This file is a database. It runs anyway.
SELF packs an ELF program into a valid SQLite database, registers four bytes at offset 68 with binfmt_misc, and runs it. strip becomes a transaction, ldd a JOIN.
Archive
Tech · page 3
IRZ Tech archive, page 3.
Blender's physics now lives in a node you can open
With 5.2 LTS, Blender moves hair and cloth into Geometry Nodes: an XPBD solver becomes a graph component, constraints become editable data, and a rigid-body engine borrowed from AAA games is on the horizon.
A cut Apple cable, a $5 board, and an unfixable iPhone exploit
Maker forums are full of Raspberry Pi Pico 2 boards with Apple Lightning cables soldered to them. The reason is usbliter8, a BootROM exploit Apple can never patch, and a wiring job you can do at a desk.
Twenty-four bacterial colonies to add two bits
MIT prints bacterial colonies the way engineers place electronic components: two transistors, three relays. The computation gets reprogrammed by changing the print pattern, without touching the DNA.
A protocol born in 1981 just squashed a 34-year-old bug
Fifteen years after the last stable release, C-Kermit 11 ships with more than 1,700 automated tests, IPv6 and a fix for a bug introduced in 1992. A look at forty-five years of a file-transfer protocol.
The monitor forgot what black looked like
Dissecting the RP2040 scanvideo library, Kevin went from seventeen VGA pins down to six, enough for the ZX Spectrum palette. And one missing black pixel was enough to dim the whole screen.
Twenty-seven copper pads, no touch chip
SPOKE turns 27 copper pads punched into a circuit board into a MIDI controller. The interesting part: the RP2040 has no touch hardware at all, so detection is a discharge time counted in software.
Robot touch fits in sixteen electrodes
A 3D-printed tactile skin locates a press to within a few millimeters with sixteen electrodes and not a single discrete sensor. A close reading of the process: recipe, results, blind spots.
The Blueprints for a Civilization Fit on an SD Card
Open Source Ecology squeezed its entire machine wiki into a file readable without a network. Seven years later, that 2019 copy is still the newest one anyone can download.
A leak ten billion times weaker, predicted before the first rivet
On an airliner or a destroyer, the energy leaking from one antenna to another gets computed before the first weld. On the menu: a cubic cost, a ghost cavity that makes the model lie, and a story starting in 1981.