2026-03-16 13:00:47
Anyone who saw Back to the Future II was disappointed when 2015 rolled around with nary a hoverboard in sight. There have been various attempts to fake it, but none of them quite have the feel of floating about wherever you’d like to go that the movie conveys. The little-known YouTuber [Colin Furze] has a new take on the idea: use magnets. Really big magnets.
If you’re one of [Colin]’s handful of subscribers, then you probably saw his magnetic-suspension bike. We passed on that one, but we couldn’t resist the urge to cover the hoverboard version, regardless of how popular [Colin] might be on YouTube. It’s actually stupidly simple: the suspension is provided by the repulsive force between alarmingly large neodymium magnets. In this case, two are on the base plate that holds the skateboard ‘trucks’, and two are on the wooden ‘deck’ that [Colin] rides upon.
Of course magnetic repulsion is a very unstable equilibrium, so [Colin] had to reduce the degrees of freedom. In his first test, that was with a pair of rods and linear bearings. That way the deck could only move in the z-axis, providing the sensation of hovering without allowing the deck to slide off its magnetic perch. Unfortunately those pins transferred too much vibration from the ground into the deck, ruining the illusion of floating on air.
After realizing that he’d never be able to ollie (jump) this massive beast of a skateboard, [Colin] decides he might as well use a longboard instead. Longboards, as the name implies, are long skateboards, and are for transportation, not tricks. The longboard gets the same massive magnets, but after a couple of iterations to find a smoother solution — including a neat but unsuccessful tensegrity-inspired version — ends up with a pair of loosely-fitted pins once again, though relocated to the rear of the board. From the rider’s perspective, it looks exactly like a hoverboard, since you can’t see underneath from that angle. According to [Colin], it feels like a hoverboard, too.
The only way to do better would be with eddy currents over copper, or superconductors over a magnetic track, but both of those methods limit you to very specific locations. This might be a bit of a fakeout, but its one with a degree of freedom. One, to be specific. You have to admit, it’s still less of a fake than the handle-less Segway we got in 2015, at least.
2026-03-16 10:00:13
[Nick] came across an awesome Bluetooth speaker online, only, there was a problem. It didn’t really exist—it was just a render of a device that would be nice to have. Of course, there was an obvious solution—[Nick] just had to build the device for real!
The key to the aesthetic of the build is the external case. [Nick] was able to recreate the rough design of the rendered device in SolidWorks, before having the components produced on a resin 3D printer which provided excellent surface finish. Internally, the Bluetooth audio receiver was cribbed from an old pair of wireless headphones. However, a little more oomph was needed to make the speaker really usable, so [Nick] hooked the audio output up to a small MAX98306 amplifier board and a pair of 3 W speakers. The tiny tactile buttons from the headphone PCB wouldn’t do, either. For a nicer feel, [Nick] hacked in a set of four hall effect keyboard switches to control the basic functions.
The result is a Bluetooth speaker that looks as rad as the rendered unit, only you can actually take it outside and bump some tunes! It recalls us of some fine up-cycling work we’ve seen done to vintage 80s radios in a similar vibe.
2026-03-16 07:00:22
Some days, it feels like we’re getting all the bad parts of cyberpunk and none of the cool stuff. Megacorps and cyber warfare? Check. Flying cars and holograms? Not quite yet. This week, things took a further turn for the dystopian with the news that a woman was hospitalized after an altercation with a humanoid robot in Macau. Police arrived on scene, took the bot into custody, and later told the media they believed this was the first time Chinese authorities had been called to intervene between a robot and a human.
The woman, reportedly in her seventies, was apparently shocked when she realized the robot was standing behind her. After the dust settled, the police determined it was being operated remotely as part of a promotion for a local business. We’ve heard there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but we’re not sure the maxim holds true when you manage to put an old lady into the hospital with your ad campaign.
Speaking of robots, the U.S. Library of Congress recently discovered and subsequently restored Georges Méliès’s Gugusse et l’Automate (Gugusse and the Automaton), a short film from 1897 that’s considered the first piece of science fiction cinema. As far as anyone knows, it’s also the first time a robot appeared on screen, although this isn’t exactly The Terminator we’re talking about here.
The runtime is less than a minute, but to make the short story even shorter: a guy cranks up a robot that gets bigger and bigger until it turns on its maker and starts to hit him with a stick. The human responds in kind by smashing the robot with a cartoonishly large mallet until it poofs out of existence. The modern film school interpretation is that it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of technology, ye old Black Mirror, if you will. Since nobody can ask old Georgie what he was going for, we’ll just have to take their word for it.
Returning to the desert of the present, Tom’s Hardware reports that at least one manufacturer is starting to pack their new RAM with an additional non-functioning filler module. With prices skyrocketing, this allows folks who can’t afford to fill all the memory slots on their motherboard to stick something in there that at least looks the part. This may seem pointless, but consider that many gamers and other power users have PC’s with clear side panels to show off their elaborate internal layouts. We get it from an aesthetic standpoint, but it also sounds like a new way to potentially get scammed when buying parts on the second-hand market. Though, to be fair, it could be that we’re just overly cynical after watching that Georges Méliès film. At the very least, the current price of memory certainly makes it feel like we’re being hit with a stick.
Finally, what good is living in a cyberpunk world without the occasional bout of rebellion? That’s where the Ageless Linux project comes in. This is a Linux distribution that’s intentionally configured to violate the California Digital Age Assurance Act, which essentially states that the operating system must ask the user how old they are and make this information available to any piece of software that wants to know.
To be fair, being in violation of this law right now is easy — indeed, the OS you’re using now is almost certainly not compliant. But the idea is that it may bend the knee at some point, while Ageless Linux won’t. One could argue that they started the project a bit too early, but frankly, the whole thing is performative in the first place, so if it gets people talking, that’s enough. We’re particularly interested in their idea of making a non-compliant hardware device that’s cheap enough to distribute while still meeting the definition of a computing device, as it’s written in the California Digital Age Assurance Act.
Think they would mind if we borrowed the idea for this year’s Supercon badge?
See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.
2026-03-16 04:00:19
Platinum-group metals (PGMs) are great catalysts, but they’re also great investments — in the sense that they are very, very expensive. Just ask the guy nicking car exhausts in the Walmart parking lot. If one could replace PGMs with a more common element, like, say the aluminum that makes up over 8% the mass of this planet, it would be a boon to the chemical industry, and a bane to meth addicts. Researchers at King’s College, London have found a way to do just that, with a novel form of aluminum called cyclotrialumane.
The aluminum trimer is exactly what the ‘tri’ in the name makes it sound like: three aluminum atoms, bonded in a triangular structure that is just pointy and stick-outy enough to poke into other molecules and make chemistry happen. OK, not really — you can see from the diagram above it’s not nearly that simple — but the point is that the shape makes it a good catalyst. The trimer structure is useful in large part because it is very stable, allowing reactions to be catalyzed in a large variety of solutions.
The researchers specifically call out their trialuminum compound as effective at splitting H2 in to H+ ions, as well as ethene polymerization. Both of those are important industrial reactions, but that’s only a start for this trialuminum wonder catalyst, because the researchers claim it can catalyze totally new reactions and create previously-unknown chemicals.
If you never took chemistry, or it’s been too many years since you last slept through that class, we have a primer on catalysts here. By accelerating chemical reactions, catalysts have enabled some neat hacks, like anything involving platinum-cure silicone.
Thanks to [Lightislight] for the tip! Hacks do appear here on their own, but you can always use our tips line to catalyze the synthesis of a particular article.
Header image adapted from: Squire, I., de Vere-Tucker, M., Tritto, M. et al. A neutral cyclic aluminium (I) trimer. Nat Commun 17, 1732 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68432-1
2026-03-16 01:00:06
Those who stay into the forbidden realm of font rendering quickly learn how convoluted and arcane it can be – LaTeX is a fully Turing-complete programming language, Unicode has over eighty invisible characters, and there are libraries that let you execute WebAssembly in a font. A great example of a font’s hidden capabilities is Z80 Sans, a font that disassembles Z80 opcodes to assembly mnemonics.
If one pastes Z80 opcodes into a word processor and changes their font to Z80 Sans, the codes are rendered as their assembly mnemonics. The font manages this by abusing the Glyph Substitution Table and Glyph Positioning Table, two components of the OpenType standard. Fonts define relations between characters (internal representations used by the computer, such as ASCII and Unicode) and glyphs (the graphics actually displayed).
In some cases, though, the way a character is displayed depends on where it appears in a word, or what appears around it (Arabic characters are a common example, but an example from English is the ligature “æ”). Z80 Sans defines all the possible glyphs for each nibble of the opcodes, then used a recursive descent parser to generate substitution rules which display the correct glyphs in context.
For a deeper dive into the pitfalls of text graphics, check out this font rendering engine written for a hobby OS. You can also use fonts to play games or talk to an LLM.
2026-03-15 22:00:11
If you weren’t around for the early PC era, or were a little more casual about operating systems, you could perhaps be forgiven for not knowing that DOS is not synonymous with MS-DOS. MS-DOS was just Microsoft’s implementation — or rather, an implementation they purchased — of a Disk Operating System, one that was…let’s just say “inspired by” Digital Research’s CP/M.
Digital Research shot back with DR-DOS, an operating system that was both compatible with and much superior in some ways to MS-DOS. The last version was released in 1991, after Novell bought the struggling Digital Research. Now it’s back, or at least, it’s on its way back with a fully clean-room implementation by a fellow who calls himself [CheeseWeezel] on Reddit.
He’s gone so far as to purchase the trademark, so this re-creation is the official DR-DOS. In any case [CheeseWeezel]’s DR-DOS is considered version 9.0, and is currently in Beta. The clean-sheet re-implementation of DR-DOS’s API was sadly necessary due to the rather tortured history of the IP after DR was bought by Novel, who sold DR-DOS to Caldera, who briefly open-sourced the code before retracting the license and selling on. Some of you may remember a controversy where a previous rights holder, DR DOS INC, was found purloining FreeDOS code in violation of the GPL. Perhaps because of that, [CheeseWeezel] isn’t using any old code, and isn’t open-sourcing what he’s done. Right now, the beta of DR-DOS 9 is free for non-commercial use, but as is standard for EULAs, that could change at any time without warning. [CheeseWeezel] is still working full compatibility, but at this point it at least runs DOOM.
Still, given the origins of DOS in Digital Research’s early work on CP/M, it warms the heart to see what many of us thought of as the “true” DOS survive in some form in the 21st century. Arguably it already had, in the form of SvarDOS, but you can’t use that to make smug jokes about your operating system having PhD instead of a measly master’s. If you did not like DOS, we recall the joke from Mac users was that those were the degrees needed to operate the PC. Speaking of DOS, you don’t necessarily need a retrocomputer to run it.
Thanks to [OldDOSMan] for the tip!
