Waveshare ESP32-S31-Zero – A tiny ESP32-S31 board with up to 32MB PSRAM, 32MB SPI flash

Waveshare ESP32-S31-Zero is a small ESP32-S31 development board that follows the form factor of the earlier Waveshare “Zero” boards, such as the ESP32-C6-Zero-B, RA4M1-Zero, and ESP32-S3-Zero, among others. The new tiny board still features a USB-C port for power and programming, as well as eighteen through and castellated holes for GPIO and power signals,  but it boasts a more powerful ESP32-S31 dual-core RISC-V MCU clocked at up to 320 MHz, featuring 2.4 GHz WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and 802.15.4 connectivity, as well as up to 32MB on-chip PSRAM and a 16MB or 32MB SPI flash chip. Since the ESP32-S31 has...

It’s Alpine Linux, On A Kindle Paperwhite 3

As computing power becomes cheaper and microprocessors become more capable, a steady trend over recent decades has been to see more everyday devices hiding Linux under the hood somewhere. Sadly in most cases that’s where it stays, but some such machines have a level of hackability. One such is the 7th generation Kindle PaperWhite 3, for which [pragyaangaur] has produced a distro that gives it the Alpine Linux userspace and a few other tricks.

As you might expect, the Kindle must be jailbroken, and is limited to the rather ancient Amazon kernel. The distro comes with a few extras for the...

MousePods Reverse Engineers Head Tracking Data From Stubborn AirPods

[Matteo Gaudioso] released MousePods, a Python tool which accesses the motion sensors in Apple AirPods on Linux, turning them into mouse input. No Apple host required. Doing this required reverse-engineering how the devices work and communicate, because it turns out the AirPods 3 do things differently than other models.

Head tracking with AirPods has been around for years. Apple uses the motion data for spatial audio and gesture detection, and there are a number of open source tools to access that data. But there was always a blind spot: no one...

Using Halftone Images in QR codes Without Upsetting Scanners

Although quick-response (QR) codes are rather simple monochrome affairs, adding embellishments to them is a popular activity, if only to make QR codes not stick out like a sore thumb in e.g. flashy marketing flyers. The most simple approach here is to put any regular graphic in e.g. the center of said QR code and lean on the scanner’s error-correcting features to route around the damage, but a more sophisticated approach uses halftone images that are blended with the QR code, as first demonstrated in 2013 by [Hung-Kuo Chu] et al.

A number of online halftone image QR generators exist that...

Why the ULC Audio Codec is a Perfect Fit for the N64

Although the Nintendo 64 could deliver solid 3D graphics with assets loaded at a blistering speed from the game cartridge, audio-wise it was a bit more hampered. The main challenge here was that streaming PCM audio data from a roomy CD as on the PlayStation wasn’t an option, and using compressed audio samples was impaired by Nintendo’s refusal to open up more than the CPU for third-party codecs, leading to most N64 games using so-called ‘sound fonts’ that use sample-based tracks.

Once the N64’s RSP vector processor became available for use by developers it became possible to use MP3s without clobbering...

This Week in Security: More Linux Bugs, Biggest Crypto Theft Ever, Prusa Printers, Residential Proxies

Linux kernel bugs which can be triggered remotely, without any login, are rare. Most kernel vulnerabilities need an attacker to already be running code on the machine. CVE-2026-98432 is one of those: a use-after-free in the IPv4 TCP handshake code, rated CVSS 9.8, which Atlas has written up in detail. It goes all the way back to Linux 4.4.

A use-after-free is exactly what it sounds like: the program releases a chunk of memory, but some other code keeps using it. If an attacker can get their own data placed into that freed memory before it’s used again, they can influence what the kernel...

The Goat Emoji Is 100% Valid Machine Code, and It Doesn’t Stop There

Did you know emojis can be executables? Well, they are if you treat them like Intel 8088 or 8086 machine code, anyway. [GloriousCow] shared this clever revelation, demonstrating that executable programs could be created entirely from emojis. To really appreciate why, it’s necessary to take a small step back.

It all started when [GloriousCow] happened to notice, entirely by chance, that (the goat emoji) was F0 9F 90 90. Anyone familiar with x86 assembly language probably recognizes 90h as nop,  or null operation, or “spend a cycle doing nothing”. What about F0 and 9F? Together they are lock lahf (assert...

520 MHz STM32H7P4/STM32H7P5 Arm Cortex-M7 MCUs feature Hardware Signal Processor (HSP), optional Neural-ART NPU

STMicroelectronics has introduced the STM32H7P4 and STM32H7P5, two 520 MHz Arm Cortex-M7 MCUs part of STM32H7P family designed for digital power, motor control, industrial sensing, and edge AI applications. Both feature a Hardware Signal Processor (HSP) for accelerating mathematical and signal-processing operations, while the STM32H7P5 also includes an 85 GOPS Neural-ART NPU for Edge AI inference/TinyML. The MCUs feature up to 2MB dual-bank flash, 736KB SRAM, two high-resolution timers with up to 24 PWM outputs, three advanced motor-control timers, and four 12-bit ADCs. Other features include CORDIC and FMAC mathematical accelerators, three CAN FD interfaces, USB OTG Full-Speed, and support...

Электровакуумное дело. Биндер

Штудируя электровакуумное дело, мы будем постоянно натыкаться на, походя поминаемый, некий загадочный биндер (смешивание с биндером, сушка биндера, сжигание биндера). Что же означает это забавное, богатое аллюзиями, словечко, слыша которое на ум невольно приходит то сын турецко-подданного, тов. Бендер, то город Бендеры и даже где-то Бердичев, вкупе с неподражаемыми братьями-сыщиками (Ой, шеф, а я вас вижу!), а то и мифический одесский биндюжник (и Король!) Исаака Бабеля. Между тем электровакуумный биндер — не более чем технологический компонент, выжигаемая связка многих электровакуумных декоктов. Незаметный и незримый конечному пользователю, но критически важный компонент, основа для (внутри) ламповых покрытий. Что же такое биндер, где он применялся и из чего готовился? Как всегда, между делом...

Making Xibalba 64, a New N64 Release in 2026

[Dominic Szablewski] created something that we don’t see every day: a no-kidding new physical Nintendo 64 game for sale, complete with cartridge, manual, and box art. He wrote about what it was like to make Xibalba 64, a 3D FPS game built using his own game engine. It even supports two-player couch co-op and four-player deathmatch.

The N64 was a groundbreaking console that brought analog controls and fully 3D game worlds to mainstream console gaming. Architecture-wise it has its share of quirks, including a tiny (4 kB!) amount of texture memory to go around all that fancy 3D content.

Xibalba was originally...