The Brits Made A Rocket. What Happened To It?

April 9, 2026 by Jenny List 17 Comments

Like many long-established broadcasters, the BBC put out a selection of their archive material for us all to enjoy online. Their most recent may be of interest to Hackaday readers and has more than a bit of personal interest to your scribe, as it visits the Spadeadam rocket test range on the event of its closure in 1973. This marked the final chapter in the story of Blue Streak, the British intercontinental missile project that later became part of the first European space launcher.

It’s possible citizens of every country see their government as uniquely talented in the throwing away of taxpayer’s money, but the sad story here isn’t in Blue Streak itself which was obsolete as a missile by the time it was finished. Instead it lies in the closure of the test range as part of the ill-advised destruction of a nascent and successful space industry, just as it had made the UK the third nation to have successfully placed a satellite in orbit.

We normally write in the second person in our daily posts here at Hackaday, but for now there’s a rare switch into the first person. My dad spent a large part of the 1950s working as a technician for de Haviland Propellers, later part of Hawker Siddeley, and then British Aerospace. He was part of the team working on Blue Streak at Spadeadam and the other test site at RAF Westcott in Buckinghamshire, and we were brought up on hair-raising tales of near-disasters in the race to get British nukes flying. He’s not one of the guys in the video below, as by that time he was running his metalwork business in Oxfordshire, but I certainly recognise the feeling of lost potential they express. Chances are I’ll never visit what remains of the Spadeadam test stands in person as the site is now the UK’s electronic warfare test range, so the BBC film represents a rare chance for a closer look.

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You’ve All Seen A Hackintosh, But Have You Seen One On A Wii?

April 8, 2026 by Jenny List 11 Comments

The Intel era of Apple Macs led to so-called “Hackintoshes”, more normal PCs running x86 MacOS X. Now Bryan Keller proves that a Hackintosh isn’t restricted to the x86 era, not by doing it with a modern ARM version, but by going back to PowerPC, and the Nintendo Wii.

The Wii can be thought of in hardware terms as not too far from a Mac G3 with a little less memory, having a PowerPC 750-family processor, a close relative as those in the first generation of MacOS X capable Macs. Since the roots of MacOS X are shared with its open-source equivalent Darwin, he reasons it should be possible to port just enough Darwin to the Wii to enable the closed-source OS X to run on top of it. He’s running OS X 10.0, the earliest version from 2001.

The write-up is a fascinating path through writing a bootloader and running a patched kernel that flashes the Wii LEDs, and then the process of making the Wii’s very different hardware from a Mac, accessible to the OS. It boots from an SD card and uses a framebuffer for display so perhaps it’s not as fast as you might hope, but he gets it working. Even for someone not versed in MacOS or the Wii, it’s a good write-up that makes its points accessible.

Something that makes us happy about this piece of work is its place in the greater picture, after all the Wii has found itself running classic MacOS too.

AI For The Skeptics: Pick Your Reasons To Be Excited

April 8, 2026 by Jenny List 70 Comments

It’s odd being a technology writer in 2026, because around you are many people who will tell you that your craft is outdated. Like the manufacturers of buggy-whips at the turn of the twentieth century, the automobile (in the form of large language model AI) is on the market, and your business will soon be an anachronism. Adapt or go extinct, they tell you. It’s an argument I’ve found myself facing a few times over the last year in my wandering existence, and it’s forced me to think about it. What are the reasons everyone is excited about AI and are those reasons valid, what is there to be scared of, and what are the real reasons people should be excited about it?

If We Gotta Take This Seriously, How Can We Do It?

A couple in a horse drawn buggy, circa 1900ish — The futures looking bright in the buggy-whip department! Public domain.

I’ll start by repeating my tale from a few weeks ago when I asked readers what AI applications would survive when the hype is over. The reaction of a friend with decades of software experience on trying an AI coding helper stuck with me; she referenced her grandfather who had been born in rural America in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and recalled him describing the first time he saw an automobile. I agree with her that this has the potential to be a transformative technology, and while it’s entertaining to make fun of its shortcomings as I did three years ago when the idea of what we now call vibe coding first appeared, it’s already making itself useful in some applications. Simply dismissing it is no longer appropriate, but equally, drinking freely of the Kool-Aid seems like joining yet another hype bandwagon that will inevitably derail. A middle way has to be found. Continue reading “AI For The Skeptics: Pick Your Reasons To Be Excited” →

934 MHz: When The Government Really Doesn’t Want You To Have CB

April 7, 2026 by Jenny List 39 Comments

In the mid 1970s there were a spate of movies depicting the romance and lifestyle of truck drivers in the southern half of the United States. Over on the other side of the Atlantic these were naturally received not as works of drama but as documentaries, and thus began a craze for British drivers to do up their Ford Capri so in the right light and with your eyes nearly closed, it almost looked like Burt Reynolds’ Pontiac Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit.

Such a fine automobile was of course incomplete without a CB radio, highly illegal at the time, which led to an underground CB craze and its eventual legalization in 1981. [Ringway Manchester] is here with a tale from that era, of 934 MHz CB, an odd and underused allocation that was eventually phased out for commercial services.

When UK CB was eventually legalized by the government, it was very obvious that they really didn’t want to. Brits got 27 MHz as FM only with meager power and a weird set of frequencies that nobody else had, and a second band way up in the UHF range, at 934 MHz. We remember they originally tried to make a UHF band the only allocation on purpose because it was nearly useless for mobile operation, and Brits only got 27 MHz by fighting back in the political lobbying space.

The video below tells the story of the band, with relatively scarce and expensive equipment leading to it being an exclusive band more similar to the amateur bands, with little resemblance to its raucous 27 MHz counterpart. How much activity there was depended very much on where in the country you were, which of course wasn’t where your Hackaday scribe was as a teenager even if it had been affordable. Eventually the government saw the little flashing pound signs and grabbed it back for a mobile radio service that never materialized, and now the frequencies are part of the mobile phone spectrum.

Have a watch for an odd bit of UK radio nostalgia and some 2020s illegal CB’ers, and if you want more it’s a subject we’ve touched on before.

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Cleaning An IBM 5150, And The Perfect Period PCB Soldermask

April 5, 2026 by Jenny List 11 Comments

Now that early PCs have moved firmly from the realm of e-waste into being collector’s items, it’s worth putting in some effort to restore them if you find one. [Epictronics] has an early IBM 5150, the ancestor of all today’s PCs, and is bringing it back to life. Along the way, he’s building a replica AdLib sound card, making a useful discovery about how to make new parts look authentic.

The video below the break is a gentle journey through an early PC teardown, followed by the construction of the replica sound card. Here’s the interesting nugget of information: these new cards are careful recreations of the originals, but they just don’t look right. It seems modern soldermask is too shiny, and as luck would have it, there’s another option that is much more period-authentic. We hadn’t noticed matte green was available, but it certainly captures the look of those days much better.

As you might expect, such an old machine has a range of dead capacitors and a few chips. There’s a lucky escape with a Varta battery on an expansion card, having very little leakage, and part of one of the floppy drives needs some surgery. It’s gentle hacking that’s engaging to watch, and of course, at the end, we’re rewarded with the thing booting properly.

You might think reproducing a sound card is unusual, but we’ve seen it a number of times.

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Scrap Vintage Camera Goes Digital With Scanner Parts

April 4, 2026 by Jenny List 3 Comments

Every collector ends up with items that are worthless, usually because they are broken or incomplete. When [Graindead] found a 1920s glass-plate reflex camera for pennies with plenty of missing parts, it was obvious that what he had was a piece of junk. Throw it away? No, he turned it digital with the aid of a small document scanner.

A reflex camera like this one is the ancestor of the 35mm single-lens reflex cameras we may still be familiar with today, in that is has a flip-up mirror inside to bounce the light onto a ground glass screen. The photographer can see what the lens sees to set up the shot, before flipping the mirror out of the way and exposing the glass plate film by pulling out a dark slide. This one was missing the ground glass and the lens, so he has to grind a replacement, and bodge in a similar-age Carl Zeiss Tessar lens.

In the video below you can see the build, and a range of pictures including some trichrome colour shots. It gives an imperfect result even compared to the same camera with its period film, but the point here is the art rather than the clarity. We’d take this one out with us, if it were ours.

For more vintage digital fun, have a look at a similar adaptation that shoots video.

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The Rapper, The Canadian Academics, And The Secret Behind The Earworm

April 4, 2026 by Jenny List 12 Comments

There are many events so far in 2026 that could reasonably have been predicted, but perhaps one which couldn’t is a Hackaday scribe in Europe unexpectedly finding herself with a constant earworm from Afroman. The rapper, who most of us know only from his year 2000 hit single about getting high, made the news after an inept police raid on his house, and in turn a court case over his musical denunciations of the authorities.

It’s fair to say they picked on the wrong guy, but in thinking about why, the answer is in the earworm. He has the unique skill of making a song irritatingly catchy, which led us to the question of how a catchy song works. As luck would have it a team from the University of Waterloo have recently released a paper in which they explain it all in terms of maths, giving the rest of us a formula where the likes of Afroman are presumably born with it.

We won’t pretend that Hackaday’s mathematical expertise stretches beyond that needed for engineering, but for the more advanced numberphiles among us the university’s write-up goes into some detail about their use of group theory to study the patterns and symmetry in a given piece of music. It’s a new approach that joins other more famous guides to musical success, so perhaps if you couple it with the stuff your music teacher failed to tell you in school, you could be on your way to the top of the charts. Meanwhile here at Hackaday we’ll stick to more conventional inspiration.

Header: Chris Gilmore, CC BY-SA 2.0.