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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High-Stakes Fox Hunting: The FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division In World War II

June 4, 2025 by Dan Maloney 30 Comments

With few exceptions, amateur radio is a notably sedentary pursuit. Yes, some hams will set up in a national or state park for a “Parks on the Air” activation, and particularly energetic operators may climb a mountain for “Summits on the Air,” but most hams spend a lot of time firmly planted in a comfortable chair, spinning the dials in search of distant signals or familiar callsigns to add to their logbook.

There’s another exception to the band-surfing tendencies of hams: fox hunting. Generally undertaken at a field day event, fox hunts pit hams against each other in a search for a small hidden transmitter, using directional antennas and portable receivers to zero in on often faint signals. It’s all in good fun, but fox hunts serve a more serious purpose: they train hams in the finer points of radio direction finding, a skill that can be used to track down everything from manmade noise sources to unlicensed operators. Or, as was done in the 1940s, to ferret out foreign agents using shortwave radio to transmit intelligence overseas.

That was the primary mission of the Radio Intelligence Division, a rapidly assembled organization tasked with protecting the United States by monitoring the airwaves and searching for spies. The RID proved to be remarkably effective during the war years, in part because it drew heavily from the amateur radio community to populate its many field stations, but also because it brought an engineering mindset to the problem of finding needles in a radio haystack.

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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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Forced E-Waste PCs And The Case Of Windows 11’s Trusted Platform

May 29, 2025 by Maya Posch 141 Comments

Until the release of Windows 11, the upgrade proposition for Windows operating systems was rather straightforward: you considered whether the current version of Windows on your system still fulfilled your needs and if the answer was ‘no’, you’d buy an upgrade disc. Although system requirements slowly crept up over time, it was likely that your PC could still run the newest-and-greatest Windows version. Even Windows 7 had a graphical fallback mode, just in case your PC’s video card was a potato incapable of handling the GPU-accelerated Aero Glass UI.

This makes a lot of sense, as the most demanding software on a PC are the applications, not the OS. Yet with Windows 11 a new ‘hard’ requirement was added that would flip this on its head: the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a security feature that has been around for many years, but never saw much use outside of certain business and government applications. In addition to this, Windows 11 only officially supports a limited number of CPUs, which risks turning many still very capable PCs into expensive paperweights.

Although the TPM and CPU requirements can be circumvented with some effort, this is not supported by Microsoft and raises the specter of a wave of capable PCs being trashed when Windows 10 reaches EOL starting this year.

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Remotely Interesting: Stream Gages

May 28, 2025 by Dan Maloney 32 Comments

Near my childhood home was a small river. It wasn’t much more than a creek at the best of times, and in dry summers it would sometimes almost dry up completely. But snowmelt revived it each Spring, and the remains of tropical storms in late Summer and early Fall often transformed it into a raging torrent if only briefly before the flood waters receded and the river returned to its lazy ways.

Other than to those of us who used it as a playground, the river seemed of little consequence. But it did matter enough that a mile or so downstream was some sort of instrumentation, obviously meant to monitor the river. It was — and still is — visible from the road, a tall corrugated pipe standing next to the river, topped with a box bearing the logo of the US Geological Survey. On occasion, someone would visit and open the box to do mysterious things, which suggested the river was interesting beyond our fishing and adventuring needs.

Although I learned quite early that this device was a streamgage, and that it was part of a large network of monitoring instruments the USGS used to monitor the nation’s waterways, it wasn’t until quite recently — OK, this week — that I learned how streamgages work, or how extensive the network is. A lot of effort goes into installing and maintaining this far-flung network, and it’s worth looking at how these instruments work and their impact on everyday life.

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Hands-On: EufyMake E1 UV Printer

May 27, 2025 by Tom Nardi 47 Comments

The modern hacker and maker has a truly incredible arsenal of tools at their disposal. High-tech tools like 3D printers, laser cutters, and CNC routers have all become commonplace, and combined with old standbys like the drill press and mini lathe, it sometimes seems like we’ve finally peaked in terms of what the individual is realistically capable of producing in their own home. But occasionally a new tool comes along, and it makes us realize that there are still avenues unexplored for the home gamer.

After spending the last few weeks playing with it, I can confidently say the eufyMake E1 UV printer is one of those tools. The elevator pitch is simple: with a UV printer, you can print anything on anything. As you can imagine, the reality is somewhat more complex, but the fact that you can toss a three dimensional object in the chamber and spray it with a high-resolution color image with a few button presses holds incredible creative potential. Enough that the Kickstarter for the $1,700 printer has already raised a mind-boggling $27 million at the time of this writing, with more than a month yet to go before crossing the finish line.

If you’re on the fence about backing the campaign, or just have doubts about whether or not the machine can do what eufyMake claims, I’ll put those concerns to rest right now — it’s the real deal. Even after using the machine for as long as I have, each time a print job ends, I find myself momentary taken aback by just how good the end result is. The technology inside this machine that not only makes these results possible, but makes them so easily obtainable, is truly revolutionary.

That being said, it’s not a perfect machine by any stretch of the imagination. While I never ran into an outright failure while using the eufyMake E1, there’s a fairly long list of issues which I’d like to see addressed. Some of them are simple tweaks which may well get sorted out before the product starts shipping this summer, while others are fundamental to the way the machine operates and could represent an opportunity for competitors.

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