2026-02-12 11:00:56
Plenty of our childhoods had at least one math teacher who made the (ultimately erroneous) claim that we needed to learn to do math because we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our pockets. While the reasoning isn’t particularly sound anymore, knowing how to do math from first principles is still a good idea in general. Similarly, most of us have hugely powerful graphics cards with computing power that PC users decades ago could only dream of, but [NCOT Technology] still decided to take up this project where he does the math that shows the fundamentals of how 3D computer graphics are generated.
The best place to start is at the beginning, so the video demonstrates a simple cube wireframe drawn by connecting eight points together with lines. This is simple enough, but modern 3D graphics are really triangles stitched together to make essentially every shape we see on the screen. For [NCOT Technology]’s software, he’s using the Utah Teapot, essentially the “hello world” of 3D graphics programming. The first step is drawing all of the triangles to make the teapot wireframe. Then the triangles are made opaque, which is a step in the right direction but isn’t quite complete. The next steps to make it look more like a teapot are to hide the back faces of the triangles, figure out which of them face the viewer at any given moment, and then make sure that all of these triangles are drawn in the correct orientation.
Rendering a teapot is one thing, but to get to something more modern-looking like a first-person shooter, he also demonstrates all the matrix math that allows the player to move around an object. Technically, the object moves around the viewer, but the end effect is one that eventually makes it so we can play our favorite games, from DOOM to DOOM Eternal. He notes that his code isn’t perfect, but he did it from the ground up and didn’t use anything to build it other than his computer and his own brain, and now understands 3D graphics on a much deeper level than simply using an engine or API would generally allow for. The 3D world can also be explored through the magic of Excel.
2026-02-12 08:00:08
[Teddy Warner]’s GPenT (Generative Pen-trained Transformer) project is a wall-mounted polargraph that makes plotter art, but there’s a whole lot more going on than one might think. This project was partly born from [Teddy]’s ideas about how to use aspects of machine learning in ways that were really never intended. What resulted is a wall-mounted pen plotter that offers a load of different ‘generators’ — ways to create line art — that range from procedural patterns, to image uploads, to the titular machine learning shenanigans.
Want to see the capabilities for yourself? There’s a publicly accessible version of the plotter interface that lets one play with the different generators. The public instance is not connected to a physical plotter, but one can still generate and preview plots, and download the resulting SVG file or G-code.
Most of the generators do not involve machine learning, but the unusual generative angle is well-represented by two of them: dcode and GPenT.
dcode is a diffusion model that, instead of converting a text prompt into an image, has been trained to convert text directly into G-code. It’s very much a square peg in a round hole. Visually it’s perhaps not the most exciting, but as a concept it’s fascinating.
The titular GPenT works like this: give it a scrap of text inspiration (a seed, if you will), and that becomes a combination of other generators and parameters, machine-selected and stacked with one another to produce a final composition. The results are unique, to say the least.
Once the generators make something, the framed and wall-mounted plotter turns it into physical lines on paper. Watch the system’s first plot happen in the video, embedded below under the page break.
This is a monster of a project representing a custom CNC pen plotter, a frame to hold it, and the whole software pipeline both for the CNC machine as well as generating what it plots. Of course, the journey involved a few false starts and dead ends, but they’re all pretty interesting. The plotter’s GitHub repository combined with [Teddy]’s write up has all the details one may need.
It’s also one of those years-in-the-making projects that ultimately got finished and, we think, doing so led to a bit of a sigh of relief on [Teddy]’s part. Most of us have unfinished projects, and if you have one that’s being a bit of a drag, we’d like to remind you that you don’t necessarily have to finish-finish a project to get it off your plate. We have some solid advice on how to (productively) let go.
2026-02-12 05:00:41
Although hobbyists these days most often seem to use thermoplastics as a print-and-done material in FDM printers, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from taking things further with thermoforming. Much like forming acrylic using a hot wire or hot air, thermoplastics like PLA can be further tweaked with a similar method. This can be much less complex than 3D printing the design with supports, as demonstrated by [Zion Brock].
For this classically styled radio project the front grille was previously 3D printed with the curved shape, but to avoid an ugly edge it had to be printed with most of the grille off the print bed, requiring countless supports and hours of printing time. To get around this, [Zion] opted to print the grille flat and then thermoform its curved shape. Of course, due to the unusual shape of the grille, this required a bit more effort than e.g. a spherical form.
This is similar to what is used with sheet metal to get detailed shaped, also requiring a mold and a way to stretch the flat shape over the mold. With the flat form designed to have all the material in the right places, it was able to be printed in less than an hour in PLA and then formed with a heatgun aimed at the part while the two-section mold is slid together to create the final form.
You can find the design files and full instructions on the website for the radio project.
2026-02-12 03:30:03
This week Jonathan chats with Bill Shotts about The Linux Command Line! That’s Bill’s book published by No Starch Press, all about how to make your way around the Linux command line! Bill has had quite a career doing Unix administration, and has thoughts on the current state of technology. Watch to find out more!
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.
Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.
Theme music: “Newer Wave” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
2026-02-12 02:00:37
Let’s face it; remembering a bunch of passwords is the pits, and it’s just getting worse as time goes on. These days, you really ought to have a securely-generated key-smash password for everything. And at that point you need a password manager, but you still have to remember the password for that.
Well, Motorola is sympathetic to this problem, or at least they were in 2013 when they came up with the password pill. Motorola Mobility, who were owned by Google at the time, debuted it at the All Things Digital D11 tech conference in California. This was a future that hasn’t come to pass, for better or worse, but it was a fun thought experiment in near-futurism.
Back then, such bleeding-edge research was headed by former DARPA chief Regina Dugan. At the conference, Dugan stated that she was “working to fix the mechanical mismatch between humans and electronics” by doing things such as partnering with companies that “make authentication more human”.
Along with Proteus Digital Health, Dugan et. al created a pill with a small chip inside of it and a switch. Once swallowed, your various stomach acids serve as the electrolyte. The acids power the chip, and the switch goes on and off, creating an 18-bit ECG-like signal.
Basically, your entire body becomes an authentication token. Unlock your phone, your car door handle, and turn on your computer, just by existing near them.
It should be noted that Proteus already had FDA clearance for a medical device consisting of an ingestible sensor. The idea behind those is that medical staff can track when a patient has taken a pill based on the radio signal. Dugan said at the conference that it would be medically safe to ingest up to thirty of these pills per day for the rest of your life. Oh yeah, and she says the only thing that the pill exposes about the taker is whether they took it or not.
Motorola head Dennis Woodside stated that they had demonstrated this authentication technology working and authenticating a phone. While Motorola never intended to ship this pill, it was based on the Proteus device with FDA clearance, presumably so they could test it safely.
The story of Proteus Digital Health is beyond us here, but for whatever reason, their smart pills never took off. So we’re left to speculate about the impact on society that this past future of popping password pills would have had.
While it sounds sorta cool at first, it also seems like something a government might choose to force on a person sooner or later. Someone they wanted to insert behind enemy lines, perhaps, or just create an inside job that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
Taking off my tin foil hat for a moment, I’ll compare this pill with existing modern biometrics. A face scan, a fingerprint, or even my voice is my passport, verify me are all momentary actions.
With these, you’re more or less in control of when authentication happens. A pill, on the other hand, must run its course. You can’t change the signal mid-digestive cycle. Plus, you’d have to guard your pills with your life, and if a couple pills pass through you every day, you’d better have a big pillbox.
So the password pill never came to pass, but it’s worth mentioning that at the same conference, Dugan debuted another method of physical authentication — a temporary password tattoo they developed along with MC10, a company that makes stretchable circuits and has since been acquired by a company called Medidata.
More typically, their circuits are used to do things like concussion detection for sports, or baby thermometers that continuously track temperature.
Dugan said that the key MC10 technology is in the accordion-like structures connecting the islands of inflexible silicon. These structures can stretch up to 200% and still work just fine. The tattoos are waterproof, so go ahead and swim or shower. Of course, the password tattoo never came to be, either. And that’s just fine with me.
2026-02-12 00:30:02
With the convenience of digital cameras and editing software, shooting video today is so easy. But fifty years ago it wasn’t electronics that stored the picture but film, and for many that meant Super 8. Editing Super 8 involved a razor blade and glue, and an editing station, like a small projector and screen, was an essential accessory. Today these are a relatively useless curio, so [Endpoint101] picked one up for not a lot and converted it into an HDMI monitor.
Inside these devices there’s a film transport mechanism and a projection path usually folded with a couple of mirrors. In this case the glass screen and much of the internals have been removed, and an appropriate LCD screen fitted. It’s USB powered, and incorporates a plug-in USB power supply mounted in a UK trailing socket for which there’s plenty of space.
There’s always some discussion whenever a vintage device like this is torn apart as to whether that’s appropriate. These film editors really are ten a penny though, so even those of us who are 8 mm enthusiasts can see beyond this one. The result is a pleasingly retro monitor, which if we’re honest we could find space for ourselves. The full video is below the break. Meanwhile it’s not the first conversion we’ve seen, here’s another Hanimex packing a Raspberry Pi.
