2026-04-17 01:00:15
Information, it seems, flows at the speed of media. In the old days, information traveled with people on ships or horses, so if, say, a battle was won or lost, it could be months or even years before anyone back home knew what happened. While books and movable type let people store information, they still moved at the speed people moved. Before the telegraph, there were attempts to use things like semaphores to speed the flow of information, but those were generally limited to line-of-sight operations. Carrier pigeons were handy, but don’t really move much faster than people.
The telegraph helped, but people didn’t have telegraph stations in their homes. At least not ordinary people. But radio was different. It didn’t take long for every home to have a radio, and while the means of broadcasting remained in the hands of a few, the message could go everywhere virtually instantly. This meant news could go from one side of the globe to the other in seconds. It also meant rumors, fads, and what we might think of today as memes could, too.
You might think that things “going viral” is a modern problem, but, in reality, media sensations have always been with us. All that changes is the number of them and their speed.
One of the earliest viral media sensations dealt with William Floyd Collins, an unfortunate man who was exploring caves during the Kentucky Cave Wars.
Mammoth Cave in Kentucky had become a major tourist attraction. The accessible entrance to the cave was located on land owned by the Croghan family. The massive cave system had been made famous in the 19th century, and with the construction of a lock and dam nearby in 1906, Mammoth Cave became accessible to ordinary tourists.
However, the cave wasn’t completely under the Croghan land. There were also other caves that may or may not have been connected with Mammoth Cave. This led to fierce competition. The Croghan family suppressed information about exactly what land was over the cave. Meanwhile, other cave “owners” would intercept people heading for the cave, tell them that Mammoth Cave was closed, and “helpfully” direct them to another location.
By the 1920s, George Morrison blasted new entrances to the cave on non-Croghan land. There was fierce interest in finding new entrances to the cave or nearby caves to capture tourist money.
Floyd Collins found an entrance into what would become known as the “Great Crystal Cave” in 1917 and opened it to tourists in 1918. Unfortunately, the cave was hard to access, so it didn’t make much money.
Floyd had started entering caves in 1893 at the age of six. He discovered his first cave in 1910. But Great Crystal Cave was too far off the main road. He entered into a deal with three farmers who owned land closer to the main highway. If Floyd could find a suitable cave or, even better, an entrance to Mammoth Cave, he’d partner with them and create a mutually profitable tourist attraction.
Floyd found a hole in what would become known as Sand Cave. Some of the passages he had to move through were as tight as 9 inches, which, of course, would not be suitable for tourists, but they opened, apparently, into a large grotto. He was determined to expand the entrance to make the cave commercially viable.
In January of 1925, he was working in the cave when his gas lamp started to dim. He tried to leave, but while trying to move through a small passage, he knocked over his light, leaving him in total darkness.
In the dark, he put his foot against a seemingly stable wall and caused a shift that pinned his leg with a rock weighing nearly 30 pounds. He was also buried in gravel. At this point, he was 150 feet from the hole to the surface.
The next day, people noticed Floyd was missing, but no one would dare to follow him through the narrow passages. His younger brother finally got close enough to determine what happened. He was able to give Floyd food and water as plans for a rescue developed.
After four days in the cave, several people tried to pull Floyd out using a rope and a harness, but they only wound up injuring him. Meanwhile, the media had taken interest in the case, and the publicity drew hundreds of tourists and amateur spelunkers. Campfires and, possibly, the electric light that had been placed to give Floyd some light and warmth, melted ice inside the cave, creating puddles of water around the trapped man.
Two days after the failed rescue attempt, rain and the melting ice caused the cave passage to collapse, and the rescue team determined it was too dangerous to dig it back out after making an attempt to do so. They decided to dig straight down to reach Floyd.
Unfortunately, the cave drew air in so they decided they could not use mechanical diggers without risking suffocating Floyd. That meant humans would have to dig the 55-foot shaft to reach the victim. The initial estimate that 75 volunteers could dig the shaft in 30 hours proved optimistic, as conditions worsened and the hole grew deeper.
Someone disconnected the wires from the light bulb and connected them to an audio amplifier to detect signs of life from the victim. They believed the repetitive crackling noise meant he was breathing.
The light bulb went open on February 11th, twelve days after the incident started. Five days later, they reached his body. He had died and had been dead for several days.
You can find a well-done documentary from Remix Films in the video below. For a movie inspired by the event, check out the Billy Wilder film Ace in the Hole (1951) starring Kirk Douglas.
A newspaper reporter, William Miller, was on the scene and, being a small man, was able to actually help remove gravel from Floyd before the cave-in. His interview with the man from inside the cave won a Pulitzer Prize.
There was a time when this would have been only a sensational local story, but by the modern year of 1925, reports “went out on the wire” by telegraph and were picked up by newspapers worldwide. The nearest telegraph station was miles away, so two ham radio operators (9BRK and 9CHG) provided a link between the site, the newspaper, and the authorities.
The first broadcast radio station, KDKA, was only five years old, but stations provided news bulletins detailing the progress. Thanks to the media, crowds were reported to number in the tens of thousands. Eventually, the National Guard arrived to help control the crowds.
Vendors popped up to sell hamburgers and memorabilia like a macabre circus. As you can see in the video below, memorabilia about the event and Floyd Collins can be worth a pretty penny to collectors.
The whole thing became one of the three largest media events between World War I and World War II. The other two were Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight (1927) and the kidnapping of Lindbergh’s baby (1932). Oddly, Lindbergh was an acquaintance of Floyd’s and also flew news photos from the scene (although, reportedly, to the wrong newspaper).
While it wasn’t quite as big an event, Canada’s 1936 Moose River Gold Mine collapse was a similar situation and also received worldwide media attention. It has the distinction of being the first 24-hour radio coverage of a breaking news story in Canada.
These days, sensational news stories pop up everywhere. It seems as if they hardly get started when they are displaced by another one. But we submit that “going viral” isn’t a modern phenomenon. Only the speed at which it happens. Even an 1835 newspaper was able to spur a viral hoax.
Featured image: “Mammoth Cave Saltpeter Mine” by [Bpluke01]
2026-04-16 23:30:04
Imagine you and your friend are enjoying a nice sunny day, and BAM — they start to have a severe allergic reaction to who knows what. You have an EpiPen, but your friend is on the other side of a field! The solution? Obviously [Emily The Engineer] has only one option: build an entire EpiPen launcher!
Starting off the life-saving project, [Emily] prototyped with a 3D printed blank and a simple solenoid-controlled glorified potato cannon. This proved effective, as one would expect of such a project after successful tests on a human subject. However, there was one simple problem: what if you missed your initial shot?
To ensure no possible failed missions, a bolt-action magazine was retrofitted onto the device. Additionally, an air compressor placed in a mobile backpack carrier allows for repeated mobile use. Official testing was done on ballistic gel before a “war game” scenario played out involving an anaphylactic friend. As one would assume, this went perfectly, ignoring the time delay of having to wait for the compressor to build up enough pressure…
Anyways, even if you won’t be using this EpiPen launcher anytime soon, there are some actual DIY medical miracles you can look into! Something that’s a tad less insane to hack together than an EpiPen gun would be a splint. That is exactly what you can learn about here!
2026-04-16 22:00:07
Although we have many types of networking equipment with many unique names, at their core they can usually be reduced to just a computer with some specific peripherals. This is especially the case for something like a router, a device found in just about any home these days. Certain consumer-grade routers may contain something special like a VDSL modem, but most of them just have a WAN Ethernet jack on one end and one or more LAN-facing Ethernet ports.
All further functionality is implemented in software, including any firewall, routing and DHCP features. What this means is that any old PC with at least two Ethernet ports or equivalent can be a router as long as you install the appropriate software.
In this article we’ll be taking a look at what consumer-level options there exist here today, ideally something so simple that the average home user could set it up with a bit of coaching.
Although these days most people are probably happy to use whatever consumer router gets tossed their way by their ISP or purchased from any of the many electronics retailers, the era of home routers starting in the 90s was a rough one. Not only did many ISPs for a long time have strict rules against even thinking of installing any kind of connection-sharing router on the precious internet connection they so gracefully provided access to, the routers that were available even during the 2000s also weren’t particularly good.
Perhaps the most egregious issue that you’d run into as a somewhat internet-savvy user was that these units came with the tiniest amount of RAM and a routing table that would fill up within seconds if you so much as thought of doing anything naughty like downloading Linux ISOs with Bittorrent. Even more than the lightest internet use risked issues such as the router freezing up and requiring a reboot.
Being the nerdy type who’d hang out on various tech forums during that time, I instead opted to toss some ISA NICs into an old 486DX2-66 PC, put FreeSCO on a 1.44 MB floppy and used that instead. Even the 16 MB or so of EDO or FP RAM in that old system easily kept up with whatever internet traffic-related abuse I threw at it along with the rest of the family.
Later I’d also use Smoothwall on a trashed Pentium 166 system that I had salvaged from e-waste as a healthy upgrade. Yet over time as consumer routers stopped being terrible, I’d end up using those instead. That said, despite recent improvements there are still reasons today to put your own router together.
These reasons can vary from a simple increase in control, as well as peace of mind in an era where commercial consumer router firmware do not appear to get quite the quality assurance they should get. There is also the specter of repressive government policies, and of course less dramatic reasons such as just being into tinkering with networking gear.
Although we have moved on quite a few years from the 2000s, it’d be nice if we could still theoretically dig an ancient 486 PC out of a closet and use it, just to push back the minimum requirements as far as possible. Looking at the list of router and firewall distributions over at Wikipedia we can get a bit of an idea of what’s out there today. Naturally we’d like something that’s open source, recently updated and well-supported as we’ll be exposing it to the worst that the modern Internet has to offer.
Sadly, FreeSCO isn’t even the list, and based on the project’s website it doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2014. Similarly, Smoothwall’s free version (Express) doesn’t appear to be quite supported any more, with the commercial offering being promoted instead. A promising project is something like OPNsense, which is a FreeBSD-based distribution that does basically everything networking-related and then some. It’s also rather resource-heavy, demanding 4+ GB of RAM and so on, for features that the average home user is unlikely to use.
Ultimately only two projects really jump out: the first is the Linux Embedded Appliance Framework (LEAF), which feels like a spiritual successor to FreeSCO in targeting 486 or better hardware while running read-only off floppy discs or better.
The second project is the well-known OpenWrt, which doesn’t just provide alternative firmware images for commercial routers, but also for generic x86 and ARM hardware. This should tick all the aforementioned boxes, including the ability to run off an x86-compatible potato, while theoretically also providing driver support for just about any NIC and maybe even WNICs.
Amusingly, my current internet router is a Xiaomi device that runs OpenWrt with a custom web UI, so I’m already familiar with it in that sense. I also have no complaints about its stability, so this should be smooth sailing as a first try.
A quick sidenote here: although I did say that consumer-grade routers aren’t terrible any more today, this Xiaomi router replaced a horrid TP-Link Archer C80 with its tiny 4 MB Flash, incompatibility with OpenWrt and broken IPv6 support. Caveat emptor, as they say, for consumer-grade routers can absolutely still be terrible.
Like any self-respecting tech-enthusiast I happen to have a few drawers and boxes with relevant computer hardware, including a stash of industrial Intel Atom mini-ITX boards and some PCI Gbit NICs. Although I could have tossed this into a scruffy old case with a questionably-but-probably-fine PSU, I decided to get a new budget case and PSU, just to feel more confident about flipping on the power switch:
The mainboard is a 2009-era Intel Desktop Board D410PT, with two sticks of 1 GB DDR2 RAM. There’s just an onboard 10/100 Mbit Ethernet adapter in addition to the PCI 1 Gbit adapter, but this is good enough to test basic principles. Plus older Ethernet chips definitely ought to be supported.
With this whole kit built together, the OpenWrt Wiki entry on x86 installations was followed, with an Ext4-based non-EFI image written to a 512 MB microSD card. This card was inserted into the system with a USB adapter, though as the Wiki page makes clear there are many more ways to install OpenWrt, including on an internal (SATA/IDE/etc.) storage device.
Here the OpenWrt image selection process is definitely a bit more complicated than that for e.g. FreeSCO, as you have to know whether the system boots using a UEFI or traditional BIOS, as well as decide between the SquashFS and Ext4 root partition option. Even after looking at the pros and cons of both I’m still torn on which one is best.
There is also the issue of supported network cards, with the typical image supporting Intel and Realtek Ethernet chipsets. Having compatible NICs installed is even more important than back in the generic NE2000 days.
After firing up the newly built rig and briefly powering it down to replace the very much drained CMOS battery, I had hoped to see something promising on the connected screen. Yet other than the PXE boot attempts from both Ethernet cards before a sad ‘no bootable devices found’ error message nothing happened.
I did go through the BIOS to make sure that all ‘boot from USB’ options were enabled and tried multiple SD-card-to-USB adapters in multiple USB ports, but it would seem that either the provided OpenWrt image isn’t bootable or the Curse of Bootable USB Devices has struck again.
While I haven’t given up yet on DIY-ing an x86 router on older hardware in 2026 and still have to give LEAF a shot, I must say that compared to the FreeSCO method of just slapping that floppy into the FDD, running through the config and being done, things are a lot more complicated today. I’d definitely not trust the average person to run through these steps to set up their own consumer-grade router.
Perhaps for the LEAF version I’ll dig up a rig with FDD header on the mainboard and run it off a 1.44 MB floppy like in the good old days. Until then feel free to sound off in the comments about what obvious mistakes I have made with OpenWrt, how I should just use OPNsense on an old 19″ rackmounted Xeon server rig, or maybe your own experiences with FreeSCO, SmoothWall, OpenWrt, and/or LEAF on lovingly restored e-waste.
Featured image: “Ethernet Router” by [gratuit].
2026-04-16 19:00:54
Yeah, we know, there’s a camera on your phone that does this and that. But these days its become trendy to turn towards older digital cameras in place of smartphones, and we can tell you from experience, that the joys of having a dedicated photographing contraption are many.
There’s plenty of cheap digital cameras on the secondhand market, but instead of fending off the clothes bros and other reseller types at the thrift store, stay home and build [Doruk Kumkumoğlu]’s Optocam Zero. Inspired by the Kodak Charmera and the like, [Doruk] aimed for something that’s playful, enjoyable, and intuitive to use.
Optocam Zero uses an auto-focus camera module and features eight photo filters. The screen dims when inactive to preserve battery life, but it can be charged back up with USB-C, and you can use it for the duration. And unlike my young adult camera, you don’t have to take out the SD card to see the pictures, just use the custom hotspot interface to transfer them.
If you need to capture a cat yawning real fast, you might want to just use your phone instead, because takes 22 seconds for Optocam Zero to get camera-ready. But when you have a less spontaneous subject in mind, this thing looks like a great choice. Be sure to check out the excellent build guide (PDF) whether you build one or not.
We think the images from the Optocam Zero look pretty crispy. But if you want to go lo-fi, we have that, too.
2026-04-16 16:00:59
Usually, you think of bird decoys as being a tool to lure birds to an untimely encounter with a hunter. However, [Interesting Engineering] has a story about robotic bird decoys in Grand Teton National Park that are helping restore the dwindling number of sage grouse in the park.
While some decoys are static, others are motorized to replicate mating rituals. The goal: lure real birds to safer areas to breed. Particularly, they want the birds to avoid areas around the Jackson Hole Airport. The robots are built with help from local students and robotics teams. While some of the construction is made of fabric and foam, actual bird feathers are also used.
The robots mimic lekking behavior, a courtship ritual where male grouse do repetitive motions combined with recorded mating calls. This attracts other grouse and, of course, results in chicks who will be raised nearby.
Assuming the effort is successful, the same technique could help other areas where restored areas are difficult to repopulate. You can find more pictures on the Park’s Instagram, and the title picture is from that collection.
Usually, when we see something like this, the robot is trying to remove something dangerous to the endangered plant or animal, not attract them.
2026-04-16 13:00:47
Recently [Jeff Geerling] has been tinkering with FireWire in order to use some older gear, which includes the use of a Raspberry Pi HAT called the Firehat. This provides a 6-pin FireWire port courtesy of the VIA VT6315N PCIe-to-FireWire chipset. As is typical with USB gear today as well, some FireWire gear requires more power than a port can provide, requiring the use of a powered hub. Unfortunately the use of a powered FireWire hub caused a bit of a conflagration event on [Jeff]’s desk.
Part of the issue appears to be that this Firehat board was designed as a companion to the Equip-1 DV capture device, with no attention paid to the idea that someone might be backfeeding power from an attached hub. As a result the VIA chip cried uncle and let out the magic smoke.
With this Firehat board taking its name clearly a bit too literal, [Jeff] will be reporting his findings to the developers, in the hope that perhaps some diodes or another solution against backfeeding can be added to the final design. Fortunately he was sent this board for testing prior to public release, so this definitely shows a clear flaw that can now be corrected.
We hope that [Jeff] has a good HEPA air filtration setup in his office to get rid of the acrid magic smoke, as it’s not meant to be enjoyed for long periods.
