Author: Jenny List

3309 Articles

I, Integrated Circuit

February 4, 2026 by 75 Comments

In 1958, the American free-market economist Leonard E Read published his famous essay I, Pencil, in which he made his point about the interconnected nature of free market economics by following everything, and we mean Everything, that went into the manufacture of the humble writing instrument.

I thought about the essay last week when I wrote a piece about a new Chinese microcontroller with an integrated driver for small motors, because a commenter asked me why I was featuring a non-American part. As a Brit I remarked that it would look a bit silly were I were to only feature parts made in dear old Blighty — yes, we do still make some semiconductors! — and it made more sense to feature cool parts wherever I found them. But it left me musing about the nature of semiconductors, and whether it’s possible for any of them to truly only come from one country. So here follows a much more functional I, Chip than Read’s original, trying to work out just where your integrated circuit really comes from. It almost certainly takes great liberties with the details of the processes involved, but the countries of manufacture and extraction are accurate. Continue reading “I, Integrated Circuit” →

Symbian On Nokia Lives Again, In 2026

February 4, 2026 by 52 Comments

Do you remember Nokia phones, with their Symbian OS? Dead and gone, you might think, but even they have dedicated enthusiasts here in 2026. Some of them have gone so far as to produce a new ROM for the daddy of Symbian phones, the Nokia N8, and [Janus Cycle] is giving it a spin.

For many people, the smartphone era began when the first Apple iPhones and Android devices reached the market, but the smartphone itself can be traced back almost two decades earlier to an IBM device. In the few years before the birth of today’s platforms many people even had smartphones without quite realizing what they had, because Nokia, the market leader in the 2000s, failed to make their Symbian platform user friendly in the way that Apple did. The N8 was their attempt to produce an iPhone competitor, but its lack of an on-device app store and that horrific Windows-based installation system meant it would be their last mass-market flagship before falling down the Microsoft Windows Phone rabbit hole.

In the video below the break he takes a pair of N8s and assembles one with that beautiful camera fully working, before installing the new ROM and giving it a spin. We get to see at last what the N8 could have been but wasn’t, as it gains the last Symbian release from Nokia, and the crucial missing app store. Even fifteen years later it’s a very slick device, enough to make us sorry that this ROM won’t be made for the earlier N-series sitting in a drawer where this is being written. We salute its developers for keeping the N8 alive.

Oddly, this isn’t the only Nokia from that era that’s received a little 2020s love.

Continue reading “Symbian On Nokia Lives Again, In 2026” →

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.

Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

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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.