Hackaday Links: July 6, 2025

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Taking delivery of a new vehicle from a dealership is an emotional mixed bag. On the one hand, you’ve had to endure the sales rep’s hunger to close the deal, the tedious negotiations with the classic “Let me run that by my manager,” and the closer who tries to tack on ridiculous extras like paint sealer and ashtray protection. On the other hand, you’re finally at the end of the process, and now you get to play with the Shiny New Thing in your life while pretending it hasn’t caused your financial ruin. Wouldn’t it be nice to skip all those steps in the run-up and just cut right to the delivery? That’s been Tesla’s pitch for a while now, and they finally made good on the promise with their first self-driving delivery.

The Model Y sedan drove itself from its birthplace at the Texas Gigafactory to its new owner, a 30-minute trip that covered a variety of driving situations. The fully autonomous EV did quite well over its journey, except for at the very end, where it blatantly ignored the fire lane outside its destination and parked against the red-painted curb. While some are trying to make hay of Tesla openly flaunting the law, we strongly suspect this was a “closed course” deal, at least for that last bit of the trip. So the production team probably had permission to park there, but it’s not a good look, especially with a parking lot just a few meters to the left. But it’s pretty cool that the vehicle was on the assembly line just a half-hour before. Betcha the owner still had to pay for dealer prep and delivery, though.

How much space does a million dollars take up? According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, a million one-dollar bills will fit into a cube about 50 inches (1.27 m) on a side, and they even built one as a display for their museum. Putting aside for the moment the fact that the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago feels that they have enough public appeal to support a museum — we’d love to see the gift shop — would a million bucks really fit into a little more than a cubic meter? Not according to Calvin Liang, who took it upon himself to determine the real number of semolians on display. To do so, he built an app called Dot Counter, which lets users count items in an image by clicking on them. It turns out that the cube holds more like $1.55 million, at least assuming there are no voids inside. He also works through the math on what it would take to make an actual million-dollar cube; turns out that the 2.53:1 aspect ratio of a dollar bill makes it tough to manage anything other than a cuboid slightly smaller than the display cube holding $1.008 million. All of that really doesn’t matter, though, since Dot Counter is sure to help us win every “Guess the number of jelly beans in the jar” contest we see.

Even for the smallest of jobs, driving a truck is a hard job. And the job just keeps getting harder as the load gets bigger, as a driver in Maryland can attest to after a bizarre accident last week during the transport of a wind turbine blade. It’s a little hard to tell exactly what happened from the published stories, and the stills from the traffic-potato aren’t much help either. But it looks like the steerable rear wheels on the mega-long trailer used to move the blade, which looks to be at least 50 meters long, decided to take the eastbound lane of I-70 while the rest of the truck was going west. The pucker factor for the driver must have been off the charts as the blade crossed the highway median. Luckily, traffic was light at 5:00 AM when the accident happened, but even still, one injury was reported, and the ensuing mayhem as the blade remained lodged across both lanes as the Monday rush started must have been one for the books.

A couple of weeks ago, we featured a story on a great collection of Telnet games and demos, some of which are so accomplished that it really blows the mind. One that didn’t make that list is this fantastic ASCII moon-phase tracker. It uses ASCII art to depict the current phase of the moon visually, and yes, you can copy and paste the characters. True, it’s web-based, which probably accounts for it not appearing on the Telnet games list, but the source code is available, so making it work over Telnet might be a fun project for someone.

And finally, we’ve heard about “Netflix and chill,” but is “NASA and chill” about to be a thing? Apparently so, since NASA+, the US space agency’s media outlet, made a deal with Netflix to offer its live programming on the streaming service. This is fantastic news for Netflix subscribers, who instead of watching live launches and such for free on YouTube can pay be the privilege of watching the same content on Netflix, complete with extra ads thrown in. That’s one giant leap for mankind right there.

9 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: July 6, 2025

    1. Q: Flaunt vs. Flout: What’s the Difference?
      A: The key difference between flaunt and flout lies in their meanings: flaunt involves showing off while flout means to scornfully ignore rules.

      An simple mistake which is unable to be fixed by modern tools, see a nice example below to see how things can go horribly wrong.

      ODE TO A SPELL CHECKER (by Jerrold H Zar)

      Eye halve a spelling check her,
      It came with my pea sea.
      It plane lee marks four my revue
      Miss steaks aye kin knot sea.
      Eye ran this poem threw it,
      Your sure reel glad two no.
      Its vary polished in it’s weigh,
      My checker tolled me sew.
      A check her is a bless sing;
      It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
      It helps me right awl stiles two reed,
      And aides me when aye rime.
      Each frays come posed up on my screen,
      Eye trussed too bee a joule;
      The checker pours o’er every word
      To cheque sum spelling rule.
      Bee fore wee rote with checkers
      Hour spelling was inn deck line,
      Butt now when wee dew have a laps,
      Wee are knot maid too wine.
      Butt now bee cause my spelling
      Is checked with such grate flare,
      There are know faults with in my cite,
      Of nun eye am a wear.
      Now spelling does knot phase me,
      It does knot bring a tier;
      My pay purrs awl due glad den
      With wrapped words fare as hear.
      To rite with care is quite a feet
      Of witch won should be proud;
      And we mussed dew the best wee can
      Sew flaws are knot aloud.
      That’s why eye brake in two averse
      Cuz eye dew want too please.
      Sow glad eye yam that aye did bye
      This soft wear four pea seas.

        1. I knew it… thanks for you comment.
          I noticed shortly after posting, but then it was already too late (it’s now 2025m far into the future since the introduction of the internet but still no way in modifying my own comments (at least, not her on Hackaday)).
          The original sentence started with “An error…” but I decided to change it into “A simple mistake” well you get it. Good that you’ve corrected me, otherwise the world would simply fall apart, we can’t have that can we.

  1. Last time I was at the Chicago Federal Reserve Museum, they also had a briefcase full of 20’s on a pedestal so you could take a selfie with it, and a display on counterfeiting, including a section that presented various types of bills and challenged you to figure out whether a bill was real or counterfeit.

  2. When I worked at HP in the early 2000’s, during World Cup soccer, the company banned streaming of the games’ video feeds. So, some smarty-pants cooked up an NTSC-to-ASCII converter and “watched” the games over a Telnet feed.

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