Before Elliot Williams jumps on a train for Hackaday Europe, there was just enough time to meet up virtually with Tom Nardi to discuss their favorite hacks and stories from the previous week. This episode’s topics include the potential benefits of having a dual-gantry 3D printer, using microcontrollers to build bespoke note taking gadgets, the exciting world of rock tumbling, and the proper care and maintenance required to keep your World War II battleship in shape. They’ll also go over some old school keyboard technologies, DIP chip repairs, and documenting celestial events with your home solar array. By the end you’ll hear about the real-world challenges of putting artificial intelligence to work, and how you can safely put high-power lithium batteries to work in your projects without setting your house on fire.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
While the average Hackaday reader is arguably less likely than most to install a megacorp’s listening device in their home, we know there’s at least some of you out there that have an Amazon hockey puck or two sitting on a shelf. The fact is, they offer some compelling possibilities for DIY automation, even if you do have to jump through a few uncomfortable hoops to bend them to your will.
That being said, we’re willing to bet very few readers have bothered installing more than a few Alexa Skills. But that’s not a judgment based on any kind of nerd stereotype — it’s just that nobody seems to care about them. A fact that’s evidenced by the recent revelation that even Amazon looks to be losing interest in the program. In a post on LinkedIn, Skill developer [Mark Tucker] shared an email he received from the mothership explaining they were ending the AWS Promotional Credits for Alexa (APCA) program on June 30th.
Launched aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in July of 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is the most capable space telescope of its kind. As of this writing, the spacecraft is in good health and is returning valuable scientific data. It’s currently in an orbit that extends at its highest point to nearly one-third the distance to the Moon, which gives it an ideal vantage point from which to make its observations, and won’t reenter the Earth’s atmosphere for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Yet despite this rosy report card, Chandra’s future is anything but certain. Faced with the impossible task of funding all of its scientific missions with the relative pittance they’re allocated from the federal government, NASA has signaled its intent to wind down the space telescope’s operations over the next several years. According to their latest budget request, the agency wants to slash the program’s $41 million budget nearly in half for 2026. Funding would remain stable at that point for the next two years, but in 2029, the money set aside for Chandra would be dropped to just $5.2 million.
Drastically reducing Chandra’s budget by the end of the decade wouldn’t be so unexpected if its successor was due to come online in a similar time frame. Indeed, it would almost be expected. But despite being considered a high scientific priority, the x-ray observatory intended to replace Chandra isn’t even off the drawing board yet. The 2019 concept study report for what NASA is currently calling the Lynx X-ray Observatory estimates a launch date in the mid-2030s at the absolute earliest, pointing out that several of the key components of the proposed telescope still need several years of development before they’ll reach the necessary Technology Readiness Level (TRL) for such a high profile mission.
With its replacement for this uniquely capable space telescope decades away even by the most optimistic of estimates, the potential early retirement of the Chandra X-ray Observatory has many researchers concerned about the gap it will leave in our ability to study the cosmos.
By the time this post hits the front page, we’ll be just a few days away from the kickoff of Hackaday Europe 2024!
For those of you joining us in Berlin this weekend, we’ve got an incredible amount of content planned for you. Things get rolling on Friday with a pre-event meetup. But Saturday is when things really kick into high gear. Before the day’s out, we’ll have played host to nearly a dozen speakers and — literally — more workshops than we could fit into the schedule. Two workshops will be “floating” events that will happen once enough interested parties have congregated in one place. We’ll keep things going until well past midnight, which leads directly into Sunday. We want to get a few sessions of lightning talks packed in, so start coming up with your talk ideas now.
The Vectorscope will be making its European debut.
In addition, there will be food, music, camaraderie, badge hacking, and the general technolust surrounding a Hackaday event. In our humble and totally unbiased opinion, we put on some of the best and most unique hardware hacking meetups in the world — if you like reading Hackaday, you’ll love living it for a couple of days.
As of this writing, we still have a very few tickets for Hackaday Europe 2024 available. Want one? Head over to the Eventbrite page. But you better hurry. We’re talking a literal handful here, so don’t be surprised if they’ve dried up by the time you read this.
The workshops have all sold out, but as usual, we’ll be running a waiting list right up until the last minute: should anyone have to drop out of a workshop (which happens more than you might think), their spot will go to the person next in line. If you’d like to get on the list, email prize@hackaday.com with your name, ticket number, and the workshop you’re hoping to sneak into, and we’ll see what we can do.
But don’t let the workshops stop you. There’s still plenty to see, do, and experience. See you there!
If you were lucky enough to be near the path of totality, and didn’t have your view obscured by clouds, yesterday’s eclipse provided some very memorable views. But you know what’s even better than making memories? Having cold hard data to back it up.
Hackaday contributor [Bob Baddeley] was in Madison, Wisconsin for the big event, which NASA’s Eclipse Explorer website predicted would see about 87% coverage. Watching the eclipse through the appropriate gear at the local hackerspace was fun, but the real nerding out happened when he got home and could pull the data from his solar system.
A graph of the system’s generated power shows a very clear dip during the duration of the eclipse, which let him determine exactly when the occlusion started, peaked, and ended.
Folks with a bit of knowledge about network security commonly use virtual private networks (VPNs) when out and about. Whether you’re connecting to public WiFi or somebody passes you a questionable Ethernet cable at a hacker con, it’s nice to have a secure endpoint to tunnel all of your traffic. As a secondary bonus, connecting through a VPN can obscure your physical location. It’s that second feature that has a bunch of people jumping on the VPN bandwagon as they try to dodge the recent porn age checks that have gone into effect in a number of states. According to a recent article in PopSci, one particular VPN provider saw a 275% jump in demand on the same day that PornHub cut off access to users in Texas. While the debate over underage users accessing adult content is far outside of our wheelhouse, anything that gets more users connecting to the Internet via encrypted means is arguably a net positive.
If you wanted somebody from the Geek Squad to set up that VPN so you can get back on PornHub to work securely from the local coffee shop, you might be out of luck. Reports have been coming in that Best Buy’s mobile nerd division is seeing sweeping layoffs. Geeks were told to stay home on Tuesday and await a call from corporate, at which point many got the surprising news that they no longer had a job. The /r/GeekSquad subreddit has been a rallying point for staff who got the axe, with the user [jaym026] posting what we assume is an AI-generated inspirational speech from Optimus Prime. Of course, it sucks for anyone to lose their job, especially with the way things are these days. Still, we’re willing to bet almost none of those affected will look back on the day they were let go from an increasingly irrelevant brick-and-mortar electronics store as a low point in their professional careers.
There’s a saying among recreational mariners that the word “boat” is actually an acronym for “bring out another thousand”, as it seems you can’t operate one for long without committing to expensive maintenance and repairs. But this axiom isn’t limited to just civilian pleasure craft, it also holds true for large and complex vessels — although the bill generally has a few more zeros at the end.
Consider the USS New Jersey (BB-62), an Iowa-class battleship that first served in the Second World War and is now operated as a museum ship. Its recent dry docking for routine repair work has been extensively documented on YouTube by curator [Ryan Szimanski], and in the latest video, he covers one of the most important tasks crews have to attend to while the ship is out of the water: inspecting and repairing the hundreds of patches that line the hull.
These patches aren’t to repair damage, but instead cover up the various water inlets and outlets required by onboard systems. When New Jersey was finally decommissioned in 1991, it was hauled out of the water and plates were welded over all of these access points to prevent any potential leaks. But as the Navy wanted to preserve the ship so it could potentially be reactivated if necessary, care was taken to make the process reversible.
