Life can be unfair
Just because you’re on the right track doesn’t mean you can’t be hit by someone on the wrong one.
Some favorites from Steam 2025 Next Fest
When not playing 10+ year old favorite games, I’m looking to small, innovative indies for modern gaming fun. There’s so many interesting and innovative ideas. RockPaperShotgun lists some of their favorites from Steam’s Next Fest. From physics based sand digging, spooky board games, brain teaser games, to hilariously casual driving delivery games – there’s quite a lot to check out.
DnD from the early 2000’s
I recently had a flashback to my own college days when The Gamers movie from Dead Gentlemen came up in my Youtube feed. No series has captured the personalities and real-life nonsense of 90’s and early 2000’s DnD playing with friends so well.
Sit down and give them a watch. This is what the internet was originally designed for. Not monetization and influencer videos, but sharing passions and having fun.
One of their follow-on movies:
Even in mid-2000’s people waxed nostalgic about old DnD:
and of course – the original Summoner Geeks:
Robotic seed planting
Contrary to popular tropes about unintelligent farmers, agriculture has long been in the forefront of technological advances. Farmers have developed and quickly embrace world-changing inventions like tractors, planters, bailers, the cotton gin, and harvesters that replaced backbreaking work that used to be done by hundreds of hands.
In yet another dramatic and astounding embracing of technology, John Deere’s announced its ExactShot planting system that can plant and fertilize 6,600 seeds in 3 seconds.
The system is made up of 54 modular electrified robots and sensors that register when each individual seed goes into the soil. As this occurs, the robot will spray only the amount of fertilizer needed, about 0.2 ML, directly onto the seed at the exact moment it goes into the ground. Instead of needing to continually spray, the targeted fertilizer approach can reduce the amount of fertilizer used by over 60%.
This level of automation means that farmers like Todd Westerfeld, a fifth-generation Texas farmer, can plant wheat, soybeans, corn, and cotton on 5,500 acres with only three people. This is an astounding feat of automation and technology.
Being a farmer today means managing million dollar annual budgets with razor thin margins. I would bet the average farmer handles much more responsibility than 90% of the flashy marketing, sales, or leadership jobs you see on Linkedin. Farmers must manage constantly changing global financial and commodity price conditions, become an expert at financial and production risk management, understanding advanced soil and chemical testing/mapping technologies, stay on top of the latest farm implement innovations, and do all of this with single digit profit margins (in most cases). Nobody else does so much for so little.
8086 emulator
8086 emulator is a fun Intel 8086 emulator / vm on github. It can run most of the 8086 instruction set and provides an interactive interpreter and debugger that allows you to run programs line by line. [hackaday]
Scalable IO vs SR-IOV Virtualization
Are the days of SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) numbered? SR-IOV was originally designed for 20 or so VMs with most instances using 8 vCPUs or less. Now that we have 60-128 cores/120-256 hw threads and beyond with multiple sockets and CXL, things have changed.
Scalable IO offers better scalability, flexibility, over-provisioning, and a Scalable IO system can still support traditional SR-IOV in backwards compatibility mode.
It does this with hardware-assisted, efficient routing and has different modes for direct and intercepted path functionality. I won’t claim I fully grock all the details, but it does seem like a great way to start taking advantage of newer architecture enhancements we’re seeing in a wide variety of upcoming hardware platforms.
Give the spec a read to learn more.
Links:
- https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-scalable-io-virtualization-technical-specification-revision-1-0-version-1-3-pdf
- https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/programmable/813754/24-1-4-0-0/scalable-iov.html
- https://www.servethehome.com/microsoft-and-intel-scalable-io-virtualization-replacing-sr-iov-ocp/
How to navigate with a compass and map
It is incredible how many seasoned hikers bring compasses, and yet cannot even use them. There are a few things to learn, but shockingly easy once you know.
The Map Reading Company channel has the best video I have seen on the subject
Windows 11 finally gets over 50% installs, then instantly retreats
After 4 years, Windows 11 installations finally reached an adoption rate of just over 50% – likely due to dire sounding announcements about the end of Windows 10 support. And just one month later, install rate immediately starts a retreat and Windows 10 sees an increase of installs.
The OS wars are long since over, but it is obvious some folks at Microsoft clearly haven’t learned, or just don’t care, about disappointing your customers.
Links:
Isolating particular sounds
Is your product producing a bad/annoying/loud noise but you can’t figure out where exactly it is coming from? Using a camera with what looks to be a ring of microphones, this device allows you to isolate where sounds are coming from – and what the frequencies of those sounds are. Particularly useful if you want to isolate noises generated by secondary effects (like rushing air) of a device.
Opening the doors to quantum manipulation
MIT physicists have for the first time measured the geometry, or shape, of electrons in solids at the quantum level. Scientists have known how to measure energies and velocities of electrons in crystalline materials, but those systems’ wave form geometry could only be guessed at.
This allows us to understand, and perhaps manipulate, new quantum materials. They’ve already done this by using the technique to discover the mechanism behind quantum materials such as kagome metal.
This is a dramatic development that will help scientists and engineers manipulate, and create materials with unique magnetic, electrical, and physical properties.
Links: