Author: Jenny List

3307 Articles

Ysgrifennu Côd Yn Gymraeg (Writing Code In Welsh)

February 3, 2026 by 34 Comments

Part of traveling the world as an Anglophone involves the uncomfortable realization that everyone else is better at learning your language than people like you are at learning theirs. It’s particularly obvious in the world of programming languages, where English-derived language and syntax rules the roost.

It’s always IF foo THEN bar, and  never SI foo ALORS bar. It is now possible to do something akin to OS foo YNA bar though, because [Richard Hainsworth] has created y Ddraig (the Dragon), a programming language using Welsh language as syntax. (The Welsh double D, “Dd” is pronounced something like an English soft “th” as in “their”)

Under the hood it’s not an entirely new language, instead it’s a Welsh localisation of the Raku language. A localisation file is created, that can as we understand it handle bidirectional transcription between languages. The write-up goes into detail about the process.

There will inevitably be people asking what the point of a programming language for a spoken language with under a million native speakers is, so it’s worth taking a look at that head on. It’s important for Welsh education and the Welsh tech sector because a a geeky kid in a Welsh-medium school Pwllheli deserves to code just as much as an English kid in a school near Oxford, but it goes far beyond Welsh alone. There are many languages and cultures across the world where English is not widely spoken, and every single one of them has those kids like us who pick up a computer and run with it. The more of them that can learn to code, and thrive without having the extra burden of knowing English, the better. Perhaps in a couple of decades we’ll be using code from people who learned this way, without our ever knowing it.

As your scribe, this needs to be added: Mae’n ddrwg gyda fi ffrendiau Cymraeg, mae Cymraeg i yn wael iawn. Dwi’n dôd o’r Rhydychen, ni Pwllheli.

Header image: Jeff Buck, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Surprising Hackability Of A Knock-Off Chinese Toy Camera

February 3, 2026 by 9 Comments

My colleague Lewin on the other side of the world has recently bought himself a new camera. It’s a very cute little thing, a Kodak Charmera, the latest badge-engineered device to carry the venerable photography company’s name. It’s a keyring camera, not much bigger than my thumb, and packing a few-megapixel sensor and a little fixed-focus camera module. They’re all the rage and thus always sold out, so when I saw something similar on AliExpress for just under a tenner I was curious enough to drop in an order. How bad could it be?

A Blatant-Knock-Off With Interesting Internals

My G6 Thumb Camera arrived a few days later, as straightforward a copy of a branded product as I have seen, and while it’s by any measure not a high quality camera, I am pleasantly surprised how bad it isn’t. I’ve received a three megapixel camera with image and movie quality that’s far better than that of the kids toy cameras I’ve played with before at a similar price, and that’s something I find amazing. This isn’t a review of a cheap camera, instead it’s an investigation of what goes into a camera like this one. How can they make a camera that’s almost useful, for under a tenner? Continue reading “The Surprising Hackability Of A Knock-Off Chinese Toy Camera” →

An Event Badge Re-Imagined As A Cyberdeck

February 2, 2026 by 5 Comments

We’re used to handheld Linux devices of varying usefulness appearing on a regular basis, but there’s something about the one in a video from [Rootkit Labs] which sets it aside from the herd. It’s a fork of a conference badge.

The WHY2025 badge had pretty capable hardware, with an ESP32-P4, a really nice screen, and the lovely SolderParty keyboard. Here it’s been forked, to become a carrier board for their previous project, the Flipper Blackhat. This is a Linux add-on for the Flipepr Zero, and it seems that plenty of people wanted it in a more useful context. The result is something that looks a lot like a WHY badge, but running Linux.

It’s a great shame when badges end up lying unused after the event, and ones like the WHY 2025 badge are a serious effort to make something that endures. Here, the badge endures in spirit by being forked and re-engineered, and we like it a lot. The full video is below the break.

Continue reading “An Event Badge Re-Imagined As A Cyberdeck” →

Hackaday Podcast Episode 355: Person Detectors, Walkie Talkies, Open Smartphones, And A WiFi Traffic Light

January 30, 2026 by No comments

Another chilly evening in Western Europe, as Elliot Williams is joined this week by Jenny List to chew the fat over the week’s hacks.

It’s been an auspicious week for anniversaries, with the hundredth since the first demonstration of a working television system in a room above a London coffee shop. John Logie Baird’s mechanically-scanned TV may have ultimately been a dead-end superseded by the all-electronic systems we all know, but the importance of television for the later half of the 20th century and further is beyond question.

The standout hacks of the week include a very clever use of the ESP32’s WiFi API to detect people moving through a WiFi field, a promising open-source smartphone, another ESP32 project in a comms system for cyclists, more cycling on tensegrity spokes, a clever way to smooth plaster casts, and a light sculpture reflecting Wi-Fi traffic. Then there are a slew of hacks including 3D printed PCBs and gem-cut dichroic prisms, before we move to the can’t-miss articles. There we’re looking at document preservation, and a wallow in internet history with a look at the Netscape brand.

As usual all the links you need can be found below, so listen, and enjoy!

Or download the podcast old-school, with a direct link to the MP3 file in question.

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Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 355: Person Detectors, Walkie Talkies, Open Smartphones, And A WiFi Traffic Light” →

Wikipedia As A Storage Medium

January 28, 2026 by 15 Comments

We know that while the cost per byte of persistent storage has dropped hugely over the years, it’s still a pain to fork out for a new disk drive. This must be why [MadAvidCoder] has taken a different approach to storage, placing files as multiple encoded pieces of metadata in Wikipedia edits.

The project takes a file, compresses it, and spits out small innocuous strings. These are placed in the comments for Wikipedia edits — which they are at pains to stress — were all legitimate edits in the test cases. The strings can then be retrieved at will and reconstituted, for later use. The test files are a small bitmap of a banana, and a short audio file.

It’s an interesting technique, though fortunately one that’s unlikely to be practical beyond a little amusement at the encyclopedia’s expense. We probably all have our favorite examples of low quality Wikipedia content, so perhaps it’s fortunate that these are hidden in the edit history rather than the pages themselves. Meanwhile we’re reminded of the equally impractical PingFS, using network pings as a file system medium.

One Hundred Years Of Telly

January 26, 2026 by 13 Comments

Today marks an auspicious anniversary which might have passed us by had it not been for [Diamond Geezer], who reminds us that it’s a hundred years since the first public demonstration of television by John Logie Baird. In a room above what is today a rather famous Italian coffee shop in London’s Soho, he had assembled a complete mechanical TV system that he demonstrated to journalists.

Television is one of those inventions that owes its genesis to more than a single person, so while Baird was by no means the only one inventing in the field, he was the first to demonstrate a working system. With mechanical scanning and just 30 lines, it’s hardly HD or 4K, but it does have the advantage of being within the reach of the constructor.

Perhaps the saddest thing about Baird and his system is that while he was able to attract the interest of the BBC in it, when the time came for dedicated transmissions at a higher resolution, his by then partly mechanical system could not compete and he faded into relative obscurity. Brits instead received EMI’s 405 line system, which persisted until the very start of the 1980s, and eventually the German PAL colour system in the late 1960s.

So head on down to Bar Italia if you can to raise a coffee to his memory, and should you wish to have a go at Baird-style TV for yourself, then you may need to print yourself a disk.

Header image: Matt Brown, CC BY 2.0.

This Unlikely Microsoft Prediction Might Just Hit The Mark

January 25, 2026 by 108 Comments

It’s fair to say that there are many people in our community who just love to dunk on Microsoft Windows. It’s an easy win, after all, the dominant player in the PC operating system market has a long history of dunking on free software, and let’s face it, today’s Windows doesn’t offer a good experience. But what might the future hold? [Mason] has an unexpected prediction: that Microsoft will eventually move towards offering a Windows-themed Linux distro instead of a descendant of today’s Windows.

The very idea is sure to cause mirth, but on a little sober reflection, it’s not such a crazy one. Windows 11 is slow and unfriendly, and increasingly it’s losing the position once enjoyed by its ancestors. The desktop (or laptop) PC is no longer the default computing experience, and what to do about that must be a big headache for the Redmond company. Even gaming, once a stronghold for Windows, is being lost to competitors such as Valve’s Steam OS, so it wouldn’t be outlandish for them to wonder whether the old embrace-and-extend strategy could be tried on the Linux desktop.

We do not possess a working crystal ball here at Hackaday, so we’ll hold off hailing a Microsoft desktop Linux. But we have to admit it’s not an impossible future, having seen Apple reinvent their OS in the past using BSD, and even Microsoft bring out a cloud Linux distro. If you can’t wait, you’ll have to make do with a Windows skin, WINE, and the .NET runtime on your current Linux box.