If predictions hold steady, nearly half of the United States will be covered in snow by the time this post goes live, with the Northeast potentially getting buried under more than 18 inches. According to the National Weather Service, the “unusually expansive and long-duration winter storm will bring heavy snow from the central U.S. across the Midwest, Ohio Valley, and through the northeastern U.S. for the remainder of the weekend into Monday.” If that sounds like a fun snow day, they go on to clarify that “crippling to locally catastrophic impacts can be expected”, so keep that in mind. Hopefully you didn’t have any travel plans, as CNBC reported that more than 13,000 flights were canceled as of Friday night. If you’re looking to keep up with the latest developments, we recently came across StormWatch (GitHub repo), a slick open source weather dashboard that’s written entirely in HTML. Stay safe out there, hackers.

Speaking of travel, did you hear about Sebastian Heyneman’s Bogus Journey to Davos? The entrepreneur (or “Tech Bro” to use the parlance of our times) was in town to woo investors attending the World Economic Forum, but ended up spending the night in a Swiss jail cell because the authorities thought he might be a spy. Apparently he had brought along a prototype for the anti-fraud device he was hawking, and mistakenly left it laying on a table while he was rubbing shoulders. It was picked up by security guards and found to contain a very spooky ESP32 development board, so naturally he was whisked off for interrogation. A search of his hotel room uncovered more suspicious equipment, including an electric screwdriver and a soldering iron. Imagine if a child had gotten their hands on them?

But the best part of the story is when Sebastian tries to explain the gadget’s function to investigators. When asked to prove that the code on the microcontroller wasn’t malicious, he was at a loss — turns out our hero used AI to create the whole thing and wasn’t even familiar with the language it was written in. In his own words: “Look, I’m not a very good hardware engineer, but I’m a great user of AI. I was one of the top users of Cursor last year. I did 43,000 agent runs and generated 25 billion tokens.” Oof. Luckily, the Swiss brought in a tech expert who quickly determined the device wasn’t dangerous. He was even nice enough to explain the code line-by-line to Sebastian before he was released. No word on whether or not they charged him for the impromptu programming lesson.

It wasn’t hard for the Swiss authorities to see what was inside the literal black box Sebastian brought with him, but what if that wasn’t possible? Well, if you’ve got an x-ray machine handy, that could certainly help. The folks at Eclypsium recently released a blog post that describes how they compared a legit FTDI cable with a suspect knock-off by peering at their innards. What we thought was particularly interesting was how they were able to correctly guess which one was the real deal based on the PCB design. The legitimate adapter featured things like ground pours and decoupling caps, and the cheap one…didn’t. Of course, this makes sense. If you’re looking to crank something out as cheaply as possible, those would be the first features to go. (Editor’s note: sarcasm.)

It doesn’t take an x-ray machine or any other fancy equipment to figure out that the Raspberry Pi 5 is faster than its predecessors. But quantifying just how much better each generation of Pi is compared to the other members of the family does require a bit more effort, which is why we were glad to see that The DIY Life did the homework for us. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that the Pi 5 won the head-to-head competition in essentially every category, but it’s still interesting to read along to see how each generation of hardware fared in the testing.

Finally, Albedo has released a fascinating write-up that goes over the recent flight of their Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) satellite, Clarity-1. As we explained earlier this week, operating at a lower orbit offers several tangible benefits to spacecraft. One of the major ones is that such an orbit decays quickly, meaning a spacecraft could burn up just months or even days after its mission is completed. For Albedo specifically, they’re taking advantage of the lower altitude to snap closeup shots of the Earth. While there were a few hiccups, the mission was overall a success, providing another example of how commercial operators can capitalize on this unique space environment.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’ve love to hear about it.

We know this one is a few years old, but unless you’re deep into the cycling scene, there’s a good chance this is the first time you’ve heard of [Ali Clarkson’s] foray into home made rope spokes. 

The journey to home-made rope spoke begun all the way back in 2018, shortly after the company Berd introduced their very expensive rope spokes. Berd’s spokes are made of a hollow weaved ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) rope with very low creep. They claim wheels stronger than steel spoke equivalents at a fraction of the weight. Naturally forum users asked themselves, “well why can’t we make our own?” As it turns out, there are a handful of problems with trying this at home.

There are a number of ways to skin this proverbial cat, but they all center around some very special nautical ropes, namely, Robline DM20. This rope has excellent wear and creep characteristics, in a hollow weave much like what Berd developed. The hubs also require the addition of a bevel around the spoke holes to prevent wear. Beyond those two similarities, there are quite a number of ways to lace the spokes between the hub and wheels.

As detailed by [Ali Clarkson], one method involves creating loops out of bike spokes, with a custom jig and some brazing. Then a length of rope is passed through the hub and a special hitch is used to keep it in place. Two loops are made in the ends of this length of rope and passed through the spoke ends made earlier. Finally everything is brought up to tension and trued much like a normal wheelset. The front wheel ended up weighing around 700g, a rather impressive feat for a 24 inch downhill wheel.

However, a number of other methods have been tried on the forum threads. Namely, a number of users have attempted to varying degrees of success putting a length of spoke inside the hollow rope weave and “Chinese finger trapping” it together. The key issue here is sourcing a glue strong enough to hold the spoke piece on at lower tensions, but flexible enough to not crack with the cyclical loading on a rim.

Ultimately, this is a great look at the properties of some extremely special rope. This also isn’t the first time we have seen strange bicycle wheels made with UHMWPE.  

[Bhaskar Das] has been tinkering with one of Nintendo’s more obscure handhelds, the DSi. The old-school console has been given a new job as part of an augmented reality app called AetherShell. 

The concept is straightforward enough. The Nintendo DSi runs a small homebrew app which lets you use the stylus to make simple line drawings on the lower touchscreen. These drawings are then trucked out wirelessly as raw touch data via UDP packets, and fed into a Gemini tool which transforms them into animation frames. These are then sent to an iPhone app, which uses ARKit APIs and the phone’s camera to display the animations embedded into the surrounding environment via augmented reality. Files are on Github for those curious how it all laces together across the various devices.

One might question the utility of this project, given that the iPhone itself has a touch screen you can draw on, too. It’s a fair question, and one without a real answer, beyond the fact that sometimes it’s really fun to play with an old console and do weird things with it. Plus, there just isn’t enough DSi homebrew out in the world. We love to see more. Video after the break.