Author: Jenny List

3061 Articles

Winamp A Few Days Later: You Can Fork, And Watch For GPL Violations

September 28, 2024 by 34 Comments

A few days ago the source code for the popular Winamp music player was released into the world, with as we reported at the time, a licence that left a lot to be desired. Since then it seems some of the criticism has caught up with the company, for not only have they modified their terms to allow forking, they’ve reacted to a bunch of claimed GPL violations by removing offending files. Perhaps How-To-Geek are right in describing it all as an absolute mess.

The forking amendment means that with luck we’ll start seeing a few modified players descending from the Winamp code, and it seems that the GPL violations are more embarrassing technicalities than show-stoppers, but we have to wornder whether or not this makes for something with any more than historical interest. Perhaps its value stands in a lesson for corporate entities in how not to release their source, which sadly we expect will be taken by other organisations as an excuse not to do so.

If you’re following the Winamp source code saga you can read our coverage from when it came out. It will be interesting to see where this story goes.

Turn A Mouse Into An Analogue Tuning Knob

September 27, 2024 by 4 Comments

The software defined radio has opened up unimaginable uses of the radio spectrum for radio enthusiasts, but it’s fair to say that there’s one useful feature of an old-fashioned radio they lack when used via a computer. We’re talking of course about the tuning knob, because it represents possibly the most intuitive way to move across the bands. Never fear though, because [mircemk] has a solution. He’s converted a mouse into a tuning dial.

The scroll wheel on a mouse is nothing more than a rotary encoder, and can easily be used as a sort of tuning knob. Replacing it with a better encoder gives it a much better feel, so that’s what he’s done. An enclosure has the guts of a mouse, with the front-mounted encoder wired into where the scroll wheel would have been. The result, for a relatively small amount of work, is a tuning knob, and a peripheral we’re guessing could also have a lot of uses beyond software defined radio.

It’s not the first knob we’ve seen, for that you might want to start with the wonderfully named Tiny Knob, but it’s quite possibly one of the simplest to build. We like it.

British Commuters Get Their WiFi Hacked

September 27, 2024 by 24 Comments

As if there weren’t enough worrying global news stories already, today the British press and media have been full of a story involving the public WiFi networks at some major railway stations. Instead of being faced with the usual don’t-be-naughty terms and conditions page, commuters were instead faced with a page that definitely shouldn’t have been there.

Hackaday readers will immediately have guessed what is likely to have happened. This is probably more of a compromise of the page than of the network itself, and, indeed, the BBC are reporting that it may have come via an administrator account at Network Rail’s er… network provider. Fortunately, it seems the intent was to spread a political message rather than malware, so perhaps those travelers got off lightly. The various companies involved have all got the proverbial egg on their faces, and we’re glad we don’t work in the IT department concerned.

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Want To Help Capture Some Digital Ephemera? Break Out Your VHS Player

September 26, 2024 by 16 Comments

Do you live in the UK, have a VCR and capture card, and an interest in Teletext? [James O’Malley] needs your help! Teletext was, for many people around the world, their first experience of an electronic information system. The simple text and block graphics were transmitted on rotation as data bursts in the frame blanking periods of analogue TV broadcasts, and in an era of printed newspapers, they became compulsory reading. The UK turned off its old-style teletext over a decade ago with the switch to digital, but fragments of the broadcasts remain and can be painstakingly revived from period video recordings with the appropriate software.

This is where [James’] problem begins. Having recovered a very large archive of 1980s and 1990s VHS tapes, he’s come to the realisation that he’s bitten off more than he can chew, and that the archive needs to be in the hands of an individual, entity, or organisation which can give it the resources necessary to archive both the teletext and the programming that it contains. Can you help? Give the article linked above a read.

Meanwhile, you can wallow in a bit of nostalgia by browsing the archive of recovered pages, and while you’re at it, take a minute to envy the French.

Winamp Releases Source Code, But Is It Really Open?

September 24, 2024 by 58 Comments

The 1990s seem to have reached that point at which they are once more considered cool, and ephemera of the decade has become sought-after. One of the unlikely software hits from the period was Winamp, the MP3 player of choice in an era when time spent on dodgy file sharing sites or peer to peer sharing would snag you almost any music you wanted. Decades later its interface is still widely copied, but now you can try the original again as its source code has been made available. It’s not what we’d call open source though, even though they seem to be making an effort to imply as much with phrases such as “opening up its source code“.

If you’d like to have a go with it you can snag a copy from this GitHub repository, and you’ll need a particular version of Visual Studio 2019 to build it. Any celebrations will be muted though by paragraph five of the Winamp Collaborative License, which prohibits distribution of modified versions or forks, and stipulates that only the official maintainers can distribute it. This doesn’t sound like open source to us, indeed it seems they’re just looking for community maintenance for free, which probably isn’t too surprising from a brand which went all-out to join the NFT bandwagon a couple of years ago.

So have a look for nostalgia’s sake if you want, but we’d suggest going for something more community driven if you want to do anything with it.

Header: Christiaan Colen, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Find My Power Tool Battery

September 23, 2024 by 7 Comments

Apple’s Find My network has seen its fair of hacks to devices, but perhaps the most unusual we’ve seen is before us today. [biemster] has added a Lidl Parkside smart connected power tool battery to the network, not by concealing an AirTag within it, but by hacking its on-board firmware.

Opening up the device reveals a Tuya BT17L Bluetooth module, the hackable nature of which due to other projects prompted a port of a previous Find My project which provided open source access to the network. The result is as he describes, the world’s chunkiest key finder, and also we’re guessing the one with one of the longest battery lives too.

The European budget supermarkets are well known for their budget bargain aisles, and Lidl’s Parkside range has some surprisingly robust tools among it. They might not quite be up to replacing IKEA in the hacker source stakes, but those of us who live in countries served by them know to keep an eye out in the hope of fresh gems alongside those awesome AlpenFest apple crumble cakes. This one certainly isn’t the first Parkside hack we’ve seen.

The Tiny Toolkit Manifesto

September 22, 2024 by 48 Comments

Most of us have some form of an on-the-go toolkit, but how much thought have we put into its contents? There’s a community of people who put a lot of thought into this subject, and EMF Camp have put up one of their talks from earlier in the summer in which [Drew Batchelor] sets out their manifesto and introduces tinytoolk.it, a fascinating resource.

The talk is well worth a watch, as rather than setting the tools you should be carrying, it instead examines the motivations for your kit in the first place, and how to cull those which don’t make the grade. If an item seems to see little use, put a piece of tape with the date on it every time it comes out, to put a number on it. As an example he ended up culling a multi-tool from his kit, not because it’s not an extremely useful tool, but because he found everything it did was better done by other items in the kit.

It’s probable we’ll all look at our carry-around kit with new eyes after watching this, it’s certain that ours could use a few tweaks. What’s in your kit, and how could you improve it? Let us know in the comments.

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