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Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KolibriOS 0.7.7

July 2, 2026 by 26 Comments

It’s a fact of life when starting a computer, that booting into whatever operating system you use will take a while. Mine takes somewhere around 30 seconds, and yours probably does too. There has always been the promise of something faster just around the corner, but somehow the OS just keeps getting a little bigger. Perhaps the only computer with a disk based operating system I have ever owned which bucked this trend was a Commodore Amiga, and that machine’s booting speed was achieved by keeping most of its OS in a ROM. The subject of today’s Daily Drivers takes the idea of a long boot time and shreds it, leaving an experience more akin to that Amiga of old. It’s called KolibriOS, it’s small enough to run from a floppy disk if you want it to, it’s lightweight, and fast as lightning. It achieves this feat by being written entirely in assembly language, and it exists as a free fork of the earlier MenuetOS which moved to a proprietary licence in its 64 bit version. I downloaded the ISO file, and gave it a spin.

The KolibriOS GUI with the Netsurf browser showing the KolibriOS wiki.
You can surf the web with NetSurf, but not the encrypted web.

The minimum system requirements for KolibriOS are meagre, 1Mb of disk space, 8Mb of RAM, and a 586-class 32-bit processor. On a 2020s ThinkPad it boots in the proverbial blink of an eye, and drops immediately into a GUI desktop. It has the slightly pixelated look of a 1990s machine, there’s none of the anti-aliasing we’re used to today going on there. Installed software ranges from a set of games, emulators, graphics editors and viewers, internet software including the Webview and Netsurf web browsers, and assembly software development.

The immediate impression is of a mature and useful operating system, without any crashes or blue screens, and with applications that load on a dime. Unfortunately though, despite all the competence I can’t call it a Daily Driver by my definition of being able to write for Hackaday, because the web browser doesn’t support https. Immediately the majority of the modern Internet is off-limits, including this site. This changes the parameters of my review and I can no longer proceed as I normally would, but it doesn’t end it. Something this polished deserves a while to play around. Continue reading “Jenny’s Daily Drivers: KolibriOS 0.7.7” →

Know Your Food: Organic Production

July 2, 2026 by 21 Comments

A few weeks ago we published the first in a new series of articles, Know Your Food. It was born out of the realisation that most people know surprisingly little about what they eat, and to apply a bit of Hackaday curiosity to received opinion on the subject. As we put it then: “To know both how common foodstuffs should be made, as well as how they are made industrially, should be an essential for everyone” We’ll continue in that vein, with a look at organic food.

If you buy your food in a supermarket it’s likely that in the vegetable aisle you’ll be presented with a choice. On one hand you will have the normal vegetable, and on the other and usually for a slightly higher price, the organic version of the same vegetable. What’s going on?

So What Is This Organic Stuff All About?

A watercolour picture of a bucolic scene with a farmhouse surrounded by trees, and some cows in the foreground.
It is unlikely that a typical organic farm in the 2020s will resemble this John Constable painting. John Constable, Public domain.

Organic production is a system of agriculture that emphasises natural fertilisers, pesticides, and farming methods over synthetic or intensive ones. It has its roots in the first half of the 20th century, and as the decades progressed it has become an important sector of agricultural industry. I grew up steeped in organic agriculture because my grandfather was an early adherent in the years following the war, so I’ve seen it from the sharpest end. There is a lot to commend organic production for and plenty of reasons to embrace it, but with that come some problematic aspects, and even dubious claims. Here I’ll try to unpick some of that.

It’s tempting to believe that all organic production is somehow a return to a 19th century rural idyl, complete with the obligatory chickens in the farmyard. Some organic producers do take a slice of this back-to-the-land approach to their craft, but the reality of organic farming is a very modern approach to managing the ecosystem. Organic farmers are not wary of progress, and neither are they reluctant to use pesticides or other chemicals. Instead they do so according to the principles of organic agriculture, so any techniques they use are designed to be beneficial to the ecosystem, and any chemicals have a natural origin. Continue reading “Know Your Food: Organic Production” →

Review: The Tanmatsu, A Year On

July 1, 2026 by 4 Comments

About 18 months ago, we brought you a sneak peek at a handheld that started life in the Dutch conference badge scene. At the time it showed promise, but its software wasn’t ready for a fair review. Now it has both a stable operating system and a growing software library. It’s time to put it through its paces and see what it can do.

A Handheld Computer For Hackers

The Tanmatsu PCB, showing all the different parts.
The bare PCB, with the expansion connector bottom centre.

The Tanmatsu (Japanese for “Terminal”), is a general putpose palmtop computer based around an ESP32-P4 application processor from Espressif. It takes the form of a PCB and PETG 3D printed sandwich, with the front face PCB sporting a silicone QWERTY keyboard and an 800×480 MIPI DSI display. The keyboard should be familiar to many readers, being the same moulding as the Solder Party KeebDeck which has appeared on other devices.

Under the hood that P4 has two 400MHz RISC-V cores and 32MB of PSRAM with 16MB of Flash, and there’s an ESP32-C6 for WiFi, BLE and IEEE 802.15.4 mesh networking. There’s an Ebyte LoRa module with an SMA antenna too, which can be had in 868, or 915MHz versions depending on where in the world you live. Continue reading “Review: The Tanmatsu, A Year On” →

UDP Broadcasting And Easily Finding Network Services

July 1, 2026 by 21 Comments

Local area networks (LANs) that use technologies like Ethernet and Wi-Fi are incredibly useful for letting devices talk with each other. Yet a core problem here is knowing which devices are where on the network, as anyone who has ever tried to add a network printer or network share to their system can probably attest to. Unless you happen to know the IP address of the LAN device, the port, and protocol, the target device may as well be located on the Moon without further help, such as automatic network discovery in lieu of waddling over to the device and reading the label listing its IP address.

Over the decades quite a few ways have been developed to enable such network discovery, with many of them using UDP broadcast as the first step. By broadcasting a global message on the entire LAN, any device that has an actively listening UDP socket on that particular port can parse said message and decide whether it’s feeling sociable enough to reply.

The topic of UDP broadcasting is however not as straightforward as it may sound if you’re just getting started, including the existence of many opinions on the ‘right way’. There is also a massive divide between a sprawling service discovery protocol like mDNS and a light-weight one like that one that I had to implement a few years ago for an open source project.

Continue reading “UDP Broadcasting And Easily Finding Network Services” →

Microsoft’s Topological Quantum Computing Claims Once Again In Question

June 30, 2026 by 15 Comments

A central problem with the arguably overhyped field of quantum computing remains the difficulty in objectively ascertaining performance and new developments, as much here relies on indirect measurements. Such is especially the case with topological quantum computing, with its use of Majorana fermions. For a few years now Microsoft’s quantum computing department (Azure Quantum) has made claims here of major progress, which have subsequently repeatedly been shot down in peer review. Their most recent attempt at said progress in topological quantum computing now got a blistering response (PDF) by Henry F. Legg in an article in Nature.

We previously reported on Microsoft’s attempts here in early 2025, when they claimed the detection of the crucial Majorana Zero Mode (MZM), before it faced the criticisms of peer review, including by Legg, which included academically vicious language by some researchers, including terms like ‘essentially fraudulent’.

This raises the awkward question of whether Microsoft’s quantum researchers are just too eager to confirm a discovery, or whether a more benign reason exists.

Continue reading “Microsoft’s Topological Quantum Computing Claims Once Again In Question” →

How Airspeed Sensors Work

June 30, 2026 by 25 Comments

When you’re driving your car, you’re probably regularly looking at the speedometer to make sure you comply with the local speed limits. The method by which it works is simple enough: the rotation of the wheels is sent mechanically via a cable to a dial on the dash, or an electronic sensor counts the rotations of the drivetrain and an electronically-controlled needle or display shows the speed.

But what about if you were in an aircraft, and the wheels had nothing to do with how fast you were going? How would you even begin to measure speed? There are two ways: there’s a convenient solution to this problem rooted in simple fluid mechanics, and a far-more-complex modern solution. Today, we’ll explore how planes and helicopters are able to figure out how fast they’re going, by the old ways and the new.

Continue reading “How Airspeed Sensors Work” →

Hackaday Europe 2026 – Building A Retro PC From Scratch

June 29, 2026 by 13 Comments

If you’re big into retrocomputing, you probably spend a lot of time chasing parts and machines on online classifieds or through local swap meets. But what if there was a different way to build a classic retro PC? What if you could put one together from bare chips, from the ground up?

[Jeroen Domburg] is no stranger to the pages of Hackaday. You might know him by his alias, [sprite_tm], under which he’s shared many projects, from miniaturizing old hardware to unearthing the secrets of undocumented commercial hardware. Now, he’s turning his considerable skills to figuring out how to build a retro PC in today’s world, and came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to show us all how it’s done.

Continue reading “Hackaday Europe 2026 – Building A Retro PC From Scratch” →