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What is cyberpunk? You may not have a specific definition of the word, but here in our corporatist, AI-inflected, body-modded, post-plague world, you can certainly feel a particular cyberpunkish vibe. Somewhere in the Thatcher/Reagan crucible of the 80’s a new literary worldview peeked out from between the painstakingly crafted sentences written by William Gibson in his seminal novel Neuromancer. From there, cyberpunk invaded movies, fashion, critical theory, and, of course, video games.

A couple years ago, in an extensive review of the video game Cyberpunk 2077, game designer Tim Rogers laid out the most through exploration of cyberpunk ever released on the tubes of the internet. Maybe you don’t play video games. That’s ok. This “review” is about far, far more than video games. It’s long. It’s glorious. It’s experimental. It’s essential viewing. Here’s more from Tim Rogers at Action Button:

Action Button Reviews Cyberpunk 2077. Season One Finale. Presented with an introduction and seven stories with six intermissions. This video is absolutely not intended to watch in one sitting. As always, we strongly encourage you to consider this video a mini-series. For optimal enjoyment of this review we recommend following the instructions given in this introduction chapter. We tried a more experimental structure this time–a structure so experimental no existing app properly supports it. So we deliver this review to you with the smallest possible collection of necessary compromises…

More from Tim Rogers and Action Button!

We’ve got so much happening here at Adafruit that it’s not always easy to keep up! Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered. Each week we’ll be posting a handy round-up of what we’ve been up to, ranging from learn guides to blog articles, videos, and more.

Festival of Lights – Tiny Round 0.7″ TFT Display

Magical Light-up Dreidel

Testing Mini Sparkle Motion board & a WLED fix

Catch up with us on our blog, in our learn system, or on YouTube.

Ann Telnaes, from her personal site (alas) on Substack:

I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations — and some differences — about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.

The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/OpenAI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner. [...]

As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness”.

The only thing wrong with the cartoon is that she drew it too soon to include Tim Cook. The cartoon isn’t even particularly scathing. I’d describe it as tame even. It shows these moguls as offering money to Trump — which they are! What a bizarre decision by Telnaes’s editors. It’d be like me getting offended if someone drew a cartoon that showed me wasting money betting on the Dallas Cowboys. If the shoe fits you have to wear it.

This isn’t a sign that the Washington Post has taken another turn for the worse. It’s simply proof of what many of us wrote before the election, when Bezos kiboshed the Post editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. In one fell swoop that decision collapsed the entirety of The Washington Post’s editorial integrity. This Telnaes fiasco is just more proof. More will follow until Bezos sells.

Sometimes the best inventions are the unintentional ones. Smithonsian shares how tinkerer Erwin Perzy I made the first snow globe when trying to make better lighting for operating rooms.

In the opening scene of the 1941 mystery Citizen Kane, the eponymous protagonist, played by Orson Welles, clenches a snow globe in his hand as he utters his last word: “rosebud.” The glass-encased spherical diorama of a snowy scene was a mere novelty at the time, but the film, in part, gave rise to its popularity.

Now, more than 80 years later, it’s hard to imagine the Christmas season without snow globes. A symbol of childhood nostalgia, the Austrian innovation has become beloved around the world.

Read more.

Want to make your own snow globe? Check out some of our projects in the Adafruit learn system!

On December 24th, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe passed 3.8 million miles above the surface of the sun. That may sound like an enormous distance, but the Christmas Eve flight through the Sun’s atmosphere is the closest humanity has ever come to the star at the center of our solar system.  Here’s more from NASA:

“Flying this close to the Sun is a historic moment in humanity’s first mission to a star,” said Nicky Fox, who leads the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “By studying the Sun up close, we can better understand its impacts throughout our solar system, including on the technology we use daily on Earth and in space, as well as learn about the workings of stars across the universe to aid in our search for habitable worlds beyond our home planet.”

See and learn more!

Kelly Hooper, reporting for Politico on 9 January 2021:

The Biden Inaugural Committee on Saturday released its list of donors, which included Google, Microsoft, Boeing and several other major corporations. The list contains all contributors who donated more than $200 to President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony and related activities.

That website is now defunct, and the “bideninaugural.org” domain redirects (for the next 17 days) to “www.whitehouse.gov”, but Internet Archive has a capture from Inauguration Day, 20 January 2021.

Apple is not listed, and while there is a “Tim Cook” on the list, he’s listed as residing in Michigan.

All “great American traditions” have to start somewhere, and perhaps Tim Cook — the one from California, by way of Alabama — believes the great American tradition of donating money to presidential inaugural committees is only beginning now. Or, giving him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he only saw fit to contribute $199 to Biden’s inauguration and thus wasn’t listed, and bumped his donation by $999,801 this time. You know, for “unity”.

(Thanks to reader Daniel Streicher for the link.)

Hard not to think of this clip today, re: an egomaniacal villain, whose worldview is frozen several decades in the past, setting the terms for an extortion racket.

XDA Developers share the details about this cool project from Arnov Sharma on how to make your own portable air quality meter using a Raspberry Pi Pico 2.

We love our practical Raspberry Pi projects here at XDA. Just ask Jeff Butts, who recently wrote our tutorial on turning a Raspberry Pi into an air monitor. While Jeff is always on the hunt for something to make or 3D print, he may want to revisit his old project for 2025, as someone has shown off a Raspberry Pi-powered air monitor you can take wherever you go.

Read more about the project and learn how to make your own.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

Axios co-founder Mike Allen:

Apple CEO Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to President-elect Trump’s inaugural committee, sources with knowledge of the donation tell Axios. [...]

Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity, the sources said. The company is not expected to give.

Donald Trump tried to overthrow the legitimate results of the 2020 election to remain in office, and as part of his efforts, inspired a violent mob of insurrectionists to invade the U.S. Capitol and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

For that reason alone — there are, of course, many others, but to me, Trump’s betrayal of U.S. democracy itself remains paramount — this donation is gross and perverse. But I’m not sure it was feasible not to play ball here. In times like this, realpolitik is the only politics. I wouldn’t have the stomach to make this donation, and those of you disgusted by this likely don’t either. Few people are cut out to be the CEO of a large multinational company like Apple. Sometimes you have to eat the shit sandwich.

It seems pretty obvious that it was Apple/Cook that leaked this to Axios, not Trump’s side, given the eye-roll-inducing “proud American tradition” spin, but more especially the nugget that only Cook personally, not Apple as a company, is contributing. That’s Cook asking for any and all ire to be directed at him, personally, not Apple. Good luck with that.

Fascinating piece by Ben Cohen for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

And there are two things I learned about the EUV tool I saw that I can’t get out of my head:

1. ASML teamed up with a German optical company to develop mirrors so flat that if they were scaled up to the size of Germany itself, their largest imperfection would be less than a millimeter.

2. The precision of EUV machines is comparable to directing a laser beam from your house and hitting a ping-pong ball on the moon.

It took decades for these absurdly sophisticated machines to make their way from labs to fabs. And until recently, it wasn’t clear if the company’s audacious bet on EUV lithography would ever pay off. In 2012, ASML was strapped for cash and sold a 23% equity stake to Intel, Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which meant its biggest customers were literally invested in the company’s success.

ASML soon ramped up production — very, very slowly. The company delivered the first EUV system in 2010. Not until 2020 did it deliver the 100th. And last year was a busy one: ASML shipped a total of 42 EUV machines.

The piece is also a profile of one ASML engineer, Brienna Hall, who is one of a small cadre of frontline support engineers who keep these machines operating perfectly. The article’s headline, though, is bizarrely framed to suggest that she’s the only such support engineer in the world. The weird headline distracts from an otherwise fascinating story.

PetaPixel talked with Greg Annandale, the photographer behind some of the iconic desktop wallpaper for Raspberry Pi OS.

Annandale works for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, an educational charity distinct from Raspberry Pi the commercial entity. He works in software engineering, building educational programs for young people.

It means he is only a part-time photographer but when he does work he often travels for a substantial amount of time.

“Since around 2012 I’ve been shooting travel, landscape and expedition images at some level,” he explains.

“More recently, whilst travel time has reduced significantly, I’ve focused more on purposeful image-taking for science and documentary use (this has led to a fellowship at the Royal Geographical Society).”

Read more!

See more of the Raspberry Pi Desktop Images from Greg Annandale and on Flickr

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

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Hang out with Noe & Pedro Ruiz every week and discover 3D printing! Get your 3D news, projects, design tutorials, shop talk and more each week..

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Join Ladyada streaming live for circuit board layout design, code writing, surface mount soldering and more fresh engineering and even some gaming! If Ladyada’s working on it, you’ll find it here first.

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Chip Shortage includes videos about the ongoing chip shortage in the electronics industry. Adafruit founder Ladyada discusses the current state and highlights products that are hard to get or possibly “unobtainium”.

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According to the historical text The Cash of the Titans, the gods gifted the hero Perseus with a mechanical owl named Bubo. Made of brass feathers, whirring gears, and big bilinking eyes, Bubo protected Perseus as he sought out a titan so that it could fight a titan. Those of us who are not demigods may be able to summon up a robot similar to Bubo, with this DIY owlet project from Motbots, via Instructables:

The OwlBot (a.k.a. “The Bird Intimidator”) we’ll be making will be done in several parts. The OwlBot is an ambitious project. When complete, the OwlBot will sense motion. When motion is detected, the OwlBot should make owl sounds, perform varying movements, and flash its red eyes to intimidate and scare away pests. To put together all these tasks in one page would be too long and cumbersome, so we’ve decided to split each process we want the OwlBot to do into easy to accomplish chunks or parts as we continue on our goal to complete the OwlBot.

See more!

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

January 1st was Public Domain Day, an observance of when copyrights expire and works enter into the public domain. In the United States that means anything published in 1929 is now in the public domain! One work joining the list that we think is neat is The Skeleton Dance

Via https://web.law.duke.edu

On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon.[2] 2025 marks a milestone: all of the books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’ in the Rain. Below is just a handful of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2025.[3] To find more material from 1929, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.

Also check out the public domain review dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works that have fallen into the public domain!

FoamyGuy has posted his CircuitPython2025 as a GitHub Gist:

My thoughts around CircuitPython in 2025 break down broadly into general wishes and thoughts about the project and more personalized and specific thoughts, goals and ideas for myself.

For the project generally:

I am intrigued by the prospect of potentially integrating with zephyr, though some of the finer details of what this entails and what impacts it will have are over my head, from what I’ve understood listening to Scott talk about it in meetings and on Deep Dive there are interesting and good benefits that it could offer. I think I recall a mention or two on the possibility of using LVGL, which is definitely something I’d be happy to see happen, even if it’s in a limited capacity or not fully exposed imediately. I’m also looking forward to some of the new crypto functionality being implemented primarily for circuitmatter. While I don’t have specific uses for it in mind, I do have a hobbyist interest in cryptography and playing with the crypto implementations on circuitpython and microcontrollers is a fun intersection interests for me. I’d also mention that I’ve been happy to see some of the new features and functionality around audio from 2024 and am excited to see whats ahead, I need to make it a point to play with more of this in 2025.

For me more specifically:

Throughout the end of 2024 and continuing into 2025 I increased how much time each week that I am working on CircuitPython. My prior full time job has been winding down, and I’ve moved to Adafruit and CircuitPython work being my primary work. It has been great to be able to spend more time on CircuitPython in the last month or two, and I am looking forward to more in 2025.

One goal of mine is to get more comfortable with C code like the CircuitPython core and Arduino drivers that ultimately get ported to CircuitPython implementations. Prior to working on small things inside of the CircuitPython core I had no experience or education with C, I’ve learned a lot by tinkering inside of the core, but I’d like to level up further and get the fundamentals down better. Perhaps a worthy goal is getting this skill to a point where I could be useful in helping the effort to one day use LVGL with CircuitPython.

Another goal is getting more practice with and understanding of I2C driver libraries. Recently I worked with Liz on the VCNL4200 driver which was my first time really diving into the internals of this type of library. In the new year I hope to get more experience with it by working on more driver libraries for new breakouts.

An on-going goal of mine is creating useful displayio widgets. The only specific one in the works right now is scrollable list that shows a fixed number of items visually but allows scrolling through a larger list of items. I’m sure some others will come up throughout the year, I’ve heard that there may be some circular display projects in my future, so perhaps some more things suited to them are in order.

A potentially smaller thing I’m looking forward to tinkering with in 2025 is Meshtastic. I’ve picked up a few of the starter boards that are recomended to bein with and already have a CircuitPython port avaialble. I’m interested to play with Meshtastic generally and then see what if any posibilities there are for CircuitPython integration.

Lastly I’d love to work on more games for CircuitPython in 2025. I created a few for learn guides in 2024, and look forward more this year. On the personal project side I’m also aiming for a more ambitious game project than any of my previous. I’ve started building out a few of the componenets it will use, and doing some testing on graphics approaches and their memory usage to figure out how big I can reasonably aim for the world and number of different items.

Wishing everyone in the CircuitPython community a Happy New Year. Have fun tinkering in 2025 Tim

We’re excited for FoamyGuy to work more on CircuitPython!

#CircuitPython2025 is our annual reflection on the state of CircuitPython. We’d love to hear from you too! See the kick-off post for all of the details. Please post by January 14th and email circuitpython2025@adafruit.com to let us know so we can link to it.

Past posts:

• @jepler (aka @stylus) posted big news to Mastodon.
• Kick off blog post.

It’s a new year! Time to take on moooore projects! Maybe we’ll replace the FONA family with LTE modules this year. The First thing we need to do is get a good SIM card holder. We don’t have a breakout for one already, so we’re just going to whip this one up so we have it ready for when we need to prototype. We can put it in the shop, too.

We got the ‘big’ Sparkle Motion boards out to the PCB fab house and now are turning to the mini version. This one doesn’t have USB PD or 24V support, but it is very compact and has many niceties that WLED users will enjoy…like built-in ICS-43434 microphone, however during testing, we discovered that GPIO 9 and 10 were not available because the ESP32-Mini module we’re using has slightly different pin availability! No biggie with open source firmware: we just forked and fixed and PR’d the changes here – video.

PatrickBlom shares:

We have had an Ikea SNIGLAR changing table in our basement for a while, which is rarely used. I wanted to repurpose it as a shelf that could also be mobile. Fortunately, I still had some old office chair wheels that I wanted to attach to the changing table.

download the files on: https://www.printables.com/model/1121585-office-chair-wheel-adapter-for-ikea-sniglar

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord

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Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting

3D Printing Projects Playlist:

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Noe’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/ecken

Pedro’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/videopixil

Speaking of Simon Willison, I greatly enjoyed this post from last week, with some of the self-imposed principles he follows writing his excellent eponymous blog. Amongst them:

• I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to, if I can figure that out. Credit is really important, and it’s also useful for myself because I can later search for someone’s name and find other interesting things they have created that I linked to in the past. If I’ve linked to someone’s work three or more times I also try to notice and upgrade them to a dedicated tag. [...]
• If the original author reads my post, I want them to feel good about it. I know from my own experience that often when you publish something online the silence can be deafening. Knowing that someone else read, appreciated, understood and then shared your work can be very pleasant.
• A slightly self-involved concern I have is that I like to prove that I’ve read it. This is more for me than for anyone else: I don’t like to recommend something if I’ve not read that thing myself, and sticking in a detail that shows I read past the first paragraph helps keep me honest about that.

Every step of the way, I found myself nodding my head, thinking to myself, I do that too! — right down to creating tags for people after I’ve mentioned their work or simply credited their bylines a few times. (The difference is that Willison seemingly isn’t a procrastinator, and I am, so my decades of tagging aren’t yet exposed to anyone but me.)

Then I got to this:

There are a lot of great link blogs out there, but the one that has influenced me the most in how I approach my own is John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. I really like the way he mixes commentary, quotations and value-added relevant information.

And now it doesn’t seem quite as amazing that I was nodding my head in agreement with each of his guidelines. But, call me biased, it’s still a hell of a good start to a blogging rulebook.

Shared by 3DeepPrinting on MakerWorld

Cute Banana Keyboard Clicker – No supports

Download the files and learn more

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!