9+ mon, 4+ week ago (49+ words) Continue reading "Hackaday Links: March 2, 2025" " Continue reading "Hackaday Links: February 23, 2025" " Continue reading "Hackaday Links: February 16, 2025" " Continue reading "Hackaday Links: February 9, 2025" " Continue reading "Hackaday Links: February 2, 2025" " Continue reading "Hackaday Links: January 26, 2025" " Continue reading "Hackaday Links: January 19, 2025" "...

9+ mon, 3+ week ago (264+ words) The Free Software Foundation is holding an auction to celebrate its 40th anniversary. You can bid on the original sketch of the GNU head by [Etienne Suvasa] and [Richard Stallman's] Internet Hall of Fame medal. There are some other awards, including the FSF's 1999 Norbert Wiener Award. There's even a katana that symbolizes the fight for computer user freedom. Continue reading "Your Chance To Get A Head (A Gnu Head, Specifically)" " Internal laptop modifications like this one remind us of the Ye Olden Days of Hackaday, when Eee PC modifications were all the rage and we still ran black and white pictures "taped" to the screen. Ah, the memories. The Free Sofware Foundation, the very same organization'responsible'for the GNU General Public License and open source advocacy on the part of the Free Software'stalwart'[Richard Stallman], has certified its first piece of hardware…...

11+ mon, 2+ week ago (1032+ words) [Hackaday Links Column Banner]It looks like we won't have Cruise to kick around in this space anymore with the news that General Motors is pulling the plug on its woe-beset robotaxi project. Cruise, "read more [Hackaday Links Column Banner]It looks like we won't have Cruise to kick around in this space anymore with the news that General Motors is pulling the plug on its woe-beset robotaxi project. Cruise, which GM acquired in 2016, fielded autonomous vehicles in various test markets, but the fleet racked up enough high-profile mishaps (first item) for California regulators to shut down test programs in the state last year. The inevitable layoffs ensued, and GM is now killing off its efforts to build robotaxis to concentrate on incorporating the Cruise technology into its "Super Cruise" suite of driver-assistance features for its full line of cars…...

11+ mon, 3+ week ago (746+ words) [Hackaday Links Column Banner]For some reason, we never tire of stories highlighting critical infrastructure that's running outdated software, and all the better if it's running on outdated hardware. So when we learned that "read more [Hackaday Links Column Banner]For some reason, we never tire of stories highlighting critical infrastructure that's running outdated software, and all the better if it's running on outdated hardware. So when we learned that part of the San Francisco transit system still runs on 5-1/4" floppies, we sat up and took notice. The article is a bit stingy with the technical details, but the gist is that the Automatic Train Control System was installed in the Market Street subway station in 1998 and uses three floppy drives to load DOS and the associated custom software. If memory serves, MS-DOS as a standalone OS was pretty much…...

10+ mon, 3+ week ago (276+ words) It's been a good 2025 so far! I just got back from Chaos Communication Congress, which is easily my favorite gigantic hacker conference of the year. (Partisan Hackaday pride puts "read more It's been a good 2025 so far! I just got back from Chaos Communication Congress, which is easily my favorite gigantic hacker conference of the year. (Partisan Hackaday pride puts Supercon up as my favorite moderate-sized conference, naturally.) CCC is huge. And it's impossible to leave an event like that without your to-hack list at least doubling in length. And then I got back home and started prepping up for the podcast, which meant reading through about a week's worth of Hackaday in a single sitting. Which in turn adds a few more projects to the list. Thanks for that, y'all! All of this was possible because people who do…...

6+ mon, 3+ week ago (352+ words) [Hackaday Links Column Banner]By now, you've probably heard about Kosmos 482, a Soviet probe destined for Venus in 1972 that fell a bit short of the mark and stayed in Earth orbit for "read more Parachute or not, chances are good that the 495-kilogram spacecraft, built to not only land on Venus but to survive the heat, pressure, and corrosive effects of the hellish planet's atmosphere, will at least partially survive reentry into Earth's more welcoming environs. That's a good news, bad news thing: good news that we might be able to recover a priceless artifact of late-Cold War space technology, bad news to anyone on the surface near where this thing lands. If Kosmos 482 does manage to do some damage, it won't be the first time. Shortly after launch, pieces of titanium rained down on New Zealand after the probe's…...

2+ mon, 1+ day ago (316+ words) We're not a world news site, but there are times when events intrude upon our world. Perhaps the greatest of these was the COVID pandemic, when for many people the world stopped. Hackaday kept going, but unsurprisingly there was a lot of discussion of the pandemic and the projects which surrounded it. Do you remember the period in which governments were in a panic about not having enough ventilators? We had quite a few stories on the subject at the time, and they appear in the corpus. Fortunately it was pretty soon understood that home made ventilators would be dangerous so we were right to be cautious covering such projects. When I started on my corpus software projects, I was interested in the relationships between words because I had spent a while working in the search engine business. Later on…...

5+ mon, 4+ week ago (316+ words) [Hackaday Links Column Banner]It appears that we're approaching the HAL-9000 point on the AI hype curve with this report, which suggests that Anthropic's new AI model is willing to exhibit some rather antisocial "read more [Hackaday Links Column Banner]It appears that we're approaching the HAL-9000 point on the AI hype curve with this report, which suggests that Anthropic's new AI model is willing to exhibit some rather antisocial behavior to achieve its goals. According to a pre-release testing summary, Claude Opus 4 was fed some hypothetical company emails that suggested engineers were planning to replace the LLM with another product. This raised Claude's hackles enough that the model mined the email stream for juicy personal details with which to blackmail the engineers, in an attempt to win a stay of execution. True, the salacious details of an extramarital affair…...

10+ mon, 5+ day ago (398+ words) Continue reading "7 Segment Clockwork Display Made From Cardboard" " A pushcar is a great toy for a young child. They're great excercise, and kids love anything on wheels. However, the bigger kids might want something with a little more grunt. [Master Milo] has just the thing " an engine from a concrete saw and the fabrication skills to match. (YouTube, embedded below.) Mechanical parts are in ready supply, with bearings and shafts all sourced from INDI, a European equivalent to McMaster Carr. By purchasing gears, belts and other parts off the shelf, it's easy to make something that fits first time with a minimum of modification required. The testing video is worth a watch " with both top speed and handling tests. The platform's handling does leave something to be desired, but that's half the fun in a build like this. We're no…...

9+ mon, 4+ day ago (328+ words) We're proud to announce the last round of speakers, as well as the two workshops that we'll be running at 2025 Hackaday Europe in Berlin on March 15th and 16th "read more We're proud to announce the last round of speakers, as well as the two workshops that we'll be running at 2025 Hackaday Europe in Berlin on March 15th and 16th " and Friday night the 14th, if you're already in town. The last two years that we've done Hackaday Europe in Berlin have been awesome, and this year promises to keep up the tradition. We can't wait to get our hands on the crazy selection of SAO badge addons that are going to be in each and every schwag bag. Tickets for the event itself are going fast, but the workshop tickets that go on sale at 8:00 AM PST sell out even faster. And you need…...