Of the popular 1980s 8-bit computers, it’s fair to say that Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum punched above its weight. Sir Clive’s love of squeezing more functionality out of less hardware meant the compromises he made left it less powerful than competitors from Apple, Commodore, or Acorn. Still, the brightest programmers of the age took the little machine to heart and made it do some very impressive things. A desktop GUI, though, surely that would be pushing things too far. Never say never because now [mindbox77] has done it.

ZXdesk is an assembly language program for the 48k Spectrum that gives you something that looks a lot like GEM. It’s got all the things you’d expect from a desktop GUI, with menus, windows, and applications, and we find ourselves suitably impressed.

For all that, though, is it really an operating system? If you take an OS to be a general-purpose host for executable programs run independently from disk, like the one you’re almost certainly using right now, then of course not. Though Amstrad would eventually produce a Spectrum with a 3″ disk drive, the Spectrum 48k that this runs on does not have any form of disk. Thus the applications are built into the GUI rather than existing as separate programs. On the other hand, aside from the impressive feat of making the ZX do a GUI, it’s probably the closest to an OS we’ve ever seen on this classic rubber-keyboard home computer.

Long-term readers will note that this isn’t the first time the Spectrum has seen an impossible achievement made real.

Photodetectors come in a wide variety of constructions and materials, with the Cu₂O-based photodetector that [Mad Scientist Creations] demonstrates in a recent video being a good example of a photodetector that can be created at home using nothing but some copper and a heat source.

Of the two copper elements in a salt water cell, one element is heated to the point where a copper oxide layer forms, specifically Cu₂O, which acts as a semiconductor and provides the photosensitive layer. Even a fairly crude sensor created with a regular gas stove produces enough of a current that it can be used in a simple light detection circuit.

Although copper-oxide photodetectors may seem quaint, they are getting a lot of interest as they feature a very narrow bandgap at 1.2 eV. In a 2019 study by [Hyeon-Joo Song] et al. as published in Scientific Reports such a sensor is enhanced with an optimized grain structure that improves its performance, with much higher sensitivity and faster response times.

As demonstrated by [Andrzej Kwiatkowski] et al. in a 2024 paper in Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells these copper-oxide sensors can also be used for gas detectors, though they used advanced gas deposition to produce the thin films instead of sticking a bit of copper tape into a natural gas flame.

Even if DIY copper-oxide sensors aren’t quite as exciting as what one can do with access to a well-equipped (semiconductor) lab, it’s still a pretty accessible material that lends itself for easy experimentation.

Some sad news to start this week off — after 52 years in business, Sherline has announced they are winding down their manufacturing operations. By the end of October they estimate they’ll have produced their last tool, and although they will no longer be making new products, they plan on supporting their existing customers for as long as possible. Although from the sound of the press release, that may mean simply keeping the website up and selling through their inventory of spare parts.

The company offered a range of American-made miniature lathes and mills, and while their manual machines may have been better known in our community, they did eventually branch out into CNC. The press release doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the chain of events that led up to this decision, but it does mention the challenges of modern manufacturing and the lingering aftereffects of the COVID pandemic.

At first blush, it might seem strange that the company would falter just as desktop CNCs appear to finally be gaining momentum, but of course that doesn’t change their ability to compete with overseas manufacturing in terms of price.

Of course, keeping competitive is only a concern when you actually have competitors in the first place. That’s the situation that NASA and Boeing may find themselves in should SpaceX decide to retire the Crew Dragon after 2030. While the International Space Station will (probably) be out of the equation by that point, the US space agency will still need the capability to fly humans to… somewhere, and that means there will be lucrative government contracts up for grabs.

The chances of any other American company developing and launching a human-rated spacecraft between now and the end of the decade are pretty much zero, which means Boeing will have to pick up the slack with their Starliner capsule. Or at least, try to, as Starliner hasn’t exactly had the best track record so far. Although by the 2030s SpaceX plans to have transitioned most, if not all, of its operations to Starship, one does wonder if a big enough check from Uncle Sam could change its mind.

While the market for putting humans into orbit might be shrinking, there’s no shortage of new ways to move stuff around here on terra firma. IEEE Spectrum has the details on a rather unique electric vehicle from startup Revoy that’s designed to sit between a traditional diesel semitruck and its cargo trailer. This essentially turns the combined rig into a hybrid, with the EV module capable of pushing the load for up to 400 kilometers (250 miles). Though it might seem rather low-tech, this approach offers a major advantage in that fleets won’t need to replace their existing vehicles to take advantage of the efficiency gains promised by electrification — with the company claiming that it can cut a truck’s total fuel consumption by up to 85%.

If the day has been going a little too smoothly for your liking and you need something to be frustrated about, here’s something to agonize over. Reality Check shows you images and tasks you with determining if they’re AI-generated or not. As the timer ticks down, you’ll be furiously searching the background for malformed bits of text or extra fingers, but even that trick won’t necessarily save you in this era of increasingly capable image models.

Finally, while AI is getting very good at fooling grandmothers on Facebook, we can take some comfort in the knowledge that it’s finding the business world far more difficult to dominate. Drew Magary recently wrote up the experience of visiting a store “managed” by an AI model for SFGATE, and it sounds like things are going just as poorly as you’d imagine.

Given agency to pick the items it wanted to sell in the store, the computer stocked the shelves with bric-a-brac that has no obvious overarching theme, and although there’s a human staffer behind the counter, purchases apparently need to be negotiated with the AI via voice chat. The store is burning through its initial investment money with no profit in sight, made all the worse by the fact that one of the line items on the budget is the token cost to run the AI that’s mismanaging the whole thing in the first place.

It’s an entertaining read, and a refreshing splash of cold water on the general AI hype that seems so prevalent these days. But its impact as a condemnation of machine learning in business is undermined a bit when the bottom of every page on SFGATE reminds readers that they are producing content with the assistance of generative AI. C’est la vie.

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.

TEMPEST attacks are often the most effective way to break air-gapped security: rather than directly accessing a computer, the attacker records the system’s unintended radio emissions and uses them to reconstruct its internal operations. This kind of attack was much more effective in the days of noisy, high-voltage CRT displays, and has gradually become less effective as electronics migrate to quieter, less powerful components. A group of researchers, however, has found that even modern electronics can become effective TEMPEST transmitters when irradiated with an RF signal.

The RF a device emits depends on the unintentional antennas in its internal structure. These are difficult to eliminate, and it’s usually not worth the effort; they’re usually small enough that they only effectively radiate at much higher frequencies than the electronics carry. The researchers’ technique, called InjectEave, radiated these electronics with a radio frequency tuned to their internal antennas, injecting that frequency into the circuit. Nonlinear electronic components, such as amplifiers, then mix the injected frequency with the internal signal, creating RF sidebands. This mixed signal then radiates out of the device and can be picked up and demodulated to recover the device’s internal signal.

In principle, almost any semiconductor device will perform mixing to some extent; in testing, the researchers had success with an amplifier, analog-to-digital converter, power converter, and switching MOSFETs, but detected no significant emissions without an injected signal. For a portable setup, the researchers used a USRP B210 SDR for transmission and a spectrum analyzer to demodulate the received signal.

This was able to recover audio from wired headphones, wireless headphones, and a wireless landline, and detect the state of a smart lamp and a smart fan. All of this worked over short distances, even through walls, and with a power amplifier, the range increased to 30 meters. Even with multiple devices present, they could focus on one by tuning the injection frequency to resonate with its internal antennas. Perhaps most impressive (or concerning) was a demonstration with the VoIP phone: the researchers were able to listen in on the person speaking, clone that person’s voice, synthesize new speech in that voice, and remotely inject it onto the phone call, altering the call in real time.

If the history of these attacks is any guide, it won’t be too long before we see an open-source implementation of this technique; we’ve already seen a few approaches to traditional TEMPEST. This kind of unintended nonlinear mixing can also be used to find bugs or electronics.

Getting rid of rodents like squirrels, mice, or groundhogs is a lot like digging a hole on the beach. No matter how much you remove, it’ll always fill back in. So, while [Super Valid Designs] could keep trapping and “removing” the mice in his chicken coop, more will always work their way back in. His theory is that removing them live from the chicken coop and placing them some distance away will be more effective, and with this semi-automated ski lift that traps them and carts them off, it might end up being less work too.

The build comes to us in roughly two parts. The first is the gondolas, which not only cart the mice down the hill to freedom but also double as the mousetrap themselves. They are placed in the chicken coop, and a trap door on the ceiling with bait causes the mice to fall inside. 3D printed with acrylic windows, they are a luxurious way for a mouse to travel. At the bottom, another trap door opens onto a pile of brush, releasing the mice. The second part is the lift, built hastily out of wood and other parts lying around. After much hiking up and down the hill, [Super Valid Designs] eventually got it working properly and reliably toting the mice and automatically releasing them at the bottom of the hill.

It’s a bit too early to tell if this method is more effective than more traditional methods of dealing with mice. But it was at least a fun way to deal with the problem while he also works on more effective methods of preventing the mice from getting into his buildings in the first place. There are some simpler catch-and-release mousetraps out there as well if a ski lift is out of the question for whatever reason.

When you think of wartime cryptography, you probably think of World War II and Enigma, although there were other famous codes used during that war. But in fact, there have been codes used through wars and in peacetime for much longer. Even the Romans used codes. Of course, World War I, or The Great War, as it would have been known, had its share of codes and, as you might expect, most of these have been broken long ago. Most of them. But apparently an AI model, GPT-6 Astra, recently cracked one that was previously undeciphered.

If you aren’t up on century-old cryptography, the ADFGVX cipher appeared in 1918. It began as ADFGX, but after a few months grew an extra letter — and a larger grid. The letters were chosen because their Morse-code patterns were relatively easy to distinguish: A, D, F, G, V, and X.

The original ADFGX version used a 5×5 grid containing the alphabet, usually merging I and J. The later ADFGVX version expanded this to 6×6, making room for all the letters and the digits as well.

Encoding required a 5×5 (or 6×6) grid with the alphabet within. The table’s rows and columns were labeled… you guessed it… ADFGX pr ADFGVX. Each plaintext letter gets replaced by the corresponding row and column such as AF or XG. Finally, the letter pairs would be written under a transposition key.

Concatenating those pairs gives AGXGDDDXXF. Written in five columns under CANDY, the first row is AGXGD and the second is DDXXF.

Next, you sort the letters in the transposition key, taking the columns along with the letters. That would make the transposition key ACDNY, and the first row would now be GAGXD. Then the message is sent by columns. Too much to wrap your head around? Visit dCode and plug in some plain text, squares, and keywords for yourself.

The French broke the code in 1918, but without computers it was tough work. Codebreaker [Georges Painvin] reportedly worked on the cipher until it made him ill, but he did solve it. However, some of the intercepted messages remained a mystery. One in particular was sent on November 27, 1918. Apparently, the message used the codeword TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG, a German key believed to have gone into service in December. If this decoding is correct, then this message used it even earlier.

The message was, of course, in German and appears to be a report about a British ship’s movements near Sevastopol. In fact, HMS Canterbury’s position on the dates mentioned matches the message.

Honestly, we were more impressed that people like [Georges Painvin] in 1918 were able to decode these intercepted messages. But it is still an interesting glimpse into the capabilities of Astra.

It seems that as long as there has been writing, there have been ways to send secret messages. The Swiss in The Great War had their own encryption method.

For his own reasons, [Jose Luis Monteiro] (aka [emsyscode]) decided he needed to drive the LCD on a Sony CDX-A250 car stereo’s front panel using an Arduino. There’s probably a sweet project in the works, or perhaps he just wanted to see if it could be done. Either way, more power to [Jose], because he totally pulled it off and put the results up on GitHub for all to enjoy. There’s also a project video showing how he did the reverse-engineering, which you can see below.

The driver for this diminutive LCD is a chip obviously labeled LC75826W, and that’s what the Arduino ends up talking to. Thankfully, there was a datasheet available for that part, which gave [Jose] a great starting point for figuring out how to use it. While [Jose] is working with the LC75826W driver, he’s quite explicit in his GitHub repo that this repository is not a driver library for that chip. The code only targets the specific LCD on the CDX-A250 head unit. Still, if you’ve got a different oddball LCD that uses this driver, [Jose]’s code is a great place to start, and since it’s under an MIT license, you can fork to your heart’s content.

Kudos to Sony for not obfuscating the part or using a chip-on-board black blob — you can reverse-engineer an LCD driven by one of those, but it’s a lot more work. If you’re wondering how and why those black blobs come to be, we’ve got you covered.