2026-03-02 17:00:23
There aren’t many speed records that remain unbroken for the greater part of a century, but one of them is that of the fastest steam locomotive. As with so many such things, there’s a bit of controversy and more than one contender, but the one in the record books is the A4 Pacific, Mallard. In 1938, this locomotive thundered down an incline on the London & North Eastern Railway’s mainline in the north of England at 126 MPH. But can that number be taken as reliable? The Institute of Mechanical Engineers has a video in which they investigate.
It’s a fascinating look at the science of railway speed measurement as it existed in 1938, the record itself, and the paper dynamometer roll which recorded it. We’ve placed the video below the break, and in it, we see an in-depth analysis of the noise and inconsistencies in the recording, and see them come to the conclusion that a safer figure to quote would be 124 MPH.
Our assessment is that, of course, the LNER wanted to squeeze every morsel of publicity from it in a game of one-upmanship with their arch-rivals in the London Midland and Scottish railway, so it’s likely that their use of a momentary figure makes sense in that light. Even the best-laid 1930s jointed track would have been bumpy compared to modern continuous rail, and we are guessing that the ancient clerestory dynamometer car would hardly be as smooth-riding as a modern express coach. The achievement of measuring at all with mechanical instruments in such an environment at those speeds would have been tricky, to say the least. It leaves us wondering whether 1930s electronics could have produced some kind of trackside measurement device, but perhaps the LNER trusted their mechanical instruments more. Perhaps the Pennsylvania Railroad should have followed its example.
2026-03-02 14:00:39
Everyone loves Wago connectors for how versatile and effective they are for quickly and securely connecting conductors, but it can be tempting to buy a bag of the significantly cheaper knock-offs. The reason why this can be a terrible idea is explained by [Big Clive] who tore down a few bags of them to ogle at their internals.
The main problem with some of these knock-offs is the way that they use the plastic molding as part of the structure that holds the conductors in place. Over time this plastic will develop larger tolerances, with heat developed from passing large currents speeding up the process. As the examined type of connector relies on metal clamps that securely push the conductor onto the busbar, having the plastic weaken, and the clamp correspondingly loosen up, is clearly not a desirable scenario.
As [Clive] says in the video, you’re probably okay using these cheapo knock-offs for a quick test on the bench, but you should never put them in a permanent installation. Not just due to potential fiery scenarios, but also for insurance claims should the worst come to pass, and the insurance company finds dodgy connectors everywhere in the electrical wiring. This isn’t the first we’ve heard of knock-off Wago problems.
2026-03-02 11:00:39
[Nagy Krisztián] had an Intel 286 CPU, only… There was no motherboard to install it in. Perhaps not wanting the processor to be lonely, [Nagy] built a simulated system to bring the chip back to life.
The concept is simple enough. [Nagy] merely intended to wire the 286 up to a Raspberry Pi Pico that could emulate other parts of a computer that it would normally expect to talk to. This isn’t so hard with an ancient CPU like the 286, which has just 68 pins compared to the 1000+ pins on modern CPUs. All it took was a PLCC-68 socket, an adapter PCB, a breadboard, and some MCP23s17 logic expanders to give the diminutive microcontroller enough I/O. With a bit of work, [Nagy] was able to get the Pi Pico running the 286, allowing it to execute a simple program that retrieves numbers from “memory” and writes them back in turn.
Notably, this setup won’t run the 286 at its full clock speed of 12 MHz, and it’s a long way off from doing anything complex like talking to peripherals or booting an OS. Still, it’s neat to see the old metal live again, even if it’s just rattling through a few simple machine instructions that don’t mean a whole lot. [Nagy] equates this project to The Matrix; you might also think of it as a brain in a jar. The 286 is not in a real computer; it’s just hooked up to a microcontroller stimulating its various pins in a way that is indistinguishable from its own perspective.
We’ve seen similar retro projects before, such as this FPGA rig that helped a NEC V20 get back on its feet. If you’re doing your own tinkering on the platforms of yesteryear, we probably want to know about it on the tips line.
2026-03-02 08:00:55
We’ll start this week off with a bit of controversy from Linux Land. Anyone who’s ever used the sudo command knows that you don’t see any kind of visual feedback while entering your password. This was intended as a security feature, as it was believed that an on-screen indicator of how many characters had been entered would allow somebody snooping over your shoulder to figure out the length of your password. But in Ubuntu 26.04, that’s no longer the case. The traditional sudo binary has been replaced with a one written in Rust, which Canonical has recently patched to follow the modern convention of showing asterisks on the password prompt.
As you might expect, this prompted an immediate reaction from Linux greybeards. A bug report was filed just a few days ago demanding that the change be reverted, arguing that breaking a decades-old expectation with no warning could be confusing for users. The official response from a Canonical dev was that they see it the other way around, and that the change was made to improve the user experience. It was also pointed out that those who want to revert to the old style of prompt can do so with a config change. The issue was immediately marked as “Won’t Fix”, but the discussion is ongoing.
Speaking of unexpected changes, multiple reports are coming in that the February security update for Samsung Galaxy devices, which is currently rolling out, removes several functions from the Android recovery menu. After the update is applied to phones such as the S25 and Fold 7, long-standing features, such as the ability to wipe the device’s cache partition or install updates via Android Debug Bridge (ADB), disappear.
Just like with the change to sudo, this is the sort of thing that will aggravate veteran users the most. There’s been no official explanation for these changes, and it’s not immediately obvious why Samsung would fiddle with the recovery menu that’s remain largely unchanged since Android’s introduction. As 9to5Google mentions, it could be an attempt to prevent users from installing leaked firmware builds — a practice that’s gotten the attention of the electronic giant’s legal department.
These days, software updates are just one of the things you need to keep track of. Add in emails, RSS feeds, and incoming chat messages, and keeping up with the notifications on your computer or smartphone can be a challenge. But that’s nothing compared to the 800,000 alerts fired off earlier this week by the Vera Rubin Observatory. The observatory uses a 3.2 gigapixel camera to take long exposure images of the night sky, which are then compared with earlier shots to detect visual changes. Astronomers create filters to narrow down what they’re after, and can be notified when the automated system detects a match. A preview image is available in just seconds, while the full-resolution imagery takes around 80 hours to process. It’s still early days, but once the VRO gets up to speed, it’s expected that as many as seven million alerts will be generated each night.
While on the subject of large-scale engineering projects, this week, Google announced that its new data center in Minnesota will be hooked up to the world’s largest battery. The 300 megawatt array built by Form Energy will use iron-air technology, which essentially uses a reversible rusting process to store energy produced by renewable sources such as wind and solar. When those sources aren’t available, the data center can run off of battery power for up to 100 hours.
While heavier and less efficient than lithium-ion, iron-air batteries have the advantage of being substantially cheaper to produce. So while it’s unlikely you’ll see the technology in smartphones anytime soon, it’s perfect for static installations like this.
Finally, some sad news from the world of retro computing/games: a very rare copy of Tsukihime Trial Edition was apparently destroyed while in transit from one collector to another. It might not look like much — the game was distributed by the indie developers on unbranded floppies at a Japanese convention in 1999 — but it represents one of only 50 copies known to exist. While the occasional damaged package is all but unavoidable, this one is particularly egregious as it appears that someone at US Customs intentionally ripped the disk to pieces. The purchaser has filed a complaint with Customs, and we’re interested in hearing what their version of the story sounds like.
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.
2026-03-02 05:00:48
Water-cooled PCs generally have in common that there’s a radiator somewhere in the loop, yet nobody said that you can’t build the PCB into the radiator. Something like a genuine Victorian-era cast-iron radiator, for example. For the folk over at [Billet Labs], this is just your typical project, of course, even if it took a solid three months to make it all work.
Their previous project was also a water-cooled PC, but in the form of a steampunk-esque wall-mounted installation. What differentiates this new build is that it’s trying to be more of a sleeper PC, as long as you ignore some copper tubing and the like running around the outside of this vintage radiator.
Of course, by using a vintage cast-iron radiator like this, you’re also dealing with all the disadvantages of cast-iron, such as the countless impurities in the metal and the immense weight. With water in the loop, the entire build comes in at about 99 kilograms, and cleaning the radiator of particulates released inside it — including rust — was a challenge.
With the amount of water inside the loop, it was little surprise that even a computer stress test only raised the water temperature by two degreehttps://hackaday.com/2025/12/26/pc-watercooling-uses-everything-but-cnc-machining/s, but the main takeaway from the project was that cast-iron in a water loop is a pain, even with a galvanic corrosion inhibitor. For this reason, the video’s comment section mentioned [gsuberland], for example, mentioning chemical passivation, referencing steel sanitary pipes, and the formation of a nitride layer.
Maybe using a more modern, pure steel radiator would be easier here for that reason, but we can only admire [Billet Labs] for persevering with this project. As a bonus, this is also pretty much a guaranteed theft-proof PC, as even his massive new TV and sound setup weigh less combined, and are probably infinitely more portable. Or, you could choose to go ultra-modern for a futuristic look instead.
2026-03-02 02:00:45
Fish are popular animals to keep as pets, and for good reason. They’re relatively low maintenance, relaxing to watch, and have a high aesthetic appeal. But for all their upsides, they aren’t quite as companionable as a dog or a cat. Although some fish can do limited walking or flying, these aren’t generally kept as pets and would still need considerable help navigating the terrestrial world. To that end, [Everything is Hacked] built a fish tank that allows his fish to move around on their own. We presume he’s heard the old joke about two fish in a tank. One says, “Do you know how to drive this thing?”
The first prototype of this “fish tank” is actually built on a tracked vehicle with differential steering, on which the fish tank would sit. But after building a basic, driveable machine, the realities of fish ownership set in. The fish with the smallest tank needs is a betta fish, but even that sort of fish needs much more space than would easily fit on a robotics platform. So [Everything is Hacked] set up a complete ecosystem for his new pet, making the passenger vehicle a secondary tank.
The new fish’s name is [Carrot], named after the carrots that [Everything is Hacked] used to test the computer vision system that would track the fish’s movements and use them to control the mobile fish tank. There was some configuration needed to ensure that when this feisty fish swam in circles, the tank didn’t spin around uncontrollably, but eventually he was able to get it working in an “arena” where [Carrot] could drive towards some favorite items he might like to interact with. Mostly, though, he drove his tank to investigate the other fish in the area.
The ultimate goal was for [Everything is Hacked] to take his fish on a walk, though, so he set about training [Carrot] to respond to visual cues and swim towards them. In theory, this would have allowed him to be followed by his fish tank, but a test at a local grocery did not go as smoothly as hoped. Still, it’s an interesting project that pushes the boundaries of pet ownership much like other fish-driving projects we’ve seen.
