Trump's trade war will send BTC price 'violently higher' — analyst"This is undoubtedly my highest conviction macro trade for the year," Bitwise executive and analyst Jeff Park wrote on social media.

Is Fire Conductive Enough To Power a Lamp?Is fire conductive? As ridiculous that may sound at first glance, from a physics perspective the rapid oxidation process we call ‘fire’ produces a lot of substances that can reduce the electrical insulating (dielectric) properties of air. Is this change enough to allow for significant current to pass? To test this, [The Action Lab] on YouTube ran some experiments after being called out on this apparent fact in the comments to an earlier video.
Ultimately what you need to make ‘fire’ conductive is to have an appreciable amount of plasma to reduce the dielectric constant, which means that you cannot just use any rapid oxidation process. In the demonstration with lights and what appears to be a (relatively clean-burning) butane torch, the current conducted is not enough to light up an incandescent or LED light bulb, but can light up a 5 mm LED. When using his arm as a de-facto sensor, it does not conduct enough current to be noticeable.
The more interesting experiment here demonstrates the difference in dielectric breakdown of air at different temperatures. As the dielectric constant for hot air is much lower than for room temperature air, even a clean burning torch is enough to register on a multimeter. Ultimately this seems to be the biggest hazard with fire around exposed (HV) electrical systems, as the ionic density of most types of fire just isn’t high enough.
To reliably strike a conductive plasma arc, you’d need something like explosive (copper) wire and a few thousand joules to pump through it.

Strymon Big Sky MX Plug into BigSky and instantly lift your sound into the stratosphere. The world below you fades into the distance, and you're elevated into a glow of lush, glorious, radiant reverbs. ... Read More

zazz Dynamic Mid SideUsing four frequency bands allows control over the correlated and uncorrelated parts of the signal. E.g. for reducing reverb, or noise-like elements in the recordings. It can be used for auto-balancing... Read More

Dub: the copy trading app that has teens talkingSocial media changed everything from news consumption to shopping. Now, Dub thinks it can do the same for investing through an influencer-driven marketplace where users can follow the trades of top investors with a few taps. Think of it as TikTok meets Wall Street. Founded by 23-year-old Steven Wang — a Harvard drop-out who began […]
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Giving a Proprietary Power Supply the BootYou’ve probably noticed that everywhere you go — the doctor’s office, hotels, or retail shops, there are tiny PCs everywhere. These small PCs often show up on the surplus market for a very good price, but they aren’t quite full-blown PCs. They usually have little option for expansion and are made to be cheap and small. That means many of them have custom and anemic power supplies. We aren’t sure if [bm_00] needed a regular power supply to handle a graphics card or if the original power supply died, but either way, the HP small-form-factor box needed a new power supply. It took some clever work to be able to use a normal power supply in the little box.
At first, we thought this wouldn’t be much of a story. The motherboard surely took all the regular pins, so it would just be a matter of making an adapter, right? Apparently not. The computers run totally on 12V and the motherboard handles things like turning the computer on and off. The computer also was trying to run the power supply’s fan which needed some work arounds.

Granted, you could just wire the power supply to be on all the time, but it is nice to be able to turn everything off. The plan was to use the always-on 5V standby rail to drive a pair of relays. One relay senses the computer’s on/off switch and triggers the ATX power supply to turn on.
The problem is the computer wants to draw a little 12V power all the time. So, in an odd turn of events, a small boost converter changes the 5V standby voltage to enough current to drive the PC in the “off” mode.  When the power supply’s 5V rails turn on, they throw the other relay to disconnect the boost converter and supply the real 12V supply.
There’s only one problem with that. The motherboard sees a power glitch when the switch occurs. So, there’s a hefty capacitor to smooth out the transient. Well, there’s another problem. In some cases, though, the boost converter couldn’t provide enough power for the motherboard before the boot process.
Honestly, we think we would just put a switch or a power strip in the supply’s AC cord and have been done with it. But we admire the tenacity and ingenuity.
Then again, you could just put the PC in the power supply. Around here, old power supplies usually get benched.

Warm Audio introduce five-year warranty Warm Audio have announced the introduction of a new five-year warranty across their entire product line-up.

On… Lola Young, M-UK-GA!, and communing.MBW founder Tim Ingham's latest Review commentary
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Gallery: Glassnote welcomes in 2025 at HMV Oxford StreetEvent at HMV's historic 363 Oxford Street store was attended by quite the who's who of the UK music biz
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X expands lawsuit over advertiser ‘boycott’ to include Lego, Nestlé, Pinterest, and othersX is now suing more advertisers in an antitrust lawsuit focusing on what the company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino has claimed is a “systematic illegal boycott.” The company formerly known as Twitter first filed the lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers and its brand safety initiative known as the Global Alliance of Responsible Media in […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Taking A $15 Casio F91W 5,000 Meters UnderwaterWhen considering our favorite spy movies and kin that involve deep-sea diving, we’d generally expect to see some high-end watch that costs thousands of dollars and is specially engineered to withstand the immense pressures kilometers below the ocean’s surface. Yet what about a humble Casio F91W that can be bought for about $15 if it’s the genuine article and not one of the millions of fakes? Over at the Watches of Espionage site they figured that they’d dress up one of these famous watches to give it the best possible shot at surviving the crushing pressures at a depth of 5 km.
The actual modification to the F91W was pretty mild, involving nothing but a ‘hydro-mod’ whereby oil is used to replace the air inside the watch case. Since oil is incompressible, nothing bad should happen to the watch. Theoretically at least. The Watch-Under-Test (WUT) was strapped to a US Navy’s CURV 21 remotely operated vehicle and dunked into the ocean before starting its descend into the inky darkness of the deep sea.
Although only hitting a measly 4,950 km, the watch survived just fine, showing that even if you’re a secret US operative on a deep-dive espionage mission, all you really need is one of these Casio watches.

Morphoice TapeWowAdd realistic wow and flutter modulation to your sound with this plugin emulating magnetic tape saturation and subtle pitch variations caused by irregular motion during recording and playback... Read More

Fracture Sounds releases FREE Blueprint Bass Guitar library for Kontakt Player
Fracture Sounds has been releasing great Kontakt libraries as of late, including several quality freebies as part of their Blueprint collection. And today, we’ll look at their 16th addition to the series, Blueprint: Bass Guitar.  With this library, they’ve sampled a Fender Precision Bass (or P-bass for short) in detail, using both picked and fingered [...]
View post: Fracture Sounds releases FREE Blueprint Bass Guitar library for Kontakt Player

RedBox In The 80s: Meet The VHS Vending BehemothRedbox was a company with a moderately interesting business model—it let you rent DVDs from automated kiosks. It’s an idea so simple it’s almost surprising it didn’t appear sooner. Only, it did—all the way back in the VHS age!
Meet the Video Vendor. YouTuber [SpaceTime Junction] was able to track down one of these rare machines, which apparently formerly served an Ohio rental outlet called Kohnen’s. It’s a monstrous thing that stands taller and about three times wider than traditional vending machines, and it could hold up to 320 tapes in its robotic magazine. It’s got lashings of woodgrain, a green-on-black CRT, and the beautiful kind of clicky keys that went away after the 1980s.
[SpaceTime Junction] has a bunch of videos up on the machine, and you even get to see it powered up.  It’s a little difficult to see what’s going on, because the machine is something like nine feet wide and it’s all shot in vertical video. There isn’t a whole lot of content on these obscurities out there, so this is a great place to start. Apparently, there were recently a hundred or more of these found living in a Texas warehouse according to Reddit, so we might see more of these popping up online soon. [SpaceTime Junction] has toured that facility, too.
You can read more about the fall of Redbox, or the cleanup afterwards, in our prior coverage.

Morphoice DarkStarA reverb and delay plugin, inspired by the sound of vintage gear from the 80s. Read More