from MSNBC Top Stories https://ift.tt/e4EsDtX
via IFTTT

Scinece fiction isn’t always about the future. Sometimes science fiction elements are meant as metaphors for the human experience. William, Burroughs imatined the cyberspace as a metaphor for memory in his seminal novel Neuromancer. 1984 was as much a warning as it was an analysis of contemporary political situatons. And Sherwood Anderson’s “Famine on Mars” was all about the depression. Here’s more from Science Fiction and More Ruminations:
Simultaneously drawing on the rise of fascism in Europe, Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” creates an even more draconian governmental manifestation. Earth’s government, The Combine, acts as a genocidal and malevolent political entity that brainwashes its inhabitants in the name of “the brotherhood of man” (79). His use of “combine” evokes two interrelated images of monolithic and mechanical power: new 1920s harvesters pulled by tractors instead of mules and a combination of both political and economic powers. Like a new-fangled tractor-driven thresher, the Combine mechanizes society diminishing its human concerns. Kelly suggests the working class in this future receive numerical names while political elite received standard nomenclature.
Cherry trees usually begin to flower in late March. The Brooklyn Botanical Garden tracks blooms on CherryWatch! Via bbg.org
Visit Brooklyn Botanic Garden during cherry blossom season and witness an exuberant display that changes day by day!
Learn more and check out the video Gothamist shared on Youtube of the cherry blossoms from above at the Brooklyn botanic garden in 2021!
The YouTube channel Franzoli Electronics has a very particular set of skills. Those skills involve Tesla coils and sweet jams. Check out Toto’s Hold the line below. And head over to the channel for an electric infusion of synthy renditions. Also on Instagram @franzolielectronics
The main loud music really comes from the tesla coil sparks. They are literally playing the music due to the programmed phase, pulse width and firing frequency! So, there are no speakers, no audio / video special effects. It looks even better in person and sounds almost the same, just louder than people expect!

The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) writes in:
Join the Open Source Hardware Association in Edinburgh, Scotland May 30th and 31st for the Open Hardware Summit.
For the first time ever, we’re coming to Scotland and would love to see you there! Whether you’re just learning about or very experienced with open source hardware, we’d love to see you there!
This year we have incredible programming between our speakers, workshop runners and performers for two full days.
Talks cover a wide range of topics this year, including open source devices for biodiversity measurement with the MothBox crew.
Day 2 is packed with workshops and this year we’ve added panels! You can get hands-on with some of the latest open source hardware.
We are also happy to be collaborating with Helen Leigh and CrowdSupply on a Hardware Happy Hour on the 28th!
There’s something for everyone! Grab your tickets here, and check out the full schedule, including workshop registration, here. If you missed our call for proposals, you can still bring your hardware with you to the event and exhibit it at our tabling session!
Want to know more about the schedule? Check out the official OHS2025 site and find out about the additional 12 talks, 8 workshops, and 26 tables that we couldn’t fit in this article!
See you in Edinburgh!
Shared by flash24 on Thingiverse:
This is my version of a simple botle drip irrigation system for young trees.
Download the files and learn more

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
A fun and easy STEM experiment you can do with the kids! From Bridgeport Elementary STEM and RamZLand on YouTube:
Keith Ramsey demonstrates how to use a cup, balloon, mirror, laser pointer, and tone generator to to project images created by sound waves. For more science videos by Mr. Ramsey, subscribe to his channel @_RamZland_. Bridgeport Elementary of the MSD of Wayne Township is a STEM certified public school.
Take the sound/laser action to the next level with the MIDI Laser Harp using a Time of Flight Distance Sensors and these other shop items
We’ve got the New nEw NEW for you right here
New Product 3/19/25 Feat. @Adafruit Snap-on Enclosure for Adafruit Mini Sparkle Motion
This week we debuted 4 new products!
Visit www.adafruit.com/new for more info.
Limor and Fabio! About one hour 17 mins in! After the Python question!
Making Innovation Accessible: How Arduino & Adafruit Support Creators Everywhere by Fabio Violante. Open source is love — and at the heart of Arduino’s 20-year journey is an incredible global community driven by knowledge, creativity, and passion. On the final day of our celebration, we pay tribute to the educators, makers, and learners who bring our philosophy to life through every project, lesson, and discovery. Learn more https://days.arduino.cc/about
If you love the vibe of vintage Macs but want something a little more practical then this project is for you. MechaNickW was inspired by Pi Day to update is old Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi, a small HDMI screen and a few other bits.
Via MechaNickW on Instructables:
I was lucky enough to have someone give me a working vintage Apple Macintosh SE several years ago. They are neat machines, and were around when I was very young so somewhat nostalgic for me. While it was fun to have one, it’s not a very useful computer in the modern age. I’d wanted to integrate a Raspberry Pi into the plastic enclosure as a desktop machine for my electronics bench for years, and was inspired by Pi Day and the Instructables contest to finally make my dream of an Apple Raspberry Pi come true as a Pi Day celebration!
For fans of vintage Macs try out a couple diminutive options with the Mini Mac Pi or the HalloWing Macintosh
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
Pi Day might be over but you can still have an irrational amount of fun! Rock this wearable Pi pendant on a custom PCB with the RP2350. From Sai Yamanoor on Hackser.io:
A Pi-Day Pendant powered by the RP2350A microcontroller that can change its LED behavior when a keyword like “Pi, ” “3.14” is detected.
And don’t forget! There is still time to save on Pi HAT & Bonnets with our PIDAY sale
We’ve got the New nEw NEW for you right here
New Product 3/12/25 Feat. Adafruit TPS65131 Split Power Supply Boost Converter – +6~15 / -6V~-15V!
This week we debuted 5 New Products.
Visit www.adafruit.com/new for more info.
Want to get new products info beamed straight into your inbox? New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter
New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent out once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up NOW for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter

Developed in the 1960s by Bell Labs, bubble memory uses “a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas.” While more modern memory quickly replaced most bubble memory. Arcade cabinets continued to use the system for its anti-piracy capabilities. Bubble memory boasted to be impossible to copy. Learn more from The Retro Collective and from Wikipedia

Lenteh shares:
Simple and “cheap” double pliers holder for ikea skadis.
Make sure to check out my other stuff, and please boost if you like!
Check out my other skadis stuff here:
https://ift.tt/OlhR4yP
download the files on: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1148372-ikea-skadis-pliers-holder-double

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord
Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit
Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting
3D Printing Projects Playlist:
3D Hangout Show Playlist:
Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist:
Timelapse Tuesday Playlist:
Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media:
Noe’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/ecken
Pedro’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/videopixil
The Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 is a top of the line Pirate-brand RP2350 microcontroller with 16MB of flash memory, 8MB of PSRAM, USB-C, Qw/ST, and debug connectors. It’s an excellent ‘drop in’ upgrade to the classic Pico 2 when you need MOAR power and memory.
We adore the versatility and value of Raspberry Pi Pico 2, but we also enjoy a souped-up RP2350 board with all the extras baked in. The team at Pimoroni crammed in as much extra functionality as they possibly could whilst keeping to the original Pico footprint to maintain compatibility with existing Pico add-ons.
Check out our collection of PiCowbells for ways to extend/expand your Pico Plus’s hardware capabilities
Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 has the same shape and pinout as the classic Pico 2 but with the ‘B variant of the RP2350 which lets them shoehorn in so much more:

Redditor kappetrov has built Free95, an operating system that’s compatible with Windows applications under a GNU General Public License v3.0.
Currently it can run basic Windows Win32 GUI Applications (and Console Applications).
I might do DirectX stuff and make some games run. Or, what about DOOM? It’s still in-development of course, and I’ll appreciate anyone who’d like to contribute, but if you can’t, at least leave a star on the repo, it makes me happy
Check out the project on GitHub at github.com/Versoft-Software/Free95. Via Reddit.

We’ve got so much happening here at Adafruit that it’s not always easy to keep up! Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered. Each week we’ll be posting a handy round-up of what we’ve been up to, ranging from learn guides to blog articles, videos, and more.
PCM5122 is an I2S DAC that does it all
No-Code Offline Data Logger with WipperSnapper
WLED Matrix Display with Sparkle Motion
Catch up with us on our blog, in our learn system, or on YouTube.
Pollux Labs created their own internet radio on Hackster.io using an ESP32-S3-Zero and an Adafruit I2S 3W Class D Amplifier Breakout – MAX98357A:
Streaming radio over the internet is commonplace nowadays – but building your own ESP32 internet radio is certainly special! In this tutorial, you’ll construct your own receiver to stream your favorite stations.
Setting up the ESP32 Online Radio
Let’s start with the simplest circuit for your streaming radio. You’ll only need the ESP32-S3 Zero (e.g., from Waveshare), the amplifier module, and a speaker. Follow this wiring diagram attached.
If you are an NPR junkie you could build a Raspberry Pi Zero NPR One Radio with the Adafruit Learning System
When I was young I broke my arm, as many do at that age; I immediately got the plaster cast wet at a birthday party, as many do at that age. I had to take ANOTHER trip to the doctor for a new cast to be set costing time, money, and wear and tear on my parents. Diana Hall created the company ActiveArmor to supply activity approved 3D printed casts.
Profile from Joan Horvath on Make:
To create each custom cast, first a scan is made of the patient’s injured body part, using ActivArmor’s phone app. Then the device is created by an ActivArmor provider using the company’s proprietary software, which has been a crucial invention. The cast can be locked on, or not, depending on whether the patient is allowed to remove it.
The material has to be not just biocompatible but also non-porous, so that customers can bathe, swim, and live fairly normally, versus a traditional cast that can’t get wet. To accomplish that, the casts need to be post-processed to remove layer lines. If you’re a 3D printing person, you know that the conditions in the room and even the batch of filament can affect the outcome, so ActivArmor and its providers need to manage those variables. And there are more issues in the case of a cast, such as transparency to X-rays.
JJ 3D shared this project on Makerworld. Lear more here https://makerworld.com/en/models/1142588-dimension-stop-tool#profileId-1145142

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
Choo! Choo! This is the RP2350 Metro Line, making all station stops at “Dual Cortex M33 mountain”, “528K RAM round-about” and “16 Megabytes of Flash town” and a bonus stop at “8 Megabytes of PSRAM village”. This train is piled high with hardware that complements the Raspberry Pi RP2350 chip to make it an excellent development board for projects that want Arduino-shape-compatibility or just need the extra space and debugging ports.
You may be wondering about the RX-TX switch: we added this because traditional Arduino board start counting the GPIO for the digital pins with 0-7 and then 8-13. However, the D0/D1 pins are also traditionally the hardware UART Serial1, where D0 is Rx and D1 is Tx. On the RP2350, however, the UART pins are the other around: D0 is Tx and D1 is Rx. Thus a DPDT switch: flip one way to have the GPIO go in order of 0-7, flip the other way to have the logical locations of the hardware UART correct but now the pin order is 1, 0, 2, 3..7. Of course, it’s also handy if, like us, you often swap the pins – now you don’t need to require or cut/solder traces!
Inside the RP2350 is a ‘permanent ROM’ USB UF2 bootloader. What that means is when you want to program new firmware, you can hold down the BOOTSEL button while plugging it into USB (or pulling down the RUN/Reset pin to ground) and it will appear as a USB disk drive you can drag the firmware onto. Folks who have been using Adafruit products will find this very familiar – we use the technique on all our native-USB boards. Just note you don’t double-click reset instead hold down BOOTSEL during boot to enter the bootloader!
There is great C/C++ support, unofficial (but really good) Arduino support, an official MicroPython port, and a CircuitPython port! We of course recommend CircuitPython because we think it’s the easiest way to get started and it has support with most of our drivers, displays, sensors, and more, supported out of the box so you can follow along with our CircuitPython projects and tutorials.
While the RP2350 has lots of onboard RAM, it does not have built-in FLASH memory. Instead, that is provided by the external QSPI flash chip. On this board there is 16 MB, which is shared between the program it’s running and any file storage used by MicroPython or CircuitPython. When using C/C++ you get the whole flash memory, if using Python you will have about 14 MB remaining for code, files, images, fonts, etc.
RP2350 Chip features:
Please note: The Adafruit Metro RP2350 comes with the A2 version of the RP2350, which is affected by the E9 erratum. This errata affects some uses of GPIO and PIO such as high-impedance inputs and the internal pulldowns. You may need to use 8.2K or smaller resistors if pull-downs are required. At this time, Feb 2025, there is no other version of the RP2350 available – only the A2 version.
NYers have the opportunity to pick up some prints from nearly 600 years of printmaking. The IFPDA Print Fair is happening at the end of this month:
From March 27–30, the IFPDA Print Fair will gather more than 70 exhibitors at the Park Avenue Armory in New York to celebrate over 500 years of prints and printmaking.
Organized annually by the IFPDA, the Fair brings together an international roster of blue chip galleries, private dealers, and publishers to offer critical attention on a wide range of artists, from key art historical figures to new voices in contemporary art. Exhibitors this year include Berggruen Gallery, Black Women of Print, Carolina Nitsch, David Zwirner, Harlan & Weaver, Hauser & Wirth, Krakow Witkin Gallery, Pace Prints, The Paris Review, and Peter Blum Gallery.
Get Tickets and Learn more from Hyperallergic
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!Researchers at Columbia Engineering studied how robots can teach themselves by watching their own motions in the mirror. With the use of a camera, the robots observed their own motions and structure and in turn, learned to plan their own actions and overcome damage to their bodies.
Animal Well is a project Billy Basso started in 2017 and is the true antitheses of a AAAA game. Great YouTube documentary on what it takes to make an indie game and bring it to market. from Second Wind:
In Second Wind’s first premium documentary project, we sat down with Billy Basso to tell the story of the development of his critically acclaimed game, Animal Well.
Have a peak at a pixelated Ladyada
The Great Search: Journey through a neon-drenched cyberpunk world, and Brooklyn, as Ladyada, the engineer, on an epic quest!
Hack, build & explore, find mysterious tech
Jump, run & craft your way through pixel-perfect platforming levels while solving electronic puzzles. Will your engineering skills light up? 
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander (IM-2) and NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer is on its way to the moon. The launch starts a new round of NASA‘s research of the potential presence of volatiles or gases from lunar soil.
Carrying NASA instruments as part of the agency’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign, Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission launched at 7:16 p.m. EST, Feb. 26, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander is scheduled to touch down on Thursday, March 6, in Mons Mouton, a plateau in the Moon’s South Pole.
You can watch AI tackle Pokémon Red/Blue live on Twitch with ClaudePlaysPoekemon. It is slow going but you have to appreciate the enthusiasm as Claude exclaims: “This is excellent! I’m talking to an NPC who is mentioning fossils.” The AI certainly takes its time as it pontificates every action.
More from TechCrunch:
On Tuesday afternoon, Anthropic launched Claude Plays Pokémon on Twitch, a livestream of Anthropic’s newest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, playing a game of Pokémon Red. It’s become a fascinating experiment of sorts, showcasing the capabilities of today’s AI tech and people’s reactions to them.
Make your own Pokémon Macro Ball for Nintendo Switch with a Raspberry Pi Pico H and a few other bits