Microsoft Looking To Enforce USB-C Features Through WHCP

June 7, 2025 by Maya Posch 34 Comments

As much as people love USB-C, there’s one massive flaw that becomes very obvious the moment you look at the ports on any computer. This being that there’s no (standardized) way to tell what any of those ports do. Some may do display out (Alt-Mode), some may allow for charging, but it remains mostly a matter of praying to the hardware gods. According to a recent blog post, this is where Microsoft will seek to enforce a USB-C feature set on all (mobile) computers compliant with its Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP).

This also comes after years of the USB Implementers Forum, re-branding the USB specifications, with the most recent iteration thankfully using the bandwidth (in Gbps) as specifier (meaning no ‘USB PlaidSpeed’, sadly). Claiming to follow this end-user friendly spirit, the Microsoft blog post goes on to a minimum set of features that USB-C ports should have, as detailed in the above table.

Most notable is probably that PC charging support is required, as is support for at least one external display. As for the negatives, this seems to only apply to laptops, and no actual charging requirements are set (USB-PD voltages, wattage, etc.), so what the actual impact of this will be remains to be seen.

One thing remains certain, however, and that is that by trying to make USB-C the One True Connector for literally everything, there will always remain cases where end-user expectations remain unfulfilled.

Screens Of Death: From Diagnostic Aids To A Sad Emoji

June 5, 2025 by Maya Posch 52 Comments

There comes a moment in the life of any operating system when an unforeseen event will tragically cut its uptime short. Whether it’s a sloppily written driver, a bug in the handling of an edge case or just dumb luck, suddenly there is nothing more that the OS’ kernel can do to salvage the situation. With its last few cycles it can still gather some diagnostic information, attempt to write this to a log or memory dump and then output a supportive message to the screen to let the user know that the kernel really did try its best.

This on-screen message is called many things, from a kernel panic message on Linux to a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on Windows since Windows 95, to a more contemplative message on AmigaOS and BeOS/Haiku. Over the decades these Screens of Death (SoD) have changed considerably, from the highly informative screens of Windows NT to the simplified BSOD of Windows 8 onwards with its prominent sad emoji that has drawn a modicum of ridicule.

Now it seems that the Windows BSOD is about to change again, and may not even be blue any more. So what’s got a user to think about these changes? What were we ever supposed to get out of these special screens?

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Running FreeDOS And 8086tiny On The Game Boy Advance Because You Can

June 5, 2025 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

How many people haven’t looked at their Game Boy Advance (GBA) handheld gaming device and wondered how much better it might be if it could run FreeDOS. Inside an 8086 emulator. If you’re like [ZZAZZ] and similarly suffer intrusive project-related thoughts, then this might be a moment of clear recognition, somewhat like sharing one’s story at a Programmers Anonymous meeting, but we digress.

In the video, the basic premise of making even the 8086tiny emulator work on the GBA seemed improbable on the outset – courtesy of the rather limited memory environment provided by the GBA – before even daring to look at things like disk access.

However, letting silly things like segmented memory and mismatched memory addresses deter us from pleasing said intrusive thoughts would be beyond the pale. Ergo we get a shining example of how days of rewriting code, stripping code, debugging code, fixing alignment issues in code and writing work-arounds for newly discovered issues in code can ultimately lead to the proud moment where FreeDOS boots on the GBA.

Granted it takes over an hour to do so, and has to be started from a butchered Pokémon Emerald save file, courtesy of a well-known exploit in that game, thankfully preserved in counterfeit cartridges.

Admittedly we’re not sure what practical applications there are for FreeDOS on the GBA, but that’s never stopped hackers from taking on impossible projects before, so there’s no sense letting it get in the way now.

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My Winter Of ’99: The Year Of The Linux Desktop Is Always Next Year

June 3, 2025 by Maya Posch 206 Comments

Growing up as a kid in the 1990s was an almost magical time. We had the best game consoles, increasingly faster computers at a pace not seen before, the rise of the Internet and World Wide Web, as well the best fashion and styles possible between neon and pastel colors, translucent plastic and also this little thing called Windows 95 that’d take the world by storm.

Yet as great as Windows 95 and its successor Windows 98 were, you had to be one of the lucky folks who ended up with a stable Windows 9x installation. The prebuilt (Daewoo) Intel Celeron 400 rig with 64 MB SDRAM that I had splurged on with money earned from summer jobs was not one of those lucky systems, resulting in regular Windows reinstalls.

As a relatively nerdy individual, I was aware of this little community-built operating system called ‘Linux’, with the online forums and the Dutch PC magazine that I read convincing me that it would be a superior alternative to this unstable ‘M$’ Windows 98 SE mess that I was dealing with. Thus it was in the Year of the Linux Desktop (1999) that I went into a computer store and bought a boxed disc set of SuSE 6.3 with included manual.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Windows is installed on all my primary desktop systems, raising the question of what went wrong in ’99. Wasn’t Linux the future of desktop operating systems?

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The Potential Big Boom In Every Dust Cloud

June 2, 2025 by Maya Posch 45 Comments

To the average person, walking into a flour- or sawmill and seeing dust swirling around is unlikely to evoke much of a response, but those in the know are quite likely to bolt for the nearest exit at this harrowing sight. For as harmless as a fine cloud of flour, sawdust or even coffee creamer may appear, each of these have the potential for a massive conflagration and even an earth-shattering detonation.

As for the ‘why’, the answer can be found in for example the working principle behind an internal combustion engine. While a puddle of gasoline is definitely flammable, the only thing that actually burns is the evaporated gaseous form above the liquid, ergo it’s a relatively slow process; in order to make petrol combust, it needs to be mixed in the right air-fuel ratio. If this mixture is then exposed to a spark, the fuel will nearly instantly burn, causing a detonation due to the sudden release of energy.

Similarly, flour, sawdust, and many other substances in powder form will burn gradually if a certain transition interface is maintained. A bucket of sawdust burns slowly, but if you create a sawdust cloud, it might just blow up the room.

This raises the questions of how to recognize this danger and what to do about it.

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Testing Brick Layers In OrcaSlicer With Staggered Perimeters

June 1, 2025 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

The OrcaSlicer staggered perimeters in an FDM print, after slicing through the model. (Credit: CNC Kitchen)

The idea of staggered (or brick) layers in FDM prints has become very popular the past few years, with now nightly builds of OrcaSlicer featuring the ‘Stagger Perimeters’ option to automate the process, as demonstrated by [Stefan] in a recent CNC Kitchen video. See the relevant OrcaSlicer GitHub thread for the exact details, and to obtain a build with this feature. After installing, slice the model as normal, after enabling this new parameter in the ‘Strength’ tab.

In the video, [Stefan] first tries out a regular and staggered perimeter print without further adjustments. This perhaps surprisingly results in the staggered version breaking before the regular print, which [Stefan] deduces to be the result of increasing voids within the print. After increasing the extrusion rate to 110% to fill up said voids, this does indeed result in the staggered part showing a massive boost in strength.

What’s perhaps more telling is that a similar positive effect is observed when the flow is increased with the non-staggered part, albeit with the staggered part still showing more of a strength increase. This makes it obvious that just staggering layers isn’t enough, but that the flowrate and possibly other parameters have to be adjusted as well to fully realize the potential of brick layers. That said, it’s encouraging to see this moving forward despite questionable patent claims.

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White LED Turning Purple: Analyzing A Phosphor Failure

May 30, 2025 by Maya Posch 32 Comments

White LED bulbs are commonplace in households by now, mostly due to their low power usage and high reliability. Crank up the light output enough and you do however get high temperatures and corresponding interesting failure modes. An example is the one demonstrated by the [electronupdate] channel on YouTube with a Philips MR16 LED spot that had developed a distinct purple light output.

The crumbling phosphor coating on top of the now exposed LEDs. (Credit: electronupdate, YouTube)

After popping off the front to expose the PCB with the LED packages, the fault seemed to be due to the phosphor on one of the four LEDs flaking off, exposing the individual 405 nm LEDs underneath. Generally, white LEDs are just UV or 405 nm (‘blue’) LEDs that have a phosphor coating on top that converts the emitted wavelength into broad band visible (white) or another specific wavelength, so this failure mode makes perfect sense.

After putting the PCB under a microscope and having a look at the failed and the other LED packages the crumbled phosphor on not just the one package became obvious, as the remaining three showed clear cracks in the phosphor coating. Whether due to the heat in these high-intensity spot lamps or just age, clearly over time these white LED packages become just bare LEDs without the phosphor coating. Ideally you could dab on some fresh phosphor, but likely the fix is to replace these LED packages every few years until the power supply in the bulb gives up the ghost.

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