ReMemory Is The Amnesia-hedging Buddy Backup You Didn’t Know You Needed

February 10, 2026 by Tyler August 14 Comments

What would happen if you lost your memory, even partially? With so much of our lives being digital, forgetting your passwords (or the master key to your password manager) could be disastrous. Haunted by that specter after a concussion, [eljojo] created ReMemory, a tool based on Shamir’s Secret Sharing to help your friends help you.

Shamir’s Secret Sharing, for the uninitiated, is a way to split up important data between parties so that the full picture is only available when a quorum comes together. The classic example is giving everyone a couple of digits out of the combination to the bank vault, but no one the full combination. Together, they can open the vault.

ReMemory works the same way. Rather than the combination to a bank vault, the locally-hosted, browser-based interface splits the encryption key to your sensitive data. If you’re old fashioned that might be a plaintext list of passwords, or for the more modern the recovery codes to your password manager. It could be literally anything, like your Aunt Edna’s famous cupcake recipe, which surely should not be lost to time.

You can chose how many friends to split your data betwixt, and how many will be required to meet quorum– the minimum, of course, being two, but the suggested default is to split the data five ways, and allow decryption from any three parties. Each bundle includes the complete recovery tool, so anyone in your circle of trust can start the process of decrypting your data if they get the others on board. Since it’s self-hosted and browser based, those friends don’t have to be particularly tech-savvy, as long as they can be trusted to hold onto the files. Everything is explained in the readme included in each bundle.

This does have the downside of requiring you to have multiple close friends, at least some of whom you trust to come through in a crunch, and all of whom you trust not to collude behind your back. Still, if you’re the social type, this seems like it might be a useful tool. The code is available under an Apache 2.0 license, so you can audit it for yourself — a must for any tool you plan on entrusting your secrets to.

The best part of the sharing algorithm is that it’s not vulnerable to quantum computing. While [eljojo] was thinking of amnesia when he put the tool together, we can’t help but think this also solves the postmortem password problem.

Crouching Typewriter, Hidden PC

January 30, 2026 by Tyler August 10 Comments

Go back a couple of generations, and rather than a laptop or a luggable, the office accessory of choice was a portable typewriter. As the 20th century wore on, the typewriter became electric before eventually being eclipsed by luggable and laptop computers. On YouTube, [Prototype] is turning back the clock, by turning an old Smith-Corona electric typewriter into a luggable computer– with a stretch goal of still being able to type.

Yeah, just gutting the typewriter and shoving an SBC inside wasn’t ambitious enough for [Prototype]: his goal is a working typewriter and an x86 gaming PC. To facilitate this, he guts the Smith-Corona keyboard, and 3D-prints a new top plate to add a little more vertical space in the old typewriter. The new top does recreate the original layout and the Corona switches get printed adapters to fit them to mechanical switches [Prototype] is using with a vibe-coded Arduino. Why one would bother with ChatGPT when QMK is right there, we could not say, but feel free to skip 6:20 to 15:00 if you’re watching the video but want to avoid that side quest.

Unfortunately, the “get the keyboard working” side-quest is either faked or deferred to video part II, which has not been posted yet. In this video he demonstrates that he can actuate a single hammer with a servo, but that’s a far cry from a working typewriter so, we’re really hoping he comes through on that promise in Part Two. Even if the build stops with just one hammer, that would give the tactile sound-and-feel that other builds turn to solenoids for. Squeezing a small-form-factor motherboard and graphics card into the old Smith-Corona is also going to be an interesting challenge. It’s certainly going to be a step up from using the keyboard as a terminal.

If you like this project but balk at the idea of destroying a working piece of vintage office equipment, it is possible to turn a typewriter into a USB keyboard non-invasively.

If you like this project at all, join us in thanking [Katie] for the tip. Not your cup of tea? Tell us what is, with a tip of your own. Continue reading “Crouching Typewriter, Hidden PC” →

Lazarustorm Lets A PiStorm Live Outside Your Old Amiga

January 29, 2026 by Tyler August 7 Comments

The PiStorm is nothing new; if you’re familiar with the retrocomputer scene, you’ve probably heard of it. By replacing the 68k processor in an old Amiga (or some models of Atari) the PiStorm accelerator gives a multiple order of magnitude speedup. It’s even a reversable mod, plugging in where the original CPU was. What’s not to love? Well, some people would simply prefer to keep their original CPUs in place. [TME Retro] has a video highlighting the solution for those people: the Lazarustorm by [arananet].

It makes perfect sense to us– back in the day, you could plug a whole x86 PC-compatible ‘sidecar’ into your Amiga, so why not a PiStorm? The whole bus is right there for the taking.The Lazarusstorm, as a project, is bog simple compared to the PiStorm itself. A PCB and the connectors to get it plugged into the expansion port on the Amiga side, and the connectors to plug the PiStorm into it on the other. A couple of jumpers and a few passives, and that’s it. [TME Retro] also took the time to come up with a case for it, which sits on felt feet to relieve stress on the PCBs. It’s a nice bit of CAD, but we rather wish he’d done it in beige.

As for the upgraded Amiga, it runs just as fast as it would had the 68k been replaced with a Pi3 and PiStorm internally, which is to say it’s practically a supercomputer by 1980s standards. You get the SD card to serve as a hard drive and can even access the internet via modern WiFi, something Commodore engineers likely never expected an A500 to do. Of course, just connecting to the network is only half the battle when getting these retro machines online. When these accelerators were new, the 68k emulation ran on top of Linux, but now that the EMU68k project has it bare metal and even faster.

This isn’t the first Raspberry-flavoured slice of Amiga sidecar we’ve featured: here’s one running Spotify. If you haven’t got an Amiga, there’s a PiStorm for the FPGA-based MiniMig, too. Continue reading “Lazarustorm Lets A PiStorm Live Outside Your Old Amiga” →

X-Cube Prism Becomes Dichroic Disco Ball

January 28, 2026 by Tyler August 13 Comments

You’ve likely seen an X-cube, a dichroic prism used to split light into its constituent colours–you know, those fun little cubes you get when tearing apart a broken projector. Have you considered that the X-cube need not be a cube for its entire existence? [Matt] at “Matt’s Corner of Gem Cutting” on YouTube absolutely did, which is why he ground one into a 216-facet disco ball.

That’s the hack, really. He took something many of us have played with at our desks thinking “I should do something cool with this” and… did something cool with it that most of us lack the tools and especially skills to even consider. It’s not especially practical, but it is especially pretty. Art, in other words.

The shape he’s using is known specifically to gemologists as “Santa’s Little Helper II” though we’d probably describe it as a kind of isosphere. Faceting the cube is just a matter of grinding down the facets to create the isosphere, then polishing them to brilliance with increasingly finer grit. This is done one hemisphere at a time, so the other hemisphere can be safely held in place with the now-classic cyanoacrylate and baking soda composite. Yes, jewelers use that trick, too.

We were slightly worried when [Matt] dumped his finished disco ball in acetone to clean off the cyanoacrylate– we haven’t the foggiest idea what optical-quality glue is used to hold the four prisms of an X-cube together and were a little worried acetone might soften the joints. That turned out not to be an issue, and [Matt] now has the most eye-catching sun-catcher we think we’ve ever seen.

We actually have seen suncatchers before, though admittedly it’s not a very popular tag around here. The closest build to this one was a so-called “hypercrystal” that combined an infinitiy mirror with a crystaline shape and dicloric tape for an effect as trippy as it sounds.

We also featured a deep-dive a while back if you want to know how these colourful, hard-to-pronounce coatings work.

Continue reading “X-Cube Prism Becomes Dichroic Disco Ball” →

Post-rampocalyptic Chip-Swap Provides Desktop Memory At Laptop Prices

January 27, 2026 by Tyler August 21 Comments

When you can buy something at a low price in one location, and sell it at a higher price somewhere else, you’re engaged in what economists call “arbitrage”. We’re not sure if desoldering DDR5 chips from laptop SO-DIMMs to populate a custom PCB to create much-more-expensive desktop memory counts as arbitrage, but it certainly counts as a hack. [VIK-on], who built the cards, claims he’s getting DDR5 performance at almost DDR3 prices. Nice!

Installed, the RAM apparently works well, though [VIK-on] has not shared benchmarks.

Specifically, he’s put together a 32 GB UDIMM from donor chips from two 16 GB SO-DIMMs. The memory chips themselves aren’t enough to make a stick of RAM, however: the part where we wish we had more details was in the firmware. The firmware identifies this DIY DIMM as an ADATA AX5U6500C3232G-DCLARWH, specifically. [VIK-on] is still performing stability tests, if those go well, we’re told to expect a how-to guide.

[VIK-on] is in Russia, so SO-DIMM rates may differ in your local market, but he claims walkaway costs of 17,015 ₽ — about $218 or €188, an astounding price for DDR5 in these dark days.

Some say soldering SIMMs seems severe, but hardly strange to Hackaday, and desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s ether that or optimize software, and who wants go to that effort?

LLM-Generated Newspaper Provides Ultimate In Niche Publications

January 26, 2026 by Tyler August 18 Comments

If you’re reading this, you probably have some fondness for human-crafted language. After all, you’ve taken the time to navigate to Hackaday and read this, rather than ask your favoured LLM to trawl the web and summarize what it finds for you. Perhaps you have no such pro-biological bias, and you just don’t know how to set up the stochastic parrot feed. If that’s the case, buckle up, because [Rafael Ben-Ari] has an article on how you can replace us with a suite of LLM agents.

The AI-focused paper has a more serious aesthetic, but it’s still seriously retro.

He actually has two: a tech news feed, focused on the AI industry, and a retrocomputing paper based on SimCity 2000’s internal newspaper. Everything in both those papers is AI-generated; specifically, he’s using opencode to manage a whole dogpen of AI agents that serve as both reporters and editors, each in their own little sandbox.

Using opencode like this lets him vary the model by agent, potentially handing some tasks to small, locally-run models to save tokens for the more computationally-intensive tasks. It also allows each task to be assigned to a different model if so desired. With the right prompting, you could produce a niche publication with exactly the topics that interest you, and none of the ones that don’t. In theory, you could take this toolkit — the implementation of which [Rafael] has shared on GitHub — to replace your daily dose of Hackaday, but we really hope you don’t. We’d miss you.

That’s news covered, and we’ve already seen the weather reported by “AI”— now we just need an automatically-written sports section and some AI-generated funny papers. That’d be the whole newspaper. If only you could trust it.

Story via reddit.

[Denny] removing a plaster bust from a microwave-softened mold

PLA Mold To Plaster Bust, No Silicone Needed

January 23, 2026 by Tyler August 5 Comments

3D printing is wonderful, but sometimes you just don’t want to look at a plastic piece. Beethoven’s bust wouldn’t look quite right in front of your secret door if it was bright orange PLA, after all. [Denny] over at “Shake the Future” on YouTube is taking a break from metal casting to show off a quick-and-easy plaster casting method— but don’t worry, he still uses a microwave.

Most people, when they’re casting something non-metallic from a 3D print are going to reach for castable silicone and create a mold, first. It works for chocolate just as easily as it does plaster, and it does work well. The problem is that it’s an extra step and extra materials, and who can afford the time and money that takes these days?

[Denny]’s proposal is simple: make the mold out of PLA. He’s using a resin slicer to get the negative shape for the mold, and exporting the STL to slice in PrusaSlicer, but Blender, Meshmixer and we’re pretty sure Cura should all work as well. [Denny] takes care when arranging his print to avoid needing supports inside the mold, but that’s not strictly necessary as long as you’re willing to clean them out. After that, it’s just a matter of mixing up the plaster, pouring it into the PLA, mold, and waiting.

Waiting, but not too long. Rather than let the plaster fully set up, [Denny] only waits about an hour. The mold is still quite ‘wet’ at this point, but that’s a good thing. When [Denny] tosses it in his beloved microwave, the moisture remaining in the plaster gets everything hot, softening the PLA so it can be easily cut with scissors and peeled off.

Yeah, this technique is single-use as presented, which might be one advantage to silicone, if you need multiple copies of a cast. Reusing silicone molds is often doable with a little forethought. On the other hand, by removing the plaster half-cured, smoothing out layer lines becomes a simple matter of buffing with a wet rag, which is certainly an advantage to this technique.

Some of you may be going “well, duh,” so check out [Denny]’s cast-iron benchy if his plasterwork doesn’t impress. We’ve long been impressed with the microwave crucibles shown off on “Shake the Future”, but it’s great to have options. Maybe metal is the material, or perhaps plain plastic is perfect– but if not, perchance Plaster of Paris can play a part in your play.

Continue reading “PLA Mold To Plaster Bust, No Silicone Needed” →