Author: Al Williams

4418 Articles

Ask Hackaday: Wired Or Wireless Headphones?

March 16, 2026 by 30 Comments

They say you should never throw out old clothes because they will come back in style one day. Maybe they are right. We noted in a recent BBC post that, apparently, wired headphones are making a comeback. Like many people, we were dismayed when Apple took the headphone jack out of the iPhone and, as [Thomas Germain] notes, even Google eventually ejected the normal headphone jack. (Although, in fairness, most of the Pixel phones we’ve seen come with a pair of USB-C earbuds.)

On the face of it, though, wireless seems to be a good idea. You can get cheap Bluetooth earbuds now, although maybe still not as cheap as wired buds. Sure, they sound terrible, but so do cheap buds. It is a pain to charge them, of course, but not having to untangle wires is a benefit. On the other hand, you never have to charge your wired headphones.

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The IPV4 We Didn’t Get

March 16, 2026 by 11 Comments

If you have ever read science fiction, you’ve probably seen “alternate history” stories. You know, where Europeans didn’t discover the New World until the 19th century, or the ancient Egyptians stumbled upon electricity. Maybe those things happened in an alternate universe. [BillPG] has an alternate history tale for us that imagines IPv6 was shot down and a protocol called IPv4x became prominent instead.

The key idea is that in 1993, the IP-Next-Generation working group could have decided that any solution that would break the existing network wouldn’t work. There is precedent. Stereo records play on mono players and vice versa. Color TV signals play on black and white sets just as well as black and white signals play on color TVs. It would have made perfect sense.

How could this be? The idea was to make everyone who “owns” an IPv4 address the stewards of a 96-bit sub-address block. IPv4x-aware equipment extracts the entire 128-bit address. IPv4-only equipment routes the packet to the controlling IPv4 address. Wasteful? Sure. Most people don’t need 79 octillion addresses. But if everyone has that many, then why not?

The fictional timeline has DNS and DHCP, along with dial-up stacks, changing to accommodate the new addresses. Again, you had to assume some parts of the network were still IPv4-only. DNS would return both addresses, and it was up to you to pick the IPv4x address if you understood it.

Your ISP would probably not offer you the entire extra space. A regional router could handle all traffic for your neighborhood and then direct it to your specific 128-bit address or your pool of addresses, if you have multiple devices. No need for NAT to hide your devices, nor strange router configurations to punch traffic through.

Of course, back in the real world, we have two incompatible systems: IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 adoption has been slow and painful. We wondered why [BillPG] wrote about this future that never was. Turns out, he’s proposed a gateway that IPv6 hosts can provide to allow access from IPv4-only networks. Pretty sneaky, but we can admire it. If reading all this makes you wonder what happened to IPv5, we wondered that, too.

Seeing The World Through Animal Eyes

March 10, 2026 by 21 Comments

If you think about it, you can’t be sure that what you see for the color red, for example, is what anyone else in the world actually sees. All you can be sure of is that we’ve all been trained to identify whatever we do see as red just like everyone else. Now, think about animal vision. Most people know that dogs don’t see as many colors as we do. On the other hand, the birds and the bees can see into ultraviolet. What would the world look like with extra colors? That’s the question researchers want to answer with this system for duplicating different animals’ views of the world.

Of course, this would be easy if you were thinking about dogs or cats. They can’t see the difference between red and green, making them effectively colorblind by human standards. Researchers are using modified commercial cameras and sophisticated video processing to produce images that sense blue, green, red, and UV light. Then they modify the image based on knowledge of different animal photoreceptors.

We were somewhat surprised that the system didn’t pick up IR. As we know snakes, for example, can sense IR. You’d think more sophisticated animals would have better color vision, but that seems to be untrue. The mantis shrimp, for example, has 12-16 types of photoreceptors. Even male and female humans have different vision systems that make them see colors differently.

Maybe you need a photospectrometer. You wonder if animals dream in color, too.

The Sweetest Programming Language: MNM

March 9, 2026 by 15 Comments

Admit it. If you haven’t created your own little programming language, you’ve probably at least thought about it. [Muffed] decided to create a unique — and sweet — programming language that uses M&M (or, at least, M&M-like) candies as the building block of programs.

If this sounds strange, it is because, honestly, it is. It all started when a packet of GEMS (the Cadbury’s version of M&Ms)  spilled and randomly fell in the shape of an arrow. There are only six symbols corresponding to the colors in a package. You create your program by arranging the candies and creating a digital image of the result. In practice, you’ll probably use ASCII text to represent your candy layout and let the compiler render the image for you.

The main way of encoding things is by the number of colored candy pixels in a row. So three blue morsels in an opcode, while four is a different opcode. Red candies encode integer literals with one candy being zero, two being one, and so on. Blue indicates control flow, green candy handles variables and stack operations, yellow is for math, and so on.

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Last Year In SBCs

March 9, 2026 by 7 Comments

While it might not be comprehensive, [Bret.dk] recently posted a retrospective titled “Every Single Board Computer I Tested in 2025.” The post covers 15 boards from 8 different companies. The cheapest board was $42, but the high-end topped out at $590.

We like the structure of the post. The boards are grouped in an under $50 category, another group for $50-100, and a final group for everything north of $100. Then there’s some analysis of what RAM prices are doing to the market, and commentary about CIX P1, Qualcomm, RISC-V, and more.

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Hiding A Bomb In Plain Sight

March 7, 2026 by 38 Comments

You are at war. Trains are key to keeping your army supplied with fuel, ammunition, food, and medical supplies. But, inexplicably, your trains keep blowing up. Sabotage? Enemy attack? There’s no evidence of a bomb or overt enemy attack. This is the situation the German military found itself in during World War II. As you can see in the video below, the hidden bomb was the brainchild of a member of Britain’s SOE.

The idea was to put plastic explosive inside a fake plastic lump of coal.  They hand-painted each one, and the color had to match the exact appearance of local coal. Paint and coal dust helped with that. The bomb had to weigh the correct amount as well.

The coal was safe until it got quite hot, so resistance fighters could easily carry the coal and surreptitiously drop the bomb anywhere coal is stored. Eventually, it will be put in a boiler, and at the right temperature, it will do its job. There’s some actual footage of a test in the second video below.

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Remotely Unlocking An Encrypted Hard Disk

March 6, 2026 by 22 Comments

Can you remotely unlock an encrypted hard disk? [Jyn] needed to unlock their home server after it rebooted even if they weren’t home. Normally, they used Tailscale to remote in, but you can’t use tailscale to connect to the machine before the hard drive decrypts, right? Well, you can, sort of, and [Jyn] explains how.

The entertaining post points out something you probably knew, but never thought much about. When your Linux box boots, it starts a very tiny compressed Linux in RAM. On [Jyn’s] machine using Arch, this is the initramfs.

That’s not news, but because it is an actual limited Linux system (including systemd), you can add tools to it. In this case, adding dropbear (an ssh server) and Tailscale to the limited boot-time Linux.

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