UA: Динаміка втрат рашистів у війні проти України з 24 лютого 2022 року
index.minfin.com.ua/ua/russian…

EN: The dynamics of #ruscist losses in the war against Ukraine since February 24, 2022
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RU: Динамика потерь рашистов в войне против Украины с 24 февраля 2022 года
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One #Poland pro-Russian moron Tomasz Sommer started a whole flashmob on social media when he posted what he believed was another “material” argument against helping #Ukraine

So now every Poles will pay for Ukraine an extra 18 złotys. Are you happy?

This triggered a whole wave of shares from less and more public people kept in a tone similar to one below (by some Krzysztof Sowa):

I am smiling broadly because PLN 18 is the minimum price to ensure that:

-Olsztyn is not liberated like Bahmut

-Gdańsk does not become another Mariupol

-No rockets fall on Sopot

-My hometown of Milanówek and Józefów do not become another Bucha

-Warsaw remains safe

Just FYI, 18 PLN is 4.28 EUR. What Sommer likely meant is the recent Polish contribution to the PURL initiative ($100m) which he divided by number of Poles (roughly 38m) to come with this ridiculously cheap price.

Of course, Polish support for Ukraine is much broader than just PURL but it was a new topic which was immediately amplified by few but loud pro-Russian parties.

#Ukraine Zelensky statement from 20 December captures the essence of the problem we are now seeing with US:

Peace is better than war, but not at any cost, because we have already paid a high price. What matters for us is a just, durable peace – one that cannot be violated by another whim of Putin or any other Putin-like figure. It is extremely important to have strong security guarantees in place to prevent even the thought or the physical ability to come back to us with aggression.

I do not see the Budapest Memorandum as an agreement; I see it as nothing more than a piece of paper, because our territories were occupied, and so many people were killed. And this agreement did not protect us. I do not consider it strong or effective.

Therefore, for me, an agreement is not just about signing a document. One must know the details: what will happen if the Russians come with aggression and launch another war. How will the Americans and Europeans respond? How will our partners respond? What deterrence package will Ukraine have? What will be present on Ukrainian territory? How will our army be equipped? How strong will it be, and what reserves will we have? What can we count on? What sanctions package will be imposed simultaneously on the aggressor?

An agreement must be just and effective for Ukraine.

As a reminder, in 1994 USA, UK and Russia offered Ukraine security assurances for giving up nuclear weapons. China and France added their assurances on top of that.

When you hear people like Vance today saying “it’s not our war” after his country gave these assurances back then, this completely undermines credibility of any guarantees he’s going to give today.

And on top of that there’s of course Russia, who groomed everyone else into honestly believing that firstly, you shouldn’t expect any compliance with any agreements with Russia, and secondly, that some mythical “no inch to the East” anecdote has more weight than official, signed, mutual treaties registered with UN.

But in this aspect, Russia is also paying a heavy price for their sloppy and short-minded tactics because if not that, they would likely have a favourable deal with Ukraine already in 2022. This time I don’t think anyone will fall for Russia’s “assurances” again, if they won’t be reinforced with literal concrete and rockets.

An HO Model Power Bogie For Not A Lot

For people who build their own model trains there are a range of manufacturers from whom a power bogie containing the motor and drive can be sourced. But as [Le petit train du Berry] shows us in a video, it’s possible to make one yourself and it’s easier than you might think (French language video with truly awful YouTube auto-translation).

At the heart of the design is a coreless motor driving a worm gear at each end that engages with a gear on each axle. The wheelsets and power pickups are off-the-shelf items. The chassis meanwhile is 3D printed, and since this is an ongoing project we see two versions in the video. The V5 model adds a bearing, which its predecessor lacked.

The result is a pretty good power bogie, but it’s not without its faults. The gear ratio used is on the high side in order to save height under a model train body, and in the version without a bearing a hard-wearing filament is required because PLA will wear easily. We’re guessing this isn’t the last we’ll see of this project, so we hope those are addressed in future versions.

We like this project and we think you will too after you’ve watched the video below the break. For more home-made model railway power, how about a linear motor?

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hackaday.com/2025/12/22/an-ho-…

Ask Hackaday: What Goes Into A Legible Font, And Why Does It Matter?

American and British patents, for comparison.

There’s an interesting cultural observation to be made as a writer based in Europe, that we like our sans-serif fonts, while our American friends seem to prefer a font with a serif. It’s something that was particularly noticeable in the days of print advertising, and it becomes very obvious when looking at government documents.

We’ve brought together two 1980s patents from the respective sources to illustrate this, the American RSA encryption patent, and the British drive circuitry patent for the Sinclair flat screen CRT. The American one uses Times New Roman, while the British one uses a sans-serif font which we’re guessing may be Arial. The odd thing is in both cases they exude formality and authority to their respective audiences, but Americans see the sans-serif font as less formal and Europeans see the serif version as old-fashioned. If you thought Brits and Americans were divided by a common language, evidently it runs much deeper than that.

But What Makes Text Easier To Read?

Is this legible enough for you?

We’re told that the use of fonts such as Arial or Calibri goes a little deeper than culture or style, in that these sans-serif fonts have greater readability for users with impaired vision or other conditions that impede visual comprehension. If you were wondering where the hack was in this article it’s here, because many of us will have made device interfaces that could have been more legible.

So it’s worth asking the question: just what makes a font legible? Is there more to it than the presence or absence of a serif? In answering that question we’re indebted to the Braille Institute of America for their Atkinson Hyperlegible font, and to Mencap in the Uk for their FS Me accessible font. It becomes clear that these fonts work by subtle design features intended to clearly differentiate letters. For example the uppercase “I”, lowercase letter “l”, and numeral “1” can be almost indistinguishable in some fonts: “Il1”, as can the zero and uppercase “O”, the lowercase letters “g”, and “q”, and even the uppercase “B” and the numeral “8”. The design features to differentiate these letters for accessibility don’t dominate the text and make a font many readers would consider “weird”.

Bitmap Fonts For The Unexpected Win

The typeface used in the Commodore 8-bit machines. User:HarJIT, Public domain.

It’s all very well to look at scaleable fonts for high resolution work, but perhaps of more interest here are bitmap fonts. After all it’s these we’ll be sending to our little screens from our microcontrollers. It’s fair to say that attempts to produce smooth typefaces as bitmaps on machines such as the Amiga produced mixed results, but it’s interesting to look at the “classic” ROM bitmap fonts as found in microcomputers back in the day. After years of their just flowing past he eye it’s particularly so to examine them from an accessibility standpoint.

Machines such as the Sinclair Spectrum or Commodore 64 have evidently had some thought put into differentiating their characters. Their upper-case “Ii” has finials for example, and we’re likely to all be used to the zero with a line through it to differentiate it from the uppercase “O”. Perhaps of them all it’s the IBM PC’s code page 437 that does the job most elegantly, maybe we didn’t realise what we had back in the day.

So we understand that there are cultural preferences for particular design choices such as fonts, and for whatever reason these sometimes come ahead of technical considerations. But it’s been worth a quick look at accessible typography, and who knows, perhaps we can make our projects easier to use as a result. What fonts do you use when legibility matters?

Header: Linotype machines: AE Foster, Public domain.

hackaday.com/2025/12/22/just-w…