tal
@tal@olio.cafe
- Comment on Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! 46 minutes ago:
I think that you’re going to likely get more-helpful suggestions if you list some games or genres that you like, something beyond “No Final Fantasy” and “No GTA”.
This Reddit post has a list of PS2 games that “still hold up”, without genre restrictions. There’s nothing there that I glance at and say “oh, I loved that and one needs to go back and play it”, but it’s probably a reasonable starting point. I mean, I enjoyed Max Payne (which I would also recommend playing on the PC instead) when it came out, but I don’t know if I’d go back and play it as an FPS in 2025.
- Comment on Open Printer is a fully open-source inkjet with DRM-free ink and no subscriptions 4 hours ago:
Plotters do (well, ones that feed off a roll rather than using a table). Common if you need to do larger prints.
Supported paper sizes include North American letter, tabloid, European A4, A3, 11-inch-wide rolls, and 27mm-wide rolls.
Here’s 11-inch rolls:
https://buyrolls.com/11-x-150-20-plotter-paper-2-core-8-rolls-case.html
- Comment on Open Printer is a fully open-source inkjet with DRM-free ink and no subscriptions 5 hours ago:
I’ve used pen plotters that feed off a roll like that. One benefit is that you don’t have restrictions on how long your print is — you can make very large continuous images. That can be desirable for certain applications.
The pen plotter I used had a paper cutter that sliced the paper at the end of a print. I don’t know if this thing slices at the end of each page or what.
kagis
Ah. Apparently it also can handle pre-cut sheets, and it additionally has a cutter for the roll:
The printer’s paper, meanwhile, can be loaded as pre-cut sheets in letter, tabloid, A4, and A3 sizes, or as a continuous roll — with a built-in cutter knife able to trim the latter to the desired size following the completion of each page.
I dunno if they have a paper feeder, or if you have to insert pre-cut sheets one at a time, which I imagine would be obnoxious.
- Comment on Open Printer is a fully open-source inkjet with DRM-free ink and no subscriptions 5 hours ago:
You can get inkjet printers that don’t have restrictions on the ink. They cost more, though.
The reason printer manufacturers are so hell-bent on being a pain in the ass with the ink is because they’re using a razor-and-blades model. They’re selling you the printer at a lower price than they really should, if their price reflected their costs, with the expectation that they’ll make their money back when you buy ink at a higher price than you really should, because people pay more attention to the the initial price of the printer than to the consumable costs.
Same way you can get unlocked cell phones instead of network-locked cell phones with a plan. Gaming PCs instead of consoles. It’s not that they’re unavailable, but you’re gonna have to accept a higher up-front cost, because you’re not getting a subsidy from the manufacturer.
Canon sells a line of inkjet printers that just take ink from a bottle. No hassles with restrictions on ink supply there. The ink is cheap, and there are third-party options that are even cheaper readily available…but you’re going to pay full price for the printer.
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/printers/megatank-printers
Their lowest-end “MegaTank” printer is $230:
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/megatank-pixma-g3290
A pack of third-party ink refill bottles is $15, and will print (using Canon’s metrics), about 7,700 color pages and 9,000 black-and-white pages:
https://www.amazon.com/Refill-Compatible-Bottles-MegaTank-4-Pack/dp/B0DSPSS5W7
Compatible GI-21 Black Ink Bottle Up to 9,000 pages, GI-21 Cyan/Magenta/Yellow Ink Bottles Up to 7,700 pages
On the other hand, Canon’s lowest-end “cartridge” printer, where they use the razor-and-blades model, is $55.
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/pixma-ts3720-wireless-home-all-in-one-printer
But you rapidly pay for it with the ink; It looks like they presently sell a set of replacement cartridges for $91. And that set will print a tiny fraction of the number of pages that the above ink bottles will print.
page yield of 400 Black / 400 Color pages per ink cartridge set and cost of $90.99 for a value pack of PG-285(XL) and CL-286(XL) ink cartridges (using Canon Online Store prices as of June 2025).
All that being said, I do think that lasers are awfully nice in that you don’t need to deal with nozzles clogging. You can leave a laser printer for years and it’ll just work when you start it up.
- Comment on Open Printer is a fully open-source inkjet with DRM-free ink and no subscriptions 6 hours ago:
While I’d personally love to see an open color lazer printer more. (Less wasteful and more rugged)
I use a black-and-white laser printer, but if I were going to use a color laser printer, I’d like to have an open color laser printer simply because I’d like to have a printer that isn’t dumping printer tracking dots into each image I print.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
I don’t know if there’s a term for them, but Bacula (and I think AMANDA might fall into this camp, but I haven’t looked at it in ages) are oriented more towards…"institutional” backup. Like, there’s a dedicated backup server, maybe dedicated offline media like tapes, the backup server needs to drive the backup, etc).
There are some things that
rsnapshot,rdiff-backup,duplicity, and so forth won’t do.At least some of them (
rdiff-backup, for one) won’t dedup files with different names. If a file is unchanged, it won’t use extra storage, but it won’t identify different identical files at different locations. This usually isn’t all that important for a single host, other than maybe if you rename files, but if you’re backing up many different hosts, as in an institutional setting, they likely files in common. They aren’t intended to back up multiple hosts to a single, shared repository.Pull-only. I think that it might be possible to run some of the above three in “pull” mode, where the backup server connects and gets the backup, but where they don’t have the ability to write to the backup server. This may be desirable if you’re concerned about a host being compromised, but not the backup server, since it means that an attacker can’t go dick with your backups. Think of those cybercriminals who encrypt data at a company and wipe other copies and then demand a ransom for an unlock key. But the “institutional” backup systems are going to be aimed at having the backup server drive all this, and have the backup server have access to log into the individual hosts and pull the backups over.
Dedup for non-identical files. Note that
resticcan do this. While files might not be identical, they might share some common elements, and one might want to try to take advantage of that in backup storage.rdiff-backupandrsnapshotdon’t do encryption (thoughduplicitydoes). If one intends to use storage not under one’s physical control (e.g. “cloud backup"), this might be a concern.No “full” backups. Some backup programs follow a scheme where one periodically does a backup that stores a full copy of the data, and then stores “incremental” backups from the last full backup. All
rsnapshot,rdiff-backup, andduplicityare always-incremental, and are aimed at storing their backups on a single destination filesystem. A split between “full” and “incremental” is probably something you want if you’re using, say, tape storage and having backups that span multiple tapes, since it controls how many pieces of media you have to dig up to perform a restore.I don’t know how Bacula or AMANDA handle it, if at all, but if you have a DBMS like PostgreSQL or MySQL or the like, it’s may be constantly receiving writes. This means that you can’t get an atomic snapshot of the database, which is critical if you want to be reliably backing up the storage. I don’t know what the convention is here, but I’d guess either using filesystem-level atomic snapshot support (e.g.
btrfs) or requiring the backup system to be aware of the DBMS and instructing it to suspend modification while it does the backup.rsnapshot,rdiff-backup, andduplicityaren’t going to do anything like that.
I’d agree that using the more-heavyweight, “institutional” backup programs can make sense for some use cases, like if you’re backing up many workstations or something.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Because every “file” in the snapshot is either a file or a hard link to an identical version of that file in another snapshot.) So this can be a problem if you store many snapshots of many files.
I think that you may be thinking of
rsnapshotrather thanrdiff-backupwhich has that behavior; both usersync.But I’m not sure why you’d be concerned about this behavior.
Are you worried about inode exhaustion on the destination filesystem?
- Comment on 2 days ago:
slow
rsyncis pretty fast, frankly. Once it’s run once, if you have-aor-tpassed, if the modification time and filesize matches, by default,rsyncwon’t look at a file further. You can’t really beat that for speed unless you have some sort of monitoring system in place (like, filesystem-level support for identifying different files). - Comment on 2 days ago:
Most Unix commands will show a short list of the most-helpful flags if you use
--helpor-h. - Comment on 2 days ago:
sedcan do a bunch of things, but I overwhelmingly use it for a single operation in a pipeline: thes//operation. I think that that’s worth knowing.sed 's/foo/bar/'will replace all the first text in each line matching the regex “foo” with “bar”.That’ll already handle a lot of cases, but a few other helpful sub-uses:
sed 's/foo/bar/g'will replace all text matching regex “foo” with “bar”, even if there are more than one per line`sed ‘s/([0-9a-f]*)/0x\1/g’ will take the text inside the backslash-escaped parens and put that matched text back in the replacement text, where one has ‘\1’. In the above example, that’s finding all hexadecimal strings and prefixing them with ‘0x’
If you want to match a literal “/”, the easiest way to do it is to just use a different separator; if you use something other than a “/” as separator after the “s”,
sedwill expect that later in the expression too, like this:`sed ‘s%/%SLASH%g’ will replace all instances of a “/” in the text with “SLASH”.
- Comment on 2 days ago:
I would generally argue that rsync is not a backup solution.
Yeah, if you want to use rsync, you’re probably better-off using something like
rdiff-backup, which makes use of rsync to generate backups and store them efficiently.rsync: one-way synchronizationunison: bidirectional synchronizationgit: synchronization of text files with good interactive merging.rdiff-backup:rsync-based backups. I used to use this and moved torestic, as thebackupninjatarget forrdiff-backuphas kind of fallen into disrepair. - Comment on how do I find process that leads to oom? 3 days ago:
OOMs happen because your system is out of memory.
The kernel tries to “blame” a process and will kill it, as you’ve seen, but ultimately, you may know better than it which is acting in a way you don’t want”.
It may be that you simply don’t have enough memory to do what you want to do. You might be able to get by by adding more paging (space.
- Comment on 60hz Displays are a slideshow 3 days ago:
I’m the other way. I’d rather have battery life on cell phones, and turn the refresh rate down.
On a desktop, where the power usage is basically irrelevant, then sure, I’ll crank the refresh rate way up.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
Ah, gotcha. Just for the record — though it doesn’t really matter as regards your point, because I was incorrectly assuming that you were using it as an example of with something with Firewire onboard — there are apparently two different products:
The 1010 has a PCI card, but it talks to an external box:
The 1010LT has a PCI card alone, no external box, and then a ton of cables that fan out directly from the card:
Neither appears to have a Firewire interface. IIRC, the 1010LT was less expensive, was the one I was using.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
I have a feeling its mostly due to some audio and video hardware that has some real longevity. I’ve got a VHS+minidv player that I am transferring old videos from using FireWire (well, for the minidv. VHS is s-video capture).
Yeah, that’s a thought…though honestly, unless whatever someone is doing requires real-time processing and adding latency is a problem, they can probably pass it through some other old device that can speak both Firewire and something else.
Probably the m-audio delta 1010
That doesn’t have a Firewire interface, does it? I thought I had one of those.
checks
Oh, I’m thinking of the 1010LT, not the 1010. That lives on a PCI card.
- Comment on YSK: You should enable peak refresh rate in Android 5 days ago:
I turn the refresh rate down on phones, where battery matters. I turn it up on desktops, where it doesn’t matter.
- Comment on 5 days ago:
If it’s Linux, sounds like it should just work out of box, at least for a while longer.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-to-support-firewire-until-2029
Linux to Support Firewire Until 2029
The ancient connectivity standard still has years of life ahead of it.
Firewire is getting a new lease on life and will have extended support up to 2029 on Linux operating systems. Phoronix reports that a Linux maintainer Takashi Sakamoto has volunteered to oversee the Firewire subsystem for Linux during this time, and will work on Firewire’s core functions and sound drivers for the remaining few that still use the connectivity standard.
Further, Takashi Sakamoto says that his work will help users transition from Firewire to more modern technology standards (like perhaps USB 2.0). Apparently, Firewire still has a dedicated fanbase that is big enough to warrant six more years of support. But we suspect this will be the final stretch for Firewire support, surrounding Linux operating systems. Once 2029 comes around, there’s a good chance Firewire will finally be dropped from the Linux kernel altogether.
- Comment on Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme crushes Apple M4, Intel, and AMD in new benchmarks 6 days ago:
Ah. Thanks for the context.
Well, after they have product out, third parties will benchmark them, and we’ll see how they actually stack up.
- Comment on Britons believe the UK is seen by the rest of the world as ‘weak’ and ‘soft touch’ 6 days ago:
Just 1 in 4 Brits think the UK is viewed positively on the world stage, with most wanting their country to play a large role in international affairs, exclusive poll shows
I — American — view the UK positively in international affairs, but frankly, if you’re comparing the UK to its recent history:
The UK itself has grown, but a lot of international influence came from the UK being, globally, at the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. That’s a discovery-of-fire level event, a pretty rare situation in human history.
That was a major part of the Great Divergence; the UK was highly developed, and pulled wildly more than its weight in per capita terms.
If the bar that a Briton is setting is relative to the UK’s international role over the past couple centuries, that’s a high bar to set, because the UK had extraordinary influence in the world in that period. That’s not because the UK’s economy has become weaker, but because the world has been economically converging; less-developed countries have been catching up. I’d say that the UK definitely punches well above its weight in population terms internationally today, and is probably relatively-engaged. Could it do more? Well, I’m sure it could. But I don’t really think of the UK as especially isolationist. Name another country of 70 million that independently has as large an impact internationally.
- Comment on How do you secure your home lab? Like, physically? From thieves? 6 days ago:
Yeah, I saw, but it’s an interesting topic.
- Comment on How do you secure your home lab? Like, physically? From thieves? 6 days ago:
Is your concern compromise of your data or loss of the server?
My guess is that most burglaries don’t wind up with people trying to make use of the data on computers.
As to loss, I mean, do an off-site backup of stuff that you can’t handle losing and in the unlikely case that it gets stolen, be prepared to replace hardware.
If you just want to keep the hardware out of sight and create a minimal barrier, you can get locking, ventillated racks. I donlt know how cost-effective that is; I’d think that that might cost more than the expected value of the loss from theft. If a computer costs $1000 and you have a 1% chance of it being stolen, you should not spend more than $10 on prevention in terms of reducing cost of hardware loss, eveb if that method is 100% effective.
- Comment on How do you secure your home lab? Like, physically? From thieves? 6 days ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantrap_%28snare%29
Mantraps that use deadly force are illegal in the United States, and in notable tort law cases the trespasser has successfully sued the property owner for damages caused by the mantrap. There is also the possibility that such traps could endanger emergency service personnel such as firefighters who must forcefully enter such buildings during emergencies. As noted in the important American court case of Katko v. Briney, “the law has always placed a higher value upon human safety than upon mere rights of property”.[5]
- Comment on Recommendations for Note taking app with simple needs 1 week ago:
You might want to list the platform you’re using. I’m assuming that you’re wanting to access this on a smartphone of some sort?
- Comment on Suggestions to have a home server VPN and and Mullvad at the same time? 1 week ago:
Mulvad apparently uses Wireguard. Is there an Android Wireguard client that supports multiple VPNs?
- Comment on !askgaming@piefed.social , to discuss about video games 1 week ago:
Note that there is a !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk.
- Comment on Low birthrates in England could lead to ‘closure of 800 primary schools by 2029’ 1 week ago:
- Comment on Hyperpop 1 week ago:
For anyone else not familiar with hyperpop:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpop
Hyperpop is an electronic music movement and loosely defined microgenre that originated in the early 2010s in the United Kingdom. It is characterised by an exaggerated or maximalist take on popular music, and typically integrates pop and avant-garde sensibilities while drawing on elements commonly found in electronic, rock, hip hop, and dance music.
- Comment on Heather Stewart: Labour cosies up to US tech firms with little thought of downsides 2 weeks ago:
Datacentres also rely on water, to help cool the humming banks of hardware. In the UK the Environment Agency, which was already warning about a future water shortfall for homes and farming, recently conceded the rapid expansion of AI had made it impossible to forecast future demand.
Research carried out by Google found that fulfilling a typical prompt entered into its AI assistant Gemini consumed the equivalent of five drops of water – as well as energy equivalent to watching nine seconds of TV.
I mean, the UK could say “we won’t do parallel-processing datacenters”. If truly and honestly, there are hard caps on water or energy specific to the UK that cannot be dealt with, that might make sense.
But I strongly suspect that virtually all applications can be done at a greater distance. Something like an LLM chatbot is comparatively latency-tolerant for most uses — it doesn’t matter whether it’s some milliseconds away — and does not have high bandwidth requirements to the user. If the datacenters aren’t placed in the UK, my assumption is that they’ll be placed somewhere else. Mainland Europe, maybe.
Also, my guess is that water is probably not an issue, at least if one considers the UK as a whole. I had a comment a bit back pointing out that the River Tay — Scotland as a whole, in fact — doesn’t have a ton of datacenters near it the way London does, and has a smaller population around it than does the Thames. If it became necessary, even if it costs more to deal with, it should be possible to dissipate waste heat by evaporating seawater rather than freshwater; as as an archipeligo, nearly all portions of the UK are not far from an effectively-unlimited supply of seawater.
And while the infrastructure for it doesn’t widely exist today, it’s possible to make constructive use of heat, too, like via district heat driven off waste heat; if you already have a city that is a radiator (undesirably) bleeding heat into the environment, having a source of heat to insert into it can be useful.:
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-centre-heating/
Data centres, the essential backbone of our increasingly generative AI world, consume vast amounts of electricity and produce significant amounts of heat.
Countries, especially in Europe, are pioneering the reuse of this waste heat to power homes and businesses in the local area.
As the chart above shows, the United States has by far the most data centres in the world. So many, in fact, the US Energy Information Administration recently announced that these facilities will push the country’s electricity consumption to record highs this year and next. The US is not, however, at the forefront of waste heat adoption. Europe, and particularly the Nordic countries, are instead blazing a trail.
That may be a more-useful strategy in Europe, where a greater proportion of energy is — presently, as I don’t know what will be the case in a warming world — expended on heating than on air conditioning, unlike in the United States. That being said, one also requires sufficient residential population density to make effective use of district heating. And in the UK, there are probably few places that would make use of year-round heating, so only part of the waste heat is utilized.
looks further
The page I linked to mentions something that London — which has many datacenters — is apparently already doing:
And in the UK, the Mayor of London recently announced plans for a new district heat network in the west of the city, expected to heat over 9,000 homes via local data centres.
- Comment on Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg unveils new smart glasses powered by AI 2 weeks ago:
I mean, I’m listing it because I believe that it’s something that has some value that could be done with the information. But it’s a “are the benefits worth the costs” thing? let’s say that you need to pay $800 and wear a specific set of glasses everywhere. Gotta maintain a charge on them. And while they’re maybe discrete compared to a smartphone, I assume that people in a role where they’re prominent (diplomacy, business deal-cutting, etc) probably know what they look like and do, so I imagine that any relationship-building that might come from showing that you can remember someone’s name and personal details ("how are Margaret and the kids?") would likely be somewhat undermined if they know that you’re walking around with the equivalent of your Rolodex in front of your eyeballs. Plus, some people might not like others running around with recording gear (especially in some of the roles listed).
I’m sure that there are a nonzero number of people who would wear them, but I’m hesitant to believe that as they exist today, they’d be a major success.
I think that some of the people who are building some of these things grew up with Snow Crash and it was an influence on them. Google went out and made Google Earth; Snow Crash had a piece of software called Earth that did more-or-less the same thing (albeit with more layers and data sources than Google Earth does today). Snow Crash had the Metaverse with VR goggles and such; Zuckerberg very badly wanted to make it real, and made a VR world and VR hardware and called it the Metaverse. Snow Crash predicts people wearing augmented reality gear, but also talks about some of the social issues inherent with doing so; it didn’t expect everyone to start running around with them:
Someone in this overpass, somewhere, is bouncing a laser beam off Hiro’s face. It’s annoying. Without being too obvious about it, he changes his course slightly, wanders over to a point downwind of a trash fire that’s burning in a steel drum. Now he’s standing in the middle of a plume of diluted smoke that he can smell but can’t quite see.
It’s a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he’s not already conspicuous enough, he’s wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him. Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider, these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.
The CIC brass can’t stand these guys because they upload staggering quantities of useless information to the database, on the off chance that some of it will eventually be useful. It’s like writing down the license number of every car you see on your way to work each morning, just in case one of them will be involved in a hit-and-run accident. Even the CIC database can only hold so much garbage. So, usually, these habitual gargoyles get kicked out of CIC before too long.
This guy hasn’t been kicked out yet. And to judge from the quality of his equipment – which is very expensive – he’s been at it for a while. So he must be pretty good.
If so, what’s he doing hanging around this place?
“Hiro Protagonist,” the gargoyle says as Hiro finally tracks him down in the darkness beside a shanty. “CIC stringer for eleven months. Specializing in the Industry. Former hacker, security guard, pizza deliverer, concert promoter.” He sort of mumbles it, not wanting Hiro to waste his time reciting a bunch of known facts.
The laser that kept jabbing Hiro in the eye was shot out of this guy’s computer, from a peripheral device that sits above his goggles in the middle of his forehead. A long-range retinal scanner. If you turn toward him with your eyes open, the laser shoots out, penetrates your iris, tenderest of sphincters, and scans your retina. The results are shot back to CIC, which has a database of several tens of millions of scanned retinas. Within a few seconds, if you’re in the database already, the owner finds out who you are. If you’re not already in the database, well, you are now.
Of course, the user has to have access privileges. And once he gets your identity, he has to have more access privileges to find out personal information about you. This guy, apparently, has a lot of access privileges. A lot more than Hiro.
“Name’s Lagos,” the gargoyle says.
So this is the guy. Hiro considers asking him what the hell he’s doing here. He’d love to take him out for a drink, talk to him about how the Librarian was coded. But he’s pissed off. Lagos is being rude to him (gargoyles are rude by definition).
“You here on the Raven thing? Or just that fuzz-grunge tip you’ve been working on for the last, uh, thirty-six days approximately?” Lagos says.
Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards,
But the next time the laser darts into his face, it scatters off a million tiny, ashy particulates and reveals itself as a pure geometric line in space, pointing straight back to its source.seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro’s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.I think that Stephenson probably did a reasonable job there of highlighting some of the likely social issues that come with having wearable computers with always-active sensors running.
- Comment on Explain that 2 weeks ago:
kagis
It does sound like there are people who have been working on synthesizing spider silk for some time. So maybe we’ll get there in our lifetimes.
https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/qiy6x/what_is_keeping_us_from_making_synthetic_spider/
Hey, I can tackle this one because I work in a lab where we ARE making synthetic spider silk.
First off, the collection of natural silk or the farming of spiders is difficult on a large scale. This is due to spiders being cannibalistic and territorial. So what we’ve done is create transgenic organisms that create the spider silk proteins for us. These organisms include goats, silkworms, bacteria and alfalfa.
Problems still exist overall. For example, for every organism, except silkworms, we must spin the protein fibers ourselves. This is the current bottleneck in the production line. After the long process of protein purification, the proteins are dissolved in an organic solvent, and pushed through a long thin needle into an alcohol coagulation bath. The fibers are then treated by different methods to try to increase the strength further. Currently, we can take 1 gallon of goats milk and purify between 1 and 10 grams of protein. From 1 gram of protein we an spin hundreds of meters of silk. The silk is not as strong as the native silk, but stronger than Kevlar and silkworm silk. We are currently working on optimizing this procedure, as well as up-scaling it.
The other promising organism is the transgenic silkworms. The benefit of the silkworms is they spin the fibers for us. The most recent data show that a fiber containing 5% spider silk proteins increase the strength of the silkworm silk by 50%. If we can increase the amount of protein in the silkworms, it may be the most promising way to produce large amounts of silk, due to the infrastructure for silk manufacturing already existing for silkworm cocoons.
Currently, I am working on a couple of projects. One is mixing different ratios of silkworm silk and spider silk (created from bacteria), and finding the changes in mechanical strengths. It is unlikely we can go much higher than 20% spider silk proteins with out competently knocking out the silkworm genes altogether (which may be a future project). Another project I am working on is trying to create a human ACL from transgenic silkworm silk/spider silk fibers. We will be cabling and braiding the fibers in different way to find the best method of creating ligaments.
So, in closing, we are making synthetic silks; however, only in the lab. Once the technology is optimized, it will be moved into industry and many different applications may come from it.
https://www.science.org/content/article/black-widows-spin-super-silk
The silk of the humble spider has some pretty impressive properties. It’s one of the sturdiest materials found in nature, stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar. It can be stretched several times its length before it breaks. For these reasons, replicating spider silk in the lab has been a bit of an obsession among materials scientists for decades.
Now, researchers at the University of Cambridge have created a new material that mimics spider silk’s strength, stretchiness and energy-absorbing capacity. This material offers the possibility of improving on products from bike helmets to parachutes to bulletproof jackets to airplane wings. Perhaps its most impressive property? It’s 98 percent water.
“Spiders are interesting models because they are able to produce these superb silk fibers at room temperature using water as a solvent,” says Darshil Shah, an engineer at Cambridge’s Centre for Natural Material Innovation. “This process spiders have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, but we have been unable to copy so far.”
The lab-made fibers are created from a material called a hydrogel, which is 98 percent water and 2 percent silica and cellulose, the latter two held together by cucurbiturils, molecules that serve as “handcuffs.” The silica and cellulose fibers can be pulled from the hydrogel. After 30 seconds or so, the water evaporates, leaving behind only the strong, stretchy thread.
The fibers are extremely strong – though not quite as strong as the strongest spider silks – and, significantly, they can be made at room temperature without chemical solvents. This means that if they can be produced at scale, they have an advantage over other synthetic fibers such as nylon, which require extremely high temperatures for spinning, making textile production one of the world’s dirtiest industries. The artificial spider silk is also completely biodegradable. And since it’s made from common, easily accessible materials – mainly water, silica and cellulose – it has the potential to be affordable.
Shah and his team are far from the only scientists to work on creating artificial spider silk. Unlike silkworms, which can be farmed for their silk, spiders are cannibals who wouldn’t tolerate the close quarters necessary for farming, so turning to the lab is the only way to get significant quantities of the material. Every few years brings headlines about new inroads in the process. A German team has modified E-coli bacteria to produce spider silk molecules. Scientists at Utah State University bred genetically modified “spider goats” to produce silk proteins in their milk. The US army is testing “dragon silk” produced via modified silkworms for use in bulletproof vests. Earlier this year, researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden published a paper on a new method for using bacteria to produce spider silk proteins in a potentially sustainable, scalable way. And this spring, California-based startup Bolt Threads debuted bioengineered spider silk neckties at the SXSW festival. Their product is made through a yeast fermentation process that produces silk proteins, which then go through an extrusion process to become fibers. It’s promising enough to have generated a partnership with outdoor manufacturer Patagonia.
But, as a 2015 Wired story points out, “so far, every group that’s attempted to produce enough of the stuff to bring it to the mass market, from researchers to giant corporations, has pretty much failed.”
