This is one of those projects that was both inspired and made possible by the absolute embarrassment of dev boards available to the modern hacker. In this case, the dev board was the M5Stack PaperS3, which as the name implies combines an ESP32-S3 with an e-ink panel. [Wenting Zhang] picked one up and was immediately inspired to try and make an e-ink Game Boy.

The M5Stack PaperS3 made this project possible by exposing the display with row/column control — parallel, some would call it, as opposed to the usual serial interface of SPI. That allowed [Wenting] to work some of the same e-ink magic he perfected on his Modos monitors to allow partial refresh at up to 60 Hz. That the ESP32-S3 is capable of emulating a Game Boy while driving the screen should surprise no one, since it can emulate an MSX while outputting VGA or even Windows 95 on a 386. In this case, he’s basing the actual Game Boy emulation on Crank Boy.

Of course the e-ink screen on the M5Stack is far larger and has a much higher resolution than what the Game Boy shipped with, which lets him implement touch controls and scale the image up 3X so he can fake a couple of shades of grayscale while actually outputting black and white. Even better, if he was actually playing this thing on the regular, once the high-refresh portion of the screen starts to wear out, he can flip the orientation and keep gaming on the virtually-unrefreshed control portion of the screen — doubling the lifetime of the system, something many of you raised as a concern when we last looked at a his e-ink monitor project.

The only real shortcoming of this hack is the sound. With one-bit beeps coming out of the M5Stack buzzer, it’s got nothing on Nintendo’s hardware. Of course, that’s partially down to using the hardware as-is. With the addition of an I2S sound chip like the one used in the MOD player project we featured recently, you’d just need to squeeze out enough processor cycles to make this sound as good as it looks.

It’s a fact of life when starting a computer, that booting into whatever operating system you use will take a while. Mine takes somewhere around 30 seconds, and yours probably does too. There has always been the promise of something faster just around the corner, but somehow the OS just keeps getting a little bigger. Perhaps the only computer with a disk based operating system I have ever owned which bucked this trend was a Commodore Amiga, and that machine’s booting speed was achieved by keeping most of its OS in a ROM. The subject of today’s Daily Drivers takes the idea of a long boot time and shreds it, leaving an experience more akin to that Amiga of old. It’s called KolibriOS, it’s small enough to run from a floppy disk if you want it to, it’s lightweight, and fast as lightning. It achieves this feat by being written entirely in assembly language, and it exists as a free fork of the earlier MenuetOS which moved to a proprietary licence in its 64 bit version. I downloaded the ISO file, and gave it a spin.

The minimum system requirements for KolibriOS are meagre, 1Mb of disk space, 8Mb of RAM, and a 586-class 32-bit processor. On a 2020s ThinkPad it boots in the proverbial blink of an eye, and drops immediately into a GUI desktop. It has the slightly pixelated look of a 1990s machine, there’s none of the anti-aliasing we’re used to today going on there. Installed software ranges from a set of games, emulators, graphics editors and viewers, internet software including the Webview and Netsurf web browsers, and assembly software development.

The immediate impression is of a mature and useful operating system, without any crashes or blue screens, and with applications that load on a dime. Unfortunately though, despite all the competence I can’t call it a Daily Driver by my definition of being able to write for Hackaday, because the web browser doesn’t support https. Immediately the majority of the modern Internet is off-limits, including this site. This changes the parameters of my review and I can no longer proceed as I normally would, but it doesn’t end it. Something this polished deserves a while to play around.

Diving into the command prompt gives a feeling somewhere between a UNIX style OS and DOS, as the commands are UNIX-style but their output feels more DOS-like. Navigating around the disk I’m immediately struck by how small the executables are due to their being written in assembly language. The only exceptions are those applications ported from outside such as Netsurf or DOSBox, which is hardly surprising.

Back in the 1990s there was a single-floppy demo of the QNX operating system that packed the OS, a GUI, and a reasonable web browser for the day. At the time it was mind-blowing to see so much in such a small space, and I am reminded of that QNX demo when I use KolibriOS. This is evidently a useful OS, and I am only sad that it doesn’t support the one thing that would make it useful for my purposes. If you have an older machine I can see it would make a great emulator platform though, and since one of the emulators gives you DOS it’s likely it could also run a lot of useful things from that OS. It will never offer the flexibility on a 32-bit laptop that a Linux distro such as SliTaz can, but on the other hand that low system requirement means it could make a much older 32-bit machine into something useful. If you’ve got some ancient hardware and fancy something new, give it a try!

If you want to get around Monaco, a map — digital or otherwise — is probably the best way to navigate. But if you just want to appreciate the city’s form in a more artistic way, you might enjoy [Terence Grover’s] latest project—a backlit topographic map of the unique principality.

The project started with a QGIS mesh of Monaco, with the data fed through the Open-Meteo elevation API, which takes into account building heights. This was used as the basis for the heights of 179 pieces of 20 mm x 20 mm acrylic. These were assembled into a laser cut steel base, and were sanded on all sides but the base in order to allow them to diffuse light more effectively.

Strips of CS8812 LEDs are used to light the plastic towers, driven by a pair of Adafruit Feather RP2040 Scorpio boards. They’re fed pixel data from a Raspberry Pi 5, which runs a Flask panel accessed over an iPad. This allows control over the LED map display, showing things like civic data, highlighted events, and weather. There’s even a touch-sensitive mode that lets one paint fun patterns across the representation of the city.

We love a good artistic map, particularly when they’re full of LEDs and represent useful information.

A few weeks ago we published the first in a new series of articles, Know Your Food. It was born out of the realisation that most people know surprisingly little about what they eat, and to apply a bit of Hackaday curiosity to received opinion on the subject. As we put it then: “To know both how common foodstuffs should be made, as well as how they are made industrially, should be an essential for everyone” We’ll continue in that vein, with a look at organic food.

If you buy your food in a supermarket it’s likely that in the vegetable aisle you’ll be presented with a choice. On one hand you will have the normal vegetable, and on the other and usually for a slightly higher price, the organic version of the same vegetable. What’s going on?

So What Is This Organic Stuff All About?

Organic production is a system of agriculture that emphasises natural fertilisers, pesticides, and farming methods over synthetic or intensive ones. It has its roots in the first half of the 20th century, and as the decades progressed it has become an important sector of agricultural industry. I grew up steeped in organic agriculture because my grandfather was an early adherent in the years following the war, so I’ve seen it from the sharpest end. There is a lot to commend organic production for and plenty of reasons to embrace it, but with that come some problematic aspects, and even dubious claims. Here I’ll try to unpick some of that.

It’s tempting to believe that all organic production is somehow a return to a 19th century rural idyl, complete with the obligatory chickens in the farmyard. Some organic producers do take a slice of this back-to-the-land approach to their craft, but the reality of organic farming is a very modern approach to managing the ecosystem. Organic farmers are not wary of progress, and neither are they reluctant to use pesticides or other chemicals. Instead they do so according to the principles of organic agriculture, so any techniques they use are designed to be beneficial to the ecosystem, and any chemicals have a natural origin.

An important thing to understand is that the line between organic and non-organic agriculture is not sharply drawn. Crop rotation for example is long established farming practice, as are techniques such as contour ploughing in areas with soil erosion. As for fertiliser, there will be very few farming operations whose work does not include manure in some form, or who do not take advantage of nitrogen fixing crops. Pesticides such as the insecticide pyrethrum – originally derived from chrysanthemum root – or Bordeaux Mixture as a fungicide – a solution containing copper ions, so called because of its origin in French vineyards who applied lime solutions from copper containers – find uses where applicable in both organic and conventional agriculture. The important distinction lies in the organic farmers not going further than this, into synthetic amonium nitrate fertiliser for example, or glyphosate herbicide, which you might know as Roundup.

That’s the organic sales pitch, and it’s a compelling one. Now, we’ll go through the not so positive aspects, both of the movement and of the business.

Organic status is not simply conferred to produce by virtue of being organically grown. Instead it’s a legally protected designation, enforced through a system of certification performed by designated organisations. Where I grew up in the UK for example, organic certification is performed by the Soil Association. This is good because it preserves trust in organic status, but it suffers the flaw that it’s a profitable business for the certifier, and an expensive one for the producer. This in turn favours larger producers who can afford certification, and leaves the smaller producer unable to afford certification and thus unable to label their produce as organic. They can describe it as “Organically grown” of course, but they lose the cachet of the organic label. Since many small producers are by necessity organic, this affects a large number of producers if not a significant sector of the market.

Is Organic Food Really Better?

Then there is the produce itself. Is it better than the non-organic stuff? Here we enter complex territory, because the answer differs depending upon the circumstances.

In terms of what advertising people like to call “goodness”, by which I mean nutrients, vitamins and minerals, and the like, in many cases it’s difficult to make a case for the organic product being superior to the non organic one. There will be exceptions such as apples, where a typical non-organic commercial dessert apple is overwatered to the point of diluting the beneficial properties it might have in search of the elusive “crunch”. But in the more ordinary case, that organic zucchini is unlikely to have more nutritional value than its non organic equivalent. It’s important to note that the organic product will lack any pesticide residues which may be present on its non organic equivalent, however it must be remembered that pesticide residue levels in food are subject to their own stringent regulation.

In terms of flavour, yet again it’s a mixed bag. An organic product grown in as intensive a manner as can be got away with under the rules, is not likely to taste better than the equivalent. It’s difficult even to pin down what in the husbandry governs the flavour of the finished product in a scientific sense, however as someone who grew up around organic production I’d offer the view that the longer something took to produce, the better its flavour is likely to be.

The Slow Food movement champions products made in this way, usually traditionally produced foods, heritage varieties, and foods with a particular terroir. If you’re looking for better tasting food then you may not find it with a supermarket organic label, but it’s quite likely that one of those small organic producers will have what you are looking for, simply because their methods are less intensive.

Finally, if you’re looking at the benefit to the environment, it’s likely that in most cases the organic product will impose less stress on the ecosystem and the wider environment than its non organic equivalent. If that’s your concern you should also look further than the means of production and into food miles; how far did the food in front of you travel to your plate? Here in Europe the strawberry is in season from around May to September, so does it make sense to fly them from the other side of the world in January, however nice they taste?

So now I hope you have more of an idea about organic food than you did at the start of this piece. You’ll know something about its benefits and problems, and you’ll know when it’s better than its non-organic equivalent. I hope you’ll find the food you like, and if you do, I hope it’s from a small producer, they need your business. Bon appetit!

Header: MichelM10, CC0.

Sony has just announced on their PlayStation blog that they will stop the production of game discs starting January 2028. This effectively means a shift away from physical media to one that fully relies on downloading content from the PlayStation online store.

Although not technically confirmed, this announcement would strongly indicate that the PlayStation 6 will do away with its optical drive altogether as previously speculated. Of course, physical media has long since been on the ropes, particularly when it comes to gaming. Valve’s recently released Steam Machine doesn’t feature an optical drive, and for that matter, neither does the average gaming PC these days. But it’s still disappointing to see in many ways.

Although digital downloads have their advantages, a major problem here is that due to Digital Rights Management (DRM) you only ever get a license to lease a game. This means losing the ability to lend or borrow a game, and will likely mark the end of second hand sales. With narrow exceptions such as Good Old Games (GoG) and its DRM-free installers that you can e.g. burn onto a CD or copy to a USB drive as a static instance of the software, this shift by Sony effectively ends game ownership for PlayStation owners.

Last September, Denmark was gripped by a spate of drone sightings near airports. It’s familiar territory for Hackaday, as we reported on a similar drone panic saga at British airports back in the last decade. Back then the British police dragged their feet and hid behind secrecy laws for years to avoid admitting they overreacted, but it seems in Denmark they do things differently (Danish language, Google Translate link.).

The Danish police in Jutland have rolled back their report, and noted that a reported observation alone is not enough to confirm a drone was present. It’s not confirmed why they’ve taken this step, but we’ve been told that there’s been an effort within the drone community to identify possible aircraft flight paths which could have resulted in a false drone sighting at the times in question.

We welcome this correction, and hope that its important message travels widely. Of course it is the right thing to do for a police force to take drone reports seriously, but overreacting as the British police did is of little help. We commend the Danish police for taking this step, and we’re likely to trust any drone reports from them a little bit more in the future. If you’d like to read our plea for a sensible response at the time, it’s here.

Thanks [UAVHive] for the tip.

Doing something once is fun, but if you get interesting feedback from viewers on how to make things even more fun, you can only follow all of these instructions and put more random objects on top of an induction cooker, as [Brainiac75] fortunately did.

Much like in the first video, the goal here is to use the Lorentz force that is induced in the object for levitation, ideally without having said object depart for orbit, melt into a puddle of molten metal or be a general hazard to anyone standing in the same room.

Some of the suggestions were rather benign, such as improving the aluminium foil ring by adding four times more layers to create more mass. Unfortunately adding more layers here had the device refuse to turn on due to the absence of a suitable ferromagnetic target. The difference between the working versions with one to three layers was here also not really noticeable. Various aluminium and copper tape configurations were then attempted, but without much success.

Of note is that while levitating, the metal gets pretty hot. At one point a CD even gets melted to aluminium foil. Even the use of water-filled aluminium cans will only give you so much time, and ramping down the power level on the induction cooker only revealed that this particular model operates only at either at full blast or off. Correspondingly a new induction cooker with claimed constant output was obtained for the next experiments at lower levels.

Interestingly, it was this new induction cooker set to a more reasonable output level that showed the first reasonably static levitation results without immediate conflagration or molten metal splatter risk. Whether this is the kind of levitation display that you want to set up in your living room in lieu of a boring magnetic one is still a good question, but at least this demonstration got downgraded to something potentially safe enough to play around with in a physics class.