2026-07-13 04:00:07
As good as a desktop OS may be, at some point it has to feature accelerated 3D graphics. This has been a bit of a sticking point for Haiku OS, as none of the big names in GPU cards are likely to start putting out drivers for this OS any time soon. Fortunately there is the Linux open source driver code from Nvidia that can be used as a jumping-off point for a port, which is what [X512] and the community did over at the Haiku forums did over the course of more than a year.
In a recent video [Action Retro] takes a poke at the fruits of these efforts, trying out the driver with an RTX2070 Super GPU. Of note is that this driver requires the GSP (GPU System Processor) controller that got added by Nvidia with the Turing series of GPUs, meaning that you need at least a GTX16 or RTX20 series card.
You can get an installation package from the GitHub repository, such as for the v0.0.2 pre-release that was created in January of 2026. In this pre-release state quite a few things are working, with the ability to play 3D games at a reasonable FPS being the biggest improvement over plain VESA mode. Features like CUDA are not available as they’re not in the open sourced section, of course.
In the [Action Retro] video the whole installation process is demonstrated, starting with a fresh nightly Haiku build. First the gaming performance in software-rendered VESA mode is demonstrated before the GPU driver is installed. This shows a marked improvement in performance, although Minecraft needs to be updated for the newest Mesa library that omits OSMesa, so that couldn’t be tested. Overall it shows that Haiku has made another massive leap forward in becoming a viable daily driver OS.
Meanwhile, over on the ReactOS side of things we just saw a Half-Life 2 playthrough by [Aotori Hibiki], on an Intel Sandy Bridge PC with GeForce 8400GS graphics. Here ReactOS has the advantage of being Windows NT-compatible, including WDDM-style GPU drivers, allowing it to use the same drivers as Windows. Simultaneously, ReactOS is now implementing its first NT6 kernel API calls to make it compatible with modern (Vista+) Windows.
The upshot here is that for people who want to daily drive an open source OS with all the creature comforts imaginable, things have never seemed more promising. Especially for people who don’t want Yet Another Linux Distro but just an utterly boring desktop-centric, single-user focused OS that Just Works
these are great tidings.
2026-07-13 01:00:49
Cutting foam with a hot wire is a common technique to shape foam in a wide variety of shapes. If you want to cut something detailed and precise, like an airfoil, you probably want to use a computer-controlled cutting tool. Here [Michael Rechtin] has been working on creating a very versatile DIY CNC hot wire cutter, with the results recently announced in a video, along with the GitHub project repository if you want to give it a shake yourself.
Key in hot wire foam cutting is getting the nickel-chromium wire hot enough to gently slice through the foam rather than annihilating it or having the wire encounter significant resistance. For an automated cutter it either needs to be able to adjust the current on the fly, or have a predetermined optimal current for the cutting speed.
The machine itself is a 4-axis system, allowing the wire to be moved just about any way in between the two sides. It uses typical NEMA 17 stepper motors, along with other components that you’d find on a 3D printer. The same is true for the control board that processes the g-code from the software.
The unique part is the pulley-based mechanism that tensions the cutting wire, along with the way that the current gets passed through the wire, which uses MIG welding tips rather than just some alligator clips, which would probably also have worked but not looked as nice.
There are a few 3D-printed parts for which the STLs are provided, and the design is such that the entire assembly can be fairly easily collapsed into a compact shape that’s much easier to store if you’re not cutting foam every single day. For [Michael] cutting airfoils is the main use, for which you got a few software packages that are mentioned in the video.
2026-07-12 22:00:37
Speaking is much faster than typing, and while it’s an increasingly convenient way to interact with computers, it’s hardly private. Providing speech privacy in a way we haven’t seen before is this prototype tongue-reading system that uses machine learning and ultrasound to read tongue movements and turn them into decoded speech. Not only can a user speak without emitting a sound, since it doesn’t read sound waves it’s completely immune to noisy environments.
It turns out that tongue movements are a very rich source of information about speech, and an ultrasound probe under the chin takes very clear video of a tongue. With a dataset consisting of only around 50 hours of training data, the system has a 15.6% error rate and generalizes across different speakers (as long as they speak with similar accents).
That error rate may seem high at first glance, but keep in mind this is for a prototype system built in a month around a relatively small training dataset. All indications are that better results are just a matter of better training.
Probably the biggest drawback at the moment is the size of the ultrasound probe and the way it must be held under one’s chin like a contact microphone, but at the moment the probe is an off-the-shelf model that is hardly optimized for either size, weight, or wearability. If the system seems promising enough, a probe resembling an adhesive patch might even be possible.
It’s certainly a different approach from others we’ve seen in the past, including whispering while inhaling and reading lip and mouth movements.
2026-07-12 19:00:42
Preservationists usually take great care to prevent fungi from appearing the world of art, but in the case of [Kexin Wang]’s Funguy project, the fungus itself is the art. It uses a laser diode to repeatedly trace an outline onto a dish of agar gel in which fungus is growing, and the photophobic fungus grows only up to the edge of the laser-traced figure, potentially creating complex designs.
This project evolved out of a research project in which they developed a computer model for fungal growth, then used its predictions and a laser to control a fungus’s growth pattern. The model has two parts: a temporal convolutional neural network which learns fungi growth patterns from a series of images, and a cellular automaton to simulate these growth patterns under different starting conditions. The cellular automaton’s rules aren’t fixed; each cell runs a small neural network which learns the rules under supervision from the convolutional network. By training these networks on images of the growth stages of three different fungi, it was able to realistically predict the different growth patterns of the different species.
To actually control the growth pattern, the researchers tried a series of different wavelengths and laser powers; shorter wavelengths tended to work better, with a 405 nm laser working best. The growth model complemented the laser setup by predicting in which areas the growth medium had run out of nutrients. Since fungus would no longer spread in these regions, the laser no longer needed to trace these sections. The Funguy kit’s laser system itself is similar to a laser engraver, with an XY-kinematic system seemingly built from a DVD drive frame. It uses fungi from the Mucor genus, though it can print with other photophobic microorganisms, such as slime molds.
This project seems aimed at artistic and educational uses, but considering the various electronic parts that have been made of fungi, more functional applications should be possible.
2026-07-12 16:00:28
Vehicles long ago began to incorporate electronics and software, to the point that modern vehicles increasingly have a sort of architecture problem. The software end of things evolves ever more rapidly, but vehicles and their centralized architecture are poorly-suited to continuous updates. As a result, the automotive industry is moving away from static, hardware-defined designs and more toward dynamic, software-defined platforms. In short, the era of software-defined vehicles looms nearer every year.
There are very good reasons vehicles are the way they are, however inconvenient it may be for pushing updates. A vehicle may be in service for decades, with safety and reliability a prime concern over that lifetime. Reflecting this, automobiles are built around centralized SoCs (System-on-a-Chip) supported by tried and true components and assemblies. As mentioned, this architecture isn’t terribly well suited to meshing with a rapidly evolving software world that may also have changing computing needs. How can one accommodate this without increasing safety risks?
Some new designs are moving away from monolithic SoCs to more modular systems; ones that can support and optimize safety-critical functions and other workloads independently. Computing requirements are chosen to prioritize consistent performance and low-latency sensor fusion over raw processing power, and modern design focuses less on individual components and more on integrated hardware and software assemblies that ease manufacture and reduce design complexity.
The main goal is to design vehicles in a way that can more easily take advantage of rapid developments in software and allow easy updates, without compromising safety or reliability. Automakers haven’t completely settled on what architecture will do this best, but the era of software-defined vehicles is certainly coming closer.
2026-07-12 13:00:59
Targeted towards refined female gamers unlike the savagery of the mainstream game consoles of the era, 1995’s Casio Loopy was a bit of an oddity of a game console. Despite being standard enough in its design and backed by the might of Casio, it saw only one year of active software development and hardware manufacturing ceased by the end of 1998. With only eleven titles released for the system, with none of them being Doom, this obviously terribly upset [Throaty Mumbo], who set out to right this egregious wrong.
For the two dozen people or so who have one of these systems, you can experience the fruits of his labor yourself via the GitHub repository and something like the FloopyDrive cartridge.. Despite the quite capable Hitachi SH-1 16 MHz CPU and 1 MB of RAM, the main limitation is probably the original 2 MB of ROM space that does not leave a lot of space for DOOM WADs, even after doubling it on the FloopyDrive. Correspondingly you only get a handful of levels out of it.
Overall game performance isn’t too bad, though in the port’s current unoptimized state the resolution is fairly low. That said, even the console’s built-in printer is supported and demonstrated in the video, which is a pretty nice touch. It’s not like Sega or Nintendo consoles allowed you to screenshot those glorious headshots.
