We’re back in Europe for this week’s Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List. In the news this week is the passing of Ed Smylie, the engineer who devised the famous improvised carbon dioxide filter that saved the Apollo 13 astronauts with duct tape.
Closer to home is the announcement of the call for participation for this year’s Hackaday Supercon; we know you will have some ideas and projects you’d like to share.
Interesting hacks this week include a new Mac Plus motherboard and Doom (just) running on an Atari ST, while a LoRa secure messenger and an astounding open-source Ethernet switch captivated us on the hardware front. We also take a dive into the Mouse programming language, a minimalist stack-based environment from the 1970s. Among the quick hacks are a semiconductor dopant you can safely make at home, and a beautiful Mac Mini based cyberdeck.
Finally, we wrap up with our colleague [Maya Posch] making the case for a graceful degradation of web standards, something which is now sadly missing from so much of the online world, and then with the discovery that ChatGPT can make a passable show of emulating a Hackaday scribe. Don’t worry folks, we’re still reassuringly meat-based.
Episode 322 Show Notes:
News:
- Hackaday Supercon 2025 Call For Participation: We Want You!
- In Memory Of Ed Smylie, Whose Famous Hack Saved The Apollo 13 Crew
What’s That Sound:
- Congrats to [calculus] for picking up the [Jerobeam Fenderson] mushrooms.
- A Wrencher on Your Oscilloscope
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Escaping US Tech Giants Leads European YouTuber To Open Source
- A New Mac Plus Motherboard, No Special Chips Required
- As The World Burns, At Least You’ll Have Secure Messaging
- Working On Open-Source High-Speed Ethernet Switch
- The Mouse Language, Running On Arduino
- Running DOOM On An Atari ST
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Jenny’s Picks:
“Don’t worry folks, we’re still reassuringly meat-based.”
Why should this matter?
I mean, it might… but while it’s often fun to see a series of articles/posts/whatever by some person in particular (e.g. “Keebin’ With…” oftimes it’s simply to read some latest-n-greatest hack or whatever.
If the quality is sufficient, use monkeys and typewriters… without trying to be dismissive or impoersonal… I don’t know that it matters too much if the quality is there?