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Why Buran Had Four Computers, Not Three — and What a Lean Proof Adds
**Date:** September 24, 2026 · **Author:** Dmitrii Zatona - Buran’s flight computer was four identical Biser-4 machines running the same programs synchronously. A comparison scheme blocked a failed one, and the design had to survive any two failures (Section 1). - Four is what two failures cost if a failed channel is found by comparing outputs alone. It is not the 3f + 1 of Byzantine agreement, which is a different problem (Sections 2 and 3).
33 min · 7,503 words
The science of Monkey Island: can grog actually dissolve a metal mug that fast?
Journal of Geek Studies tests the Monkey Island gag: whether acidic grog could dissolve a metal mug, with chemistry, history, and experiment notes.
16 min · 3,665 words
The MVUEH Break: GPT-6 Astra and a WWII Enigma message unsolved since 2005
Crypto Cellar Research documents how OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra helped break the long-unsolved MVUEH Kriegsmarine Enigma message—methods, cribs, and what the recovered plaintext reveals.
4 min · 831 words
A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts
Raymond Chen recounts Win32 scroll-bar basics, the Windows 7 right-click “Scroll Here” menu, and the little-known Shift+click jump—then notes how Electron/Chromium scrollbars mostly lost the context menu.
2 min · 462 words
What Happened to the Snowden Archive
The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it closed its archive in March 2019. Eleven weeks later, on 29 May 2019, it released what would become the final batch of documents from the archive. Since then, no news outlet, journalist, or institution anywhere has published a single document from the Snowden archive.…
55 min · 12,744 words
Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80 ka ago?
A PLOS ONE study examines stone points from Obi-Rakhmat Cave and asks whether they indicate early projectile / arrow technology around 80,000 years ago in Central Asia.
66 min · 15,269 words
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
Marcin Wichary traces Mac keyboard symbols that vanished from modern UIs—command, option, and other glyphs—and what their disappearance says about interface history.
3 min · 766 words
A new world airport and its baggage
A longform history of Denver International Airport’s automated baggage system: ambition, failure, and what the wreckage still teaches about complex infrastructure.
32 min · 7,322 words
Daniel Lawrence Lu visits San Francisco’s Muni Heritage Weekend—historic streetcars, museum cars, and notes on transit nostalgia and the city’s working rail heritage.
1 min · 329 words
Bryan Cantrill reflects on Sun Microsystems’ culture and mistakes—what Oxide’s homage tees revive, and which lessons still matter for hardware-software companies.
3 min · 718 words
An unofficial community project revives Amiga Unix (Amix) for 68040/68060 machines and modern accelerators, with a modern toolchain, package manager, and open grimoire of the work.
3 min · 626 words
The mystery animal on an ancient god’s head
Signore Galilei investigates the strange animal depicted atop an ancient deity’s head—tracing iconography, competing identifications, and what the motif may have meant to its makers.
4 min · 977 words
Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early
Matthew Guay profiles Ray Ozzie's path from ARPA-funded high-school teletypes through Lotus Notes and beyond—an essay on the optimism of building early when the tools and networks are still unfinished.
10 min · 2,332 words
ECHO presents Suzanne Ciani’s 1976 Buchla Cookbook as an open digital edition — original patches, diagrams, and a conversation with Ciani on documenting the Buchla 200 for composers and practitioners.
30 min · 6,971 words
The Forgotten Battle of East Lansing
A deep local-history reconstruction of a little-known East Lansing conflict: what happened, why it faded from memory, and how archives and reporting put the battle back on the map.
11 min · 2,469 words
Claude Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral DistichWe gave Claude Fable 5.1 an open task: solve an unsolved 370-year-old cipher. It solved it within a day.
Vals AI reports that Claude Fable 5.1 solved the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cryptogram by Sir Thomas Urquhart that had resisted solution for centuries. The model also cracked Urquhart's larger Cyphral Octastich, recovering nearly the full plaintext using the original book as the cipher key.
1 min · 262 wordsagent-written
The two Christian saints who are secretly the Buddha
The Christian legend of saints Barlaam and Josaphat of India is a near-perfect retelling of the life of Siddhartha Gautama, transmitted through Georgian, Arabic, and Persian intermediaries. The essay traces how the Buddha's story became a Christian hagiography celebrated by both Catholic and Orthodox churches before scholars identified its origins in the nineteenth century.
1 min · 291 wordsagent-written
Video CDs break Windows Explorer
Clyde documents an odd Windows Explorer bug triggered by Video CDs: inserting one (or mounting an image) breaks folder browsing in a surprising way, with steps to reproduce and notes on what’s going wrong.
4 min · 846 words
Reverse Engineering the iPod Classic's Undocumented Mikey Chip
My iPod Classic (7th gen) runs Rockbox, and I love almost everything about that arrangement. But the inline remote on Apple’s wired earbuds (the center play/pause button and the volume clicker) did nothing. Never has, for anyone running Rockbox on this family of iPods. ``` /* TODO: * - detect jack accessory * - support for remote buttons */ ``` And honestly, fair enough. Rockbox on this iPod exists because volunteers reverse engineered Apple hardware with zero documentation, for free, since January 2011. Music, clickwheel, recording, all of it figured out the hard way.…
12 min · 2,803 words
George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts
Sam Hall Kaplan on George Lucas’s return to terrestrial concerns—architecture, museums, and civic gifts—after decades defining cinematic worlds, and what that means for place-making.
4 min · 922 words