat through a radiator.
It’s an interesting, and surprisingly complex problem.
Frore Systems has developed a cooling chip it calls AirJet that sits on top of a heat-generating chip and cools it without the need for mechanical fans. It’s 2.8mm thick and uses pulsating inlets to suck air into it and exhaust it out the sides.
The AirJet Mini looks like a credit card, and measures 41.5mm long by 27.5mm wide and 2.8mm thick. It can remove 5.25W of heat while consuming just 1W with a very quiet 21 dBA of noise. The AirJet Pro for x86 is a bit larger, naturally. It measures 71.5 mm by 31.5mm at the same 2.8mm thickness. It can exhaust 10.75W of heat while using just 1.75W.
The mechanism works via membranes inside that vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies. This vibration sucks air into inlets at the top of the AirJet. Once inside the device, air is then transformed into “pulsating jets” as the air removes the heat from the heat spreader. It is eventually exhausted out of the sides via integrated spouts.
Article
Who would think something like improving a chip design tool would cause the International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) to get so out of hand it was called a “trainwreck” and an “ambush” of the presenters.
The crux of the clash was whether Google’s AI chip design layout solver was really better than those of humans or state-of-the-art algorithms. In the end, there was a firing and a wrongful termination lawsuit with Google, a team re-doing a years worth of work, ugly accusations and drama, and 2 AI researchers leaving a promising field of AI improved chip design due to the conflict.
The argument involved a lot of factors like comparing different chip placement algorithms, results of reinforced learning, initial placement bias, metrics of success such as wire length, annealing, and general benchmarks – but in the end resulted in a circus of accusations, lawsuits, and drama.
Read more about it here on the IEEE article
Who knew something as simple as pencil sharpeners had such a long history. The Awesomer put together this little collection of old-school pencil sharpeners from the late 1800’s to early 1900’s.
Or if you want, go for one of these over-engineered modern ones:
I can assure you that the Palomino Kum Point Pencil Sharpener is pretty awesome (newer model here, and the one with the tip sharpener here). I use it all the time.
You can also check out this video by the ridiculously good Stuff Made Here in which he creates some of the most ridiculous pencil sharpeners he can.
Apparently someone found a working Larrabee card that was ‘pulled from an image processing machine connected to a CAT scan machine’.
A member of the LinusTechTips community over at Reddit managed to obtain a working Larrabee sample from ‘a friend who got it from their work.’ There were obviously no Windows 10 drivers, but it could still work as a basic graphics adapter. GPU-Z recognized the graphics adapter as an Intel GPU and read its device ID (8086 2240 – 8086 2240)
Interesting to see one of them still up and around. The last working one sold for about $5,000 on eBay.
Other links: