It’s fair to say I am a major consumer of RSS feeds. I have touched on this in a blog post. It is by far the easiest way to keep in touch with updates from the many websites that are of interest to me.
Below are the latest articles I have read and thought were worth a share for others to read 🙂
- by Zoe SkyforestThere are plenty of radios you can buy that pick up MW and SW bands if that’s what you’re into. Or, you can follow [mircemk]’s example, and whip one up yourself instead. The build employs an ESP32 as the brains of the operation. It’s hooked up to a rotary encoder and a small colour TFT screen, which displays an old-school style tuning dial for choosing the desired frequency. This setup is paired with an Si5351—a capable clock generator chip […]
- by [email protected] (David Hollingworth)The new training series offers a pathway for IT professionals to strengthen their cyber security skills and better understand cyber criminal behaviour.
- by Aaron BeckendorfAlthough the basic principle of radio direction finding is easy to understand (measure the phase difference between different antennas, then calculate the angle of arrival from this difference), the radio hardware to actually implement this has historically been hard for hackers to access. The QuadRF project aims to change this by building a phase-coherent four-channel SDR which makes direction mapping easy (GitHub repository). The QuadRF uses two boards: one to receive and pre-process radio waves, and a Raspberry Pi […]
- by Zoe SkyforestYou could make a clock with three hands spinning about nested central shafts. If you did that, we probably wouldn’t publish it on Hackaday unless you really found a way to make it interesting. Make a clock out of voltmeters, however, and that usually catches our eye. [lcamtuf] has done just that. The heart of the build is an AVR128DB28 microcontroller, an 8-bit microcontroller that is still currently in production. It runs at 8MHz, and drives a series of […]
- by Al WilliamsIf you are a certain age, you doubtlessly remember Heathkit. They produced a wide array of electronic kits that were models of completeness and clear instructions. They started with surplus war parts in 1947 and wound up a major player in ham radio and early personal computers. But they made so many other things like TVs, radio control planes, and test equipment. All of it was made for you to build yourself. [Unseen History] released a video with the […]
- by Al WilliamsIf you bought computer audio hardware a few decades ago, you may remember coming across products from Altec Lansing. That you probably haven’t thought of that name in some time doesn’t surprise us, the company has not fared well in recent years and has changed hands multiple times. [The Last Shift] tells the company’s history in a video you can watch below. James Lansing started Lansing Manufacturing, offering high-end speakers for the fledgling “talkie” movie industry. It had some […]
- by Jenny ListIn the time Hackaday has been in existence we must have brought you plenty of projects housed in Altoids tins, as well as a sizeable number of cyberdecks. But until today with [Exercising Ingenuity]’s build, we’ve never brought you a project that combines the two. It’s a fully functional computer that runs Linux, and with its Altoids tin enclosure, looks for all the world like a miniature clamshell laptop. Hardware wise it’s a Pi Zero with a UPS PHAT […]
- by Tyler AugustAside from nostalgia, people claim to like CRTs because they’re apprehendable– the technology just makes more sense than the arcane wibbly-wobbly solid-state madness going on inside the driver chip of your new OLED. CRTs weren’t the first technology used to display moving images though, and their mechanical forebears were even easier to understand. For that reason we suppose it was only a matter of time before one of The Youths– in this case a British YouTuber by the name […]
- by Jenny ListThere comes a point in everybody’s life when things that they were a part of are presented as history, and for the 8-bit generation, that time is now. It’s interesting to see the early history of 8-bit home computers presented as history, not from a 2026 perspective but from the early 1990s. The BBC archive has recently posted a retrospective from 1992 looking at ten years of the Computer Literacy Project, a British government programme intended to equip the […]
- by [email protected] (Ian Carlos Campbell)Both remakes were already released on Steam and the macOS App Store.
- by Aaron BeckendorfThe ionosphere is of great importance to shortwave radio transmissions, since it allows radio waves to be refracted and reflected over the horizon, and it’s therefore unfortunate that the height and thickness of the ionosphere depends on the time of day or night, weather, season, and the solar cycle. To get a better idea of current transmission conditions, [mircemk] built this shortwave propagation monitor. The monitor provides a basic measure of ionosphere conditions by measuring the strength of received […]
- by Zoe SkyforestAustralia’s payphones are an iconic part of the national landscape, even if they’re not as important as they once used to be. However, they’re having a resurgence of late, in part thanks to a new national pastime—the sport of Payphone Tag! Created by [Alex Allchin], the game is simple. To play, you first sign up on the website and get your emoji and 5-digit PIN. You then go out and find a payphone, dial the Payphone Tag number, and […]
- by Zoe SkyforestSometimes, as hackers and makers, we can end up with messy lashed-together gear that is neither reliable nor tidy. Rackmounting your stuff can be a great way to improve the robustness and liveability of your setup. If you find this appealing, you might like CageMaker by [WebMaka]. This parametric OpenSCAD script can generate mounts for all kinds of stuff. Maybe you have a little network switch that’s just a tangle of wires on your desk, or a few pieces […]
- by Lewin DayIt’s easy to think of online console gaming as an invention of the 2000s. Microsoft made waves when Xbox Live dropped in 2002, with Nintendo and Sony scrambling to catch up with their own offerings that were neither as sleek or well-integrated. However, if you were around a decade earlier, you might have experienced online console gaming much closer to the dawn of the Internet era. As far back as 1990, you could jump online with your Sega Mega […]
- by Nathan IngrahamWe’ve written about the Swiss company Proton’s moves to take on Google and Microsoft with an expanding variety of privacy-focused internet services, and the company is announcing yet another new tool today. Proton Meet, as the name suggests, is a video-calling service that sounds comparable to Zoom, Microsoft Teams and, naturally, Google Meet. As with everything Proton does, Meet is end-to-end encrypted, but the company is taking extra steps towards security and anonymity here. You don’t need a Proton […]
- by Stephen ClarkKENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The two-day countdown for the launch of NASA's Artemis II mission began Monday evening, with clocks timed for the first of six opportunities in early April to send a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon. Liftoff from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled for a two-hour launch window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC) on Wednesday. NASA has backup launch opportunities each day through Monday, […]
- by Julian ScheffersWith ever increasing sizes of various programs (video games being notorious for this), the question of size optimization comes up more and more often. [Nathan Otterness] shows us how it’s done by minifying a Linux “Hello, World!” program to the extreme. A naive attempt at a minimal hello world in C might land you somewhere about 12-15Kb, but [Nathan] can do much better. He starts by writing everything in assembly, using Linux system calls. This initial version without optimization […]
- by Lewin DayIf you were anywhere near a computer in the mid-to-late 1990s, you almost certainly encountered a Zip drive. That distinctive purple peripheral, with its satisfying clunk as you slotted in a cartridge, was as much a fixture of the era as beige tower cases and CRT monitors. Iomega, the company behind it, went from an obscure Utah outfit to a multi-billion-dollar darling of Wall Street in the span of about two years. And then, almost as quickly, it all […]
- by Lewin DayOne of the coolest things about old hi-fi hardware is that it often came with flickety needles that danced with the audio level. You can still buy these if you want, or you can simulate the same look on a screen, as [mircemk] demonstrates. It isn’t [mircemk]’s first rodeo in this regard. An earlier project involved creating simulated VU meters on round displays, but they were somewhat limited. Using the Adafruit GFX library on an ESP32 netted a working […]
- by Jenny ListLast summer we took a look at FreeDOS as part of the Daily Drivers series, and found a faster and more complete successor to the DOS of old. The sojourn into the 16-bit OS wasn’t perfect though, as we couldn’t find drivers for the 2010-era network card on our newly DOS-ified netbook. Here’s [Inkbox] following the same path, and bringing with it a fix for that networking issue. The video below is an affectionate look at the OS alongside […]