This week, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off by acknowledging an incredible milestone: 20 years of Hackaday! Well, probably. When a website gets to be this old, it’s a little hard to nail down when exactly things kicked off, but it seems like September of 2004 is about right. They’ll also go over the latest updates for the fast-approaching Hackaday Supercon, and announce the winner of another tough What’s That Sound challenge.
From there, the conversation makes its way from the fascinating electrically-activated adhesive holding the latest iPhone together to pulsed-power lasers and a high flying autonomous glider designed and built by a teenager. You’ll also hear about 3D printing on acrylic, home biohacking, and the Tiny Tool Kit Manifesto. Stick around to the end to hear the duo discuss the fine art of good documentation, and an incredible bodge job from Arya Voronova.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.
Episode 290 Show Notes:
News:
- Hackaday Turns 20-ish!
- 2024 Hackaday Superconference Speakers, Round Two
What’s that Sound?
- Congrats to [Davip] for getting a punch-tape reader/writer right.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Find My Power Tool Battery
- Hands-on With New IPhone’s Electrically-Released Adhesive
- Most Powerful Laser Diodes, Now More Powerful
- Winamp Releases Source Code, But Is It Really Open?
- 3D Printing On Top Of Laser Cut Acrylic
- StratoSoar Glider Flies Itself From High Altitude
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Tom’s Picks:
Okay, what’s the story on the paper tape machine?
I have the same question!
Was at a Vintage Computer Fest, and recorded the “What’s that Sound?” sample there.
It was actually another machine that I recorded, but both were running nicely. I think the one in the picture is a duplicator: had read and write sections in parallel.
Nice Lunar Lander tape, BTW.
Why is it hard to pin down when Hackaday started ( at least started publishing)
One of the ways the backend (frontend?) generates URL’s is by date. So the URL below shows the last pages from September 2004
https://hackaday.com/2004/09/
You can also add a day, that shows the articles published on that day, but you don’t get newer / older buttons. From the link above you can go though older pages, and then on page 4 it goes no further, and the first article is apparently:
https://hackaday.com/2004/09/05/radioshack-phone-dialer-red-box/
Yeah, that’s the earliest that we could find too.
You think Hackaday really started off with the immortal sentence: “i thought i’d start out with this hack while we’re in beta…”?
It’s possible! You’d think they’d at least announce the new blog more formally at Engadget? Maybe not.
It’s funny, I did the same thing when building https://va7unx.space/projects/inspiration/ — it’s a page that sends you to a random day in Hackaday history for inspiration. September 5th, 2004 was the first date I could find.
Congrats on 20 years of Hackaday!
Yes, as shocking as it may be, we are familiar with how our website works.
The problem is that the site has migrated between many servers and content management systems over the last ~20 years, requiring content to be exported and converted with various degrees of success. We know there’s missing data from the early days — posts older than mid-2006 have lost their art as they somehow got missed in the transition from the now-defunct Weblogs Inc. The record simply isn’t reliable past a certain point.
Beyond the technical, there’s the question of when Hackaday actually became Hackaday. At first, it was essentially a category of daily posts/tutorials on Engadget (hence the name). So should that content count? There’s a certain logic to starting the clock when the site was spun off (the domain was registered in June of 2004) but that’s not strictly accurate in the historical sense.
Compounding all of those issues is the fact that none of the current staff were onboard before 2013, when Supplyframe bought it. So we’re only vaguely aware of what happened before that point.
Long story short, September/October of 2004 is a reasonable estimate, but there’s certainly a margin of error.
“At first, it was essentially a category of daily posts/tutorials on Engadget (hence the name). So should that content count?”
Should we count the content of The Simpsons on
The Tracey Ullman Show?
On the crafting front, the 3D printing on acrylic technique could work for making stained “glass” panels where the areas between printed fake lead is painted or flooded with translucent paint.
You started the podcast the same month in 2004 I started my teaching career! I’ll bet you’ve done a lot less marking in the last 20 years! Bravo!
I remember reading HaD in college before life hit me like a ton of bricks, which would date the site to late 2003.
I probably would’ve found HaD through /., but possibly also through Fark or Digg. /. might be searchable enough to pin down any possible earlier dates.
For the record, “Davip” is pronounced like “David” but only with a trailing P. :)
(I should know, for he is me.)
Ok related to the paper tape machine….I’m a machinist and old cnc machines used to paper punch tape to store and load part programs. The machine shop where I spent much of my career had a process where if the operator made any edits to the program for it to run better and it needed to be updated and saved, a “punched program form” needed to be filled out. Paper tape machines were long gone by the time I started there in 2001, but even to this day at that shop it is known as “punching the program”, not saving!