A conventional model rocket engine is simple combustible solid fuel (black powder or more advanced composites) molded into a cylinder that uses expanding gas to produce thrust. Though it is minimal, there is some danger there. An alternative is compressed gas, which will also expand to produce thrust — just without the explosive chemical reaction. […] The post A homemade launchpad for compressed air-powered rockets appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Around 2003, my mother had a laptop: the Compaq Armada 1592DT. It ran Windows Me, the worst Windows to ever exist, whopping 96 MB of RAM, and a 3 GB hard drive. My mother used it for important stuff, and I played games on it. Given the limitations of the 3 GB hard drive, this soon lead to a conflict: there was no room to store any new games! I did my best to make additional room by running the disk cleaner utility, disabling unnecessary Windows features and deleting some PDF catalogues that my mother had downloaded, but there was still a constant lack of space. Armed with a lack of knowledge about computers, I went further and found a tool that promised to make more room on the hard drive. I can’t remember what it was, but it had a nice graphical user interface where the space on the drive was represented as a pie chart. To my amazement, I could slide that pie chart to make it so that 90% of the drive was free space! I went full speed ahead with it. What followed was a crash and upon rebooting I was presented with a black screen. Oops. My mother ended up taking it to a repair shop for 1200 EEK, which was a lot of money at the time. The repair shop ended up installing Windows 98 SE on it, which felt like a downgrade at the time, but in retrospect it was an improvement over Windows Me. I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but I assume that the tool I was playing with was some sort of a partition manager that had no safeguards in place to avoid shrinking and reformatting operating system partitions. Or if it did, then it made ignoring the big warning signs way too easy. Still 100% user error on my part. If only I knew that reinstalling Windows was a relatively simple operation at the time, but it took a solid 4-5 years until I did my first installation of Windows all by myself.

Last week I wrote 2 main posts in reaction to the Nintendo Switch 2 announcement, and today we have new info on some of the open questions that lingered waaaay back then. Game-key cards I saw a remarkable amount of arguments against this new "physical" purchase option based

Plus the terrifying story of what actually happened to Boeing's Starliner capsule, and a terrible Star Trek opinion.

Oh boy, Meta released their latest llama models this weekend (I guess because they leaked, hence the rushed weekend release?), and it benchmarked quite well on LMArena. However, as Kyle Wiggers reported for TechCrunch, not all may have been on the up and up: Meta’s Benchmarks for Its