Raye Lights Up Coachella 2024(Raye photo by A Osborn/Coachella)

While the highlights of Friday (Lana Del Rey, Sabrina Carpenter, Deftones, Chloe, Hatsune Miku) were undeniably joyful, it was clear very early on after the lineup announcement that the Saturday of this year's Coachella Festival is the cherry day. When No Doubt was confirmed to be performing on Saturday, that fact was hammered home.

Arriving in the desert early on Saturday morning, we took a few moments to really admire the landscape. The festival itself is phenomenal but the surrounding area really is stunning. Snow-peaked mountains can be seen in the distance, while we sit in the sun.

Getting there early offered the chance to chill out in shade of the Speaker Stage tent, listening to talks by photographer and author Cory Richards, and many more. There's something fundamentally "Coachella" about listening to talks about mental health and societal change in front of a giant horse statue, while electronic music pulses in the background.

We soaked up the chill beats of Maddy Maia b2b Tottie at the DoLab stage when entering the festival proper; that's a wonderful place to relax early on because there are water spritzers spritzing everyone from the trees. It's like being in some sort of a rave botanical garden -- a vivid trip made real.

L.A. post-punks Militarie Gun shook off everyone's Friday night cobwebs at the Sonoma stage. Heavy and irked, they were the first of many punk (or at least punk-adjacent) bands on Saturday and they made some friends. On a completely different musical spectrum, soul singer and songwriter Erika de Casier charmed the Gobi stage crowd with her sultry tones and sweet tunes, while back at Sonoma Girl Mexican R&B singer and guitarist Girl Ultra overcame some early sound issues to put in a solid set.

Young Fathers (Photo by C Reagan/Coachella)

We caught a little bit of Kenya Grace (lively electro fun), before making a beeline for Scottish progressive hip-hop band the Young Fathers. It's been a decade since their debut album Dead won the Mercury Prize, and their second, White Men are Black Too is another fine slab of socially conscious, rhythmic, brilliant alt-rap. At Coachella, they made every minute count. Inspiring, intense, and magnificent.

Changing the tone completely, the Aquabats saw a line of people stretching across the field to get to their Sonoma set. We were able to catch three songs, including an opening "Pool Party" which saw them bring out the Yo Gabba Gabba characters. A perfect festival band, these superhero punks are goofy, silly, hilarious fun. But they also have a ton of great pop-ska-punk tunes.

The reason we had to leave the Aquabats early was the highly-anticipated set from British chanteuse Raye (who you have recently seen on SNL). Easily one of the highlights of the day, and probably the whole weekend, her nightclub jazz-meets-electropop-meets-R&B has drawn comparisons with Amy Winehouse but Raye is very much her own woman. Her set at the Mojave stage was simply incredible. Powerful, beautiful and devastatingly honest.

"Ice-Cream Man" details her own experience with sexual assault, and it just tears your heart out. Women around us in the crowd openly sobbed as Raye poured out her soul. The fact that this song resonates with so many women is just awful, that this is their shared experience, but Raye's ability to connect with her fans on such an emotional level has to be therapeutic for everyone.

Other songs, such as the nightclub-y ode to illicit substances "Mary Jane" and the pulsing brilliance of "Prada" proved that Raye is set to explode when her new album drops.

Incredible, and there was more to come.

The Aquabats (Photo by J Bajsel/Coachella)

Porting Modern Windows Applications to Windows 95Windows 95 was an amazing operating system that would forever transform the world of home computing, setting the standard for user interaction on a desktop and quite possibly was the OS which had the longest queue of people lining up on launch day to snag a boxed copy. This raises the question of why we still don’t write software for this amazing OS, because ignoring the minor quibbles of ‘security patches’ and ‘modern hardware compatibility’, it’s still has pretty much the same Win32 API as supported in Windows 11, plus it doesn’t even spy on you, or show you ads. This line of reasoning led [MattKC] recently to look at easy ways to port modern applications to Windows 95.
In the video, the available options are ticked off, starting with straight Win32 API. Of course, nobody writes for the Win32 API for fun or to improve their mental well-being, and frameworks like WxWidgets and QuteQt have dropped support for Windows 9x and generally anything pre-Win2k for years now. The easiest option therefore might be Microsoft’s .NET framework, which in its (still supported) 2.0 iteration actually supports Windows 98 SE, or basically within spitting distance of running it on the original Win95.

An interesting point here is that .NET was never released for Windows 95 by Microsoft, which raises the question of whether there’s such a crucial difference between Windows 95 and 98 that would prevent the .NET framework from running on the former. As [Matt] finds out during his investigation, the answer seems to be mostly that Microsoft never bothered to fully test .NET on Win95 due to the low marketshare of Win95, ergo this just throws up an error message about an unsupported OS.
In order to get around this, [Matt] had to write his own .NET installer, which first led him down a maddening rabbit hole of the internals of the .NET runtime and its installer. That resolved running the custom installer on Windows 98, but even with custom function wrappers [Matt] was left with a series of exceptions to debug and resolve, including an SSE2-related one due to lack of SSE2 support in Windows 95. All of this without access to the JIT debugger that’d exist on Win98 and newer.
Eventually he did get it working, however, with the results available on the GitHub project page. Since backporting .NET 2.0 was so much fun, he next embarked on backporting .NET Framework version 3.5 as well, opening another series of .NET applications for running on an OS that’s now nearly thirty years old. Even if a practical use case is hard to make, it’s absolutely a fascinating in-depth look at what has changed over the past decades, and what we may have gained, and lost.
Thanks to [Jonathan Dziok] for the tip.

TechCrunch Mobility: Cruise robotaxis return and Ford’s BlueCruise comes under scrutinyWelcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. It was another wild week in the world of transportation, particularly in the EV startup and automated driving industries. […]
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Danish Vintage LRC Meter Reveals InsideModern test equipment is great, but there’s something about a big meter with a swinging needle and a mirror for parallax correction that makes a device look like real gear. [Thomas] shows us a Danish LCR meter (or, as it says on the front, an RLC meter). The device passes AC through the component and uses that to determine the value based on the setting of a range switch. It looks to be in great shape and passed some quick tests. Have a look at it in the video below.
An outward inspection shows few surprises, although there is an odd set of terminals on the back labeled DC bias. This allows you to provide a DC voltage in case you have a capacitor that behaves differently when the capacitor has a DC voltage across it.
Block diagram for the MM2
The circuit can measure — as the name implies — resistance, inductance, and capacitance. The manual shows a nice block diagram if you want to understand what’s going on.
Physically opening it up was a bit of a puzzle. That older gear was often well-constructed. Inside are some nice PCBs, a lot of transistors, and beautiful wiring harnesses. Someone took their time building this unit, and it shows.
Usually, when you see gear like this, it is a bridge, and you have to zero the meter, but not so with the MM2. These days, you are likely to use a microcontroller to measure the charge and discharge rate.

Erica Synths refresh Perkons HD-01 Erica Synths have announced that they are planning on releasing a new version of their latest drum machine, and will be discontinuing the current production model.

Tesla drops prices, Meta confirms Llama 3 release, and Apple allows emulators in the App StoreHeya, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the past few days in tech. Google’s annual enterprise-focused dev conference, Google Cloud Next, dominated the headlines — and we had plenty of coverage from the event. But it wasn’t the only thing afoot (see: the spectacular eclipse). Lorenzo wrote about how […]
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Who’s Afraid Of A CRT?Older consumer electronic devices follow a desirability curve in which after they fall from favour they can’t be given away. But as they become rarer, they reach a point at which everyone wants them. Then, they can’t be had for love nor money. CRT TVs are now in the first stage, they’re bulky and lower-definition than modern sets, and thus thrift stores and dumpsters still have them in reasonable numbers. To retrogamers and other enthusiasts, this can be a bonanza, and when he saw a high-end late-model JVC on the sidewalk [Chris Person] wasted no time in snapping it up. It worked, but there were a few picture issues, so he set about fixing it.

The write-up is largely a tale of capacitor-swapping, as you might expect from any older electronics, and it results in a fine picture and a working TV. But perhaps there’s another story to consider there, in that not so many of us here in 2024 are used to working with CRTs. We all know that they conceal some scary voltages, and indeed, he goes to significant lengths to discharge his CRT. It’s worth remembering though, that there’s not always a need to discharge the CRT if no attempt will be made to disconnect it, after all the connector and cable to the flyback transformer are secured by hefty insulation for a good reason. It’s a subject we’ve looked at here at Hackaday in the past. You could argue that, in some ways, newer TVs are harder to get into than these old CRTs.

Delays and Timers in LTSpice (no 555)If you need a precise time, you could use a microcontroller. Of course, then all your friends will say “Could have done that with a 555!” But the 555 isn’t magic — it uses a capacitor and a comparator in different configurations to work. Want to understand what’s going on inside? [Mano Arrostita] has a video about simulating delay and timer circuits in LTSpice.
The video isn’t specifically about the 555, but it does show how the basic circuits inside a timer chip work. The idea is simple: a capacitor will charge through a resistor with an exponential curve. If you prefer, you can charge with a constant current source and get a nice linear charge.
You can watch the voltage as the capacitor charges and when it reaches a certain point, you know a certain amount of time has passed. The discharge works the same way, of course.
We like examining circuits for learning with a simulator, either LTSpice or something like Falstad. It is easier than breadboarding and encourages making changes that would be more difficult on a real breadboard. If you want a refresher on LTSpice or current sources, you can kill two birds with one stone.

Getting It Done: The Week in D.I.Y. & Indie MusicThis week, our tips and advice for the independent, do-it-yourselfers out there covered how to use Amazon’s new Hype Deck marketing tool, how to perfect your next pitch, and more…
The post Getting It Done: The Week in D.I.Y. & Indie Music appeared first on Hypebot.

REWIND: The new music industry’s week in reviewIt was a busy week by any definition, and the music industry was no exception with the launch of a new superfan app called “EVEN,” ShowUp announced its yearly activism. Continue reading
The post REWIND: The new music industry’s week in review appeared first on Hypebot.

Audible Planets Is A FREE Semi-Modular Synth Plugin
Audible Planets is an expressive, quasi-Ptolemaic semi-modular synthesizer for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I’ve previously mentioned my love of VCV Rack and other modular software environments. For example, I’m a big fan of miRack and Audulus on the iPad. So naturally, when I hear about a new environment that allows for decidedly eccentric takes on [...]
View post: Audible Planets Is A FREE Semi-Modular Synth Plugin

XO Variable Crossover from Great Eastern FX Co. XO Variable Crossover has been designed to provides users with a way of extracting new sounds from their existing pedals. 

API startup Noname Security nears $500M deal to sell itself to AkamaiAkamai Technologies is in advanced acquisition talks with Noname Security, an API cybersecurity startup, according to a people person familiar with the deal.
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OPPS: CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL MUSIC COMPETITION AND FESTIVALWe are thrilled to announce that the 7th Chicago International Music Competition and Festival will take place from July 17 to 25, 2024 in Chicago, USA. Musicians from all over the world are encouraged to apply and participate at Ganz Hall for a chance at $35,000 in total prize money. Our competition provides young musicians with the most unique and affordable platform to learn from the world's top artists and be immersed in an inspiring environment. Deadline for competition entry is April 15, 2024. Apply at https://www.cimcusa.org/index.mhtml

Analog vs. digital drum sound design: The definitive guide
In this in-depth tutorial, we break down the unique workflows, benefits, and drawbacks of analog and digital drum sound design.