Classical Highlights for December 2024As the year wound to a close, our editors still found terrific albums to celebrate in December. Check out our selections for the month as we start working on reviewing the new music of 2025.

Toyota’s CES 2025 press conference: How to watchFive years ago, Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda went to CES to share with the world his “personal field of dreams” — a plan to build a prototype city on a 175-acre site at the foot of Mount Fuji in Japan, where people would live and work amongst all of Toyota’s projects, including autonomous vehicle technology, […]
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Bitcoin price move above $100K could pull SOL, SUI, ICP and ENA higherBitcoin bulls keep pushing for $100,000, and if they make it, SUI, ENA, SOL and ICP could also break out.

Reverse-Engineering the Polynomial Constants in the Pentium’s FPUDie photo of the Intel Pentium processor with the floating point constant ROM highlighted in red. (Credit: Ken Shirriff)
Released in 1993, Intel’s Pentium processor was a marvel of technological progress. Its floating point unit (FPU) was a big improvement over its predecessors that still used the venerable CORDIC algorithm. In a recent blog post [Ken Shirriff] takes an up-close look at the FPU and associated ROMs in the Pentium die that enable its use of polynomials. Even with 3.1 million transistors, the Pentium die is still on a large enough process node that it can be readily analyzed with an optical microscope.
In the blog post, [Ken] shows how you can see the constants in each ROM section, with each bit set as either a transistor (‘1’) or no transistor (‘0’), making read-out very easy. The example looks at the constant of pi, which the Pentium’s FPU has stored as a version with no fewer than 67 significand bits along with its exponent.

Multiplexer circuitry allows for the selection of the appropriate entry in the ROM. The exponent section always takes up 18 bits (1 for the significand sign). The significand section is actually 68 bits total, but it starts with a mysterious first bit with no apparent purpose.
After analyzing and transcribing the 304 total constants like this, [Ken] explains how these constants are used with polynomial approximations. This feature allows the Pentium’s FPU to be about 2-3 times faster than the 486 with CORDIC, giving even home users access to significant FPU features a few years before the battle of MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, and today’s AVX extensions began.
Featured image: A diagram of the constant ROM and supporting circuitry. Most of the significand ROM has been cut out to make it fit. (Credit: Ken Shirriff)

Stacy’s Computer Has Got It Going OnAccording to [ClassicHasClass], the best way to open an Atari Stacy is to not open an Atari Stacy. Apparently, these old computers were not pleasant to work on. The cables were not keyed and were prone to short against things. Screws easily strip out plastic holes. Of course, there wouldn’t be a story if there wasn’t a teardown and an upgrade that you can check out in the post.
The Stacy was one of Atari’s earliest portable systems and the first ST portable (that is, STacy). There’s a backlit LCD, a keyboard and trackball, and the usual ports. You could make do with a single floppy or spring for a second floppy or an internal SCSI hard drive. The 8 MHz 68000-based machine would set you back north of $2,300 back in 1989.
The original plan was to run the thing on C-cell batteries, but that would give you about 15 minutes of operation. They finally decided it was a luggable — you’d have to plug it into the wall. The battery compartment was there, but empty and glued shut.
Apparently, there were about 35,000 of these made, but they seem somewhat rare. But we do like a rare retrocomputer. Or even some that aren’t so rare.

How Crane Games are Playing Claw Games with the PlayerFresh from AliExpress, [Big Clive] got another fascinating item to tear down: a crane claw, as used in those all too familiar carnival games. These games feature a claw the player moves into position above a pile of toys or other items. Lower the claw gently down in the hopes that it grabs the target item. In a perfect world, the claw will move your prize and deposit it, via a chute, into your waiting hands. Of course, everyone knows that these games are rigged and rely less on skill or luck than the way that they are programmed, but the way that this works is quite subtle, as you can see in the video below.
Despite how complex these crane claws may appear, they are simply solenoids, with the metal rod inside providing the claw action. The weight of the rod and claw section opens the claw via gravity. The strength of the claw is thus fully dependent on how strongly the solenoid is being driven, which, as [Clive] demonstrates, depends on the voltage and the duty cycle. At only 12V, the target plushie will easily slip away again as the claw barely has any strength, while at 24V, it’s pretty solid.

The basic way these crane games are programmed is to use a voltage and/or duty cycle that depends on the amount of money spent (in credits) and the monetary value of the items you can ‘win.’ If you’re very lucky you’ll get a solid catch even with a floppy claw. Most of the time you’ll have to wait until you get a solid claw. While a simple concept, it seems more designed to game the player. As [Clive] duly notes, just buying the item will probably save you a lot of money and frustration.
Or, build your own, of course. There are plenty of examples.

Tenable CEO Amit Yoran diesLongtime entrepreneur and cybersecurity executive Amit Yoran passed away Friday after a battle with cancer. Cybersecurity company Tenable, where Yoran was CEO and chairman, announced his death in a press release. Before becoming Tenable’s CEO in 2016, he held a number of roles including president of RSA, founding CEO of NetWitness, and CEO of In-Q-Tel. […]
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Pi Pico Makes SSTV Reception a SnapThere’s a paradox in amateur radio: after all the time and effort spent getting a license and all the expense of getting some gear together, some new hams suddenly find that they don’t have a lot to talk about when they get in front of the mic. While that can be awkward, it’s not a deal-breaker by any means, especially when this Pi Pico SSTV decoder makes it cheap and easy to get into slow-scan television.
There’s not much to [Jon Dawson]’s SSTV decoder. Audio from a single-sideband receiver goes through a biasing network and into the Pico’s A/D input. The decoder can handle both Martin and Scottie SSTV protocols, with results displayed on a TFT LCD screen. The magic is in the software, of course, and [Jon] provides a good explanation of the algorithms he used, as well as some of the challenges he faced, such as reliably detecting which protocol is being used. He also implemented correction for “slant,” which occurs when the transmitter sample rate drifts relative to the receiver. Fixing that requires measuring the time it took to transmit each line and adjusting the timing of the decoder to match. The results are dramatic, and it clears up one of the main sources of SSTV artifacts.
We think this is a great build, and simple enough that anyone can try it. The best part is that since it’s receive-only, it doesn’t require a license, although [Jon] says he’s working on an encoder and transmitter too. We’re looking forward to that, but in the meantime, you might just be able to use this to capture some space memes.

Thanks to [CJay] for the tip.

CCC to Host Webinar 'Spotify, Why Do You Keep Hurting Songwriters?'Join the CCC on Tuesday, January 14th at 2:30pm PST for the first webinar of 2025Tuesday, January 14, 2025ZOOM WEBINAR2:30 PM PST - 3:30 PM PSTREGISTER HEREModerator: Charley Londoño | Counsel Plus, Co.; and Of Counsel at The Peter Law Group Panelists to date: Michelle Lewis | CEO, Songwriters Of North America (SONA)Adam Parness | Adam Parness Music Consulting (Former Global Head of Music Publishing at Spotify, Amazon, Pandora) Advance Registration:CCC Members $0 per person | Non-members $5 per personMORE HEREThe post CCC to Host Webinar 'Spotify, Why Do You Keep Hurting Songwriters?' first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

New ship, new year: SpaceX to deploy model Starlink satellites on next Starship launchSpaceX is significantly upping the ante of its Starship test flight program, with the next rocket launch expected to demonstrate payload deployment for the first time.  The payload in question will be 10 Starlink “simulators” that will be similar in size and weight to the next-gen satellites SpaceX plans to use Starship to deploy in […]
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Landing Soon: This Beautiful Weather DisplayAll wiring is beautiful, except when it isn’t. But is there anything more lovely to behold than circuit sculpture? Once again, [Mohit Bhoite] has made this process look easy like Sunday morning. This time, he’s created a weather display in the form of a lander.
This lander runs on the Particle Photon 2, which connects over Wi-Fi and retrieves the weather forecast for the day, along with sunrise and sunset times and wind conditions. Everything is beautifully displayed on a vertically-oriented Adafruit 170×320 TFT screen.
There’s also a pulse-density microphone (PDM) breakout board and a buzzer, and the build is capped off with a red 0805 LED. We’re not sure what the feet are made of, but they sure make this lander cute (and accurate).
All the project logs are picture-rich, which is really the most we could ask for when trying to imitate this level of greatness. This is apparently an ongoing project, and we’re excited for the end result, although it looks fairly complete from here.
Do you want to bend it like Bhoite? Then be sure to check out his Hackaday Supercon talk on the subject.

FTX’s payment plan is now effective — When will users see their funds?According to the plan, certain FTX users claiming less than $50,000 could expect to see their funds returned within 60 days.

Organizing Components, The Easy WayThere’s an old joke: What do you get someone who has everything? A place to put it. For hackers like [Christian], everything is a hoard of priceless electronic components. His solution is using small zipper bags, either regular plastic or anti-static. These attach using hook and loop fastener to plastic binder sheets which then live in a binder. Combined with some custom printed labels and a few other tricks, it makes for a nice system, as you can see in the video below.
Honestly, we’ve done something similar before, using a binder with little pockets, but the bag and custom labels beat our system. He even has QR codes on some of them to locate data sheets easily. Seems like a barcode for inventory management might have been good, too.

Some advice from us. If you are just starting out, this might seem like overkill. But if you start out doing something — this or something else — then ten years from now, you won’t have to be like us and think, “I’d get everything organized, but it is going to take months to work through what I already have…” That usually makes it a project you never really get started with. Develop good habits early!
Even if you don’t want to store your components this way, his binder hacks probably work for lots of other things, too. It isn’t as flashy as some systems we’ve seen, but it is very practical. If only you didn’t have to turn the pages in the binder yourself.

From UMG’s deal with Amazon to songs entering the public domain… here are the top stories you may have missed over the holidaysThe biggest stories from the holiday season – all in one place…
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Pershing Square distributes 47m shares of Universal Music to investors, delists from Amsterdam exchange"We believe that UMG stock is substantially undervalued at its current share price..."
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