Altera Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series AGRW039 SoC FPGA targets high-performance RF systems

Altera’s wideband Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series AGRW039 SoC FPGA is designed for high-performance Radio Frequency (RF) systems in aerospace, defense, and advanced communications systems. It is the fourth device in Altera’s Agilex 9 Direct RF-Series, and compared to the previous generation AGRW027, the new AGRW039 delivers about 45% more logic resources, 45% more DSP resources, and 43% more block RAM. It also integrates a 64Gsps wideband RF, a hard quad-core Cortex-A53 processor, and supports DDR5 and LPDDR5 memory. Agilex 9 Direct RF AGRW039 SoC FPGA key features and specifications: Hardware CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor @ up to 1.41...

The Winners of the 2025 Obfuscated C Code Contest

One of the most exciting challenges available to any software developer is that of writing brilliantly working code that’s so obtuse, so indecipherable, and opaque, that even its own author would struggle to grasp its inner workings after returning to it a year later. While for some this is just how they naturally write code, for others it’s part of the International Obfuscated C Coding Challenge (IOCCC), with 2025’s entrants once again showing their mettle.

The IOCCC judges entries among a range of categories, as it can be hard to otherwise quantify what is the ‘best’ entry, with ground rules limiting...

GEEKOM A7 2026 Edition (AMD Ryzen 5 7545U) mini PC review – Part 1: specifications, unboxing, teardown, and first boot

GEEKOM sent us a review sample of the A7 2026 Edition mini PC powered by a 4.9 GHz AMD Ryzen 5 7545U hexa-core/12-thread processor, paired with 16GB DDR5 SO-DIMM memory and a 500 GB NVMe SSD. It comes with two HDMI 2.0 ports and two USB4 with DisplayPort Alt mode to enable four-monitor setups, 2.5GbE, WiFi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity, an SD card reader, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a few USB-A ports. As its name implies, it’s a variant of the GEEKOM A7 (Ryzen 9 7940HS) mini PC we reviewed in 2024 with Windows 11 Pro and Ubuntu...

Automatic Tutorial Generator is Perhaps the Best-Case For Vibe Coding

Quick question: how did you learn to code? It probably wasn’t bribing someone a year or two ahead of you in CS to finish all your homework, but that’s exactly what ‘vibe coders’ are doing — even in class. Odds are, you learned by working through exercises, following tutorials, and doing it yourself. Finding good tutorials isn’t getting any easier in the age of LLMs, and that’s where [Deven Jarvis]’s Lathe comes in: it’s a project to get an LLM to make the tutorial for you. Instead of doing the work for you, it gets the clanker to show you...

Fraunhofer AISEC Joins OpenTitan Coalition as an Official Security Testing Partner to further enhance its security credentials

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Powering Up a Pluggable Module from the 1948 IBM 604 Electronic Calculator

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=V8pxpuN9tMQ

In that awkward transition phase between electromechanical accounting systems used in the 1940s and the introduction of fully digital computers we find systems such as the IBM 604 Electronic Calculator, advertised for accounting, calculating and engineering tasks. While not capable of complex instructions, loops and other advanced features, it did use an interesting modular architecture with easily swappable modules containing a vacuum tube and associated components. Recently [Ken Shirriff] took a poke at one of these and even powered it up.

This kind of pluggable system would become a staple of computer systems, as they enabled the use of modules or...

Discovery of an Active Wind from the Milky Way’s Central Black Hole

One of the fun aspects of astrophysics is that much of it involves phenomena which you cannot exactly study from up close, with the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of this galaxy – called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A) – being a great example. Although it’s been predicted since 1971 that black holes like Sgr A radiate energy which then pushes away nearby matter to create something akin to solar wind, this had so far not been proven. Now astronomers have discovered evidence for this emanating from Sgr A*.

Using five years worth of observations made with the Atacama Large...

Pico-Driven Ultrasound Enables Scaled Acoustic Model of Home Stereo

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=_VQDn4HWRM8

There are plenty of ways to get sound into your house: good old fashioned headphones, the Dolby surround setup we all lusted after back in the day, or the 21st century’s ubiquitous soundbar, with its ‘spatial audio’ magic. Which will work in your space? If you were an audio engineer, you’d set up listening area and use a microphone to map the space– but that would be thousands of points and sounds like tedium. [PlasmatronX] had a better idea: use Schlieren imaging to see the sound waves as the travel through the space. Schlieren imaging has trouble with audio frequencies,...

News Sites are Blocking Internet Archive over AI Scraping Fears

Especially in this era of the Internet, the role of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has become increasingly essential as more and more web content vanishes into the ether or is surreptitiously altered to hide salient details. More recently a new worry has seemingly cropped up in the form of scraping of data for so-called AI systems, or at least that’s part of the excuses being offered for blocking the Wayback Machine’s web crawlers, with [Andrew Deck] and [Hanaa’ Tameez] of [Nieman Lab] detailing the impact and reasons provided.

Some news outlets like The Baltimore Banner insist that they’re only blocking...

Optimizing Pancakes from Chemical Principles

Although parents and teachers like to point out the deep link between cooking and chemistry, most people don’t deliberately apply any chemical principles beyond acid/base reactions to their recipes. Not so [Ben Kazez]: he’s written a thorough exploration of the chemical journey to the perfect pancake, and made a calculator for others to use with their own ingredients.

The goal is to optimize the pancakes along four dimensions: interior texture (light and smooth), a tangy flavour, rise, and a crisp, brown exterior layer. The tang comes from residual acids, and since lactic acid produces the best taste, dairy-based acid sources...