Author: Al Williams

4363 Articles

Hackaday Podcast Episode 349: Clocks, AI, And A New 3D Printer Guy

December 12, 2025 by 2 Comments

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams met up to cover the best of Hackaday this week, and they want you to listen in. There were a hodgepodge of hacks this week, ranging from home automation with RF, volumetric displays in glass, and some crazy clocks, too.

Ever see a typewriter that uses an ink pen? Elliot and Al hadn’t either. Want time on a supercomputer? It isn’t free, but it is pretty cheap these days. Finally, the guys discussed how to focus on a project like Dan Maloney, who finally got a 3D printer, and talked about Maya Posch’s take on LLM intelligence.

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!

Download the human-generated podcast in mostly mono, but sometimes stereo, MP3.

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Step Into My Particle Accelerator

December 11, 2025 by 16 Comments

If you get a chance to visit a computer history museum and see some of the very old computers, you’ll think they took up a full room. But if you ask, you’ll often find that the power supply was in another room and the cooling system was in yet another. So when you get a computer that fit on, say, a large desk and maybe have a few tape drives all together in a normal-sized office, people thought of it as “small.” We’re seeing a similar evolution in particle accelerators, which, a new startup company says, can be room-sized according to a post by [Charles Q. Choi] over at IEEE Spectrum.

Usually, when you think of a particle accelerator, you think of a giant housing like the 3.2-kilometer-long SLAC accelerator. That’s because these machines use magnets to accelerate the particles, and just like a car needs a certain distance to get to a particular speed, you have to have room for the particle to accelerate to the desired velocity.

A relatively new technique, though, doesn’t use magnets. Instead, very powerful (but very short) laser pulses create plasma from gas. The plasma oscillates in the wake of the laser, accelerating electrons to relativistic speeds. These so-called wakefield accelerators can, in theory, produce very high-energy electrons and don’t need much space to do it.

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Your Supercomputer Arrives In The Cloud

December 10, 2025 by 11 Comments

For as long as there have been supercomputers, people like us have seen the announcements and said, “Boy! I’d love to get some time on that computer.” But now that most of us have computers and phones that greatly outpace a Cray 2, what are we doing with them? Of course, a supercomputer today is still bigger than your PC by a long shot, and if you actually have a use case for one, [Stephen Wolfram] shows you how you can easily scale up your processing by borrowing resources from the Wolfram Compute Services. It isn’t free, but you pay with Wolfram service credits, which are not terribly expensive, especially compared to buying a supercomputer.

[Stephen] says he has about 200 cores of local processing at his house, and he still sometimes has programs that run overnight. If your program already uses a Wolfram language and uses parallelism — something easy to do with that toolbox — you can simply submit a remote batch job.

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Linux Fu: The SSD Super Cache

December 8, 2025 by 14 Comments

NVMe solid state disk drives have become inexpensive unless you want the very largest sizes. But how do you get the most out of one? There are two basic strategies: you can use the drive as a fast drive for things you use a lot, or you can use it to cache a slower drive.

Each method has advantages and disadvantages. If you have an existing system, moving high-traffic directories over to SSD requires a bind mount or, at least, a symbolic link. If your main filesystem uses RAID, for example, then those files are no longer protected.

Caching sounds good, in theory, but there are at least two issues. You generally have to choose whether your cache “writes through”, which means that writes will be slow because you have to write to the cache and the underlying disk each time, or whether you will “write back”, allowing the cache to flush to disk occasionally. The problem is, if the system crashes or the cache fails between writes, you will lose data.

Compromise

For some time, I’ve adopted a hybrid approach. I have an LVM cache for most of my SSD that hides the terrible performance of my root drive’s RAID array. However, I have some selected high-traffic, low-importance files in specific SSD directories that I either bind-mount or symlink into the main directory tree. In addition, I have as much as I can in tmpfs, a RAM drive, so things like /tmp don’t hit the disks at all.

There are plenty of ways to get SSD caching on Linux, and I won’t explain any particular one. I’ve used several, but I’ve wound up on the LVM caching because it requires the least odd stuff and seems to work well enough.

This arrangement worked just fine and gives you the best of both worlds. Things like /var/log and /var/spool are super fast and don’t bog down the main disk. Yet the main disk is secure and much faster thanks to the cache setup. That’s been going on for a number of years until recently.

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Belting Out The Audio

December 8, 2025 by 17 Comments

Today, it is hard to imagine a world without recorded audio, and for the most part that started with Edison’s invention of the phonograph. However, for most of its history, the phonograph was a one-way medium. Although early phonographs could record with a separate needle cutting into foil or wax, most record players play only records made somewhere else. The problem is, this cuts down on what you can do with them. When offices were full of typists and secretaries, there was the constant problem of telling the typist what to type. Whole industries developed around that problem, including the Dictaphone company.

The issue is that most people can talk faster than others can write or type. As a result, taking dictation is frustrating as you have to stop, slow down, repeat yourself, or clarify dubious words. Shorthand was one way to equip a secretary to write as fast as the boss can talk. Steno machines were another way. But the dream was always a way to just speak naturally, at your convenience, and somehow have it show up on a typewritten page. That’s where the Dictaphone company started.

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How Big Is Your Video Again? Square Vs Rectangular Pixels

December 8, 2025 by 11 Comments

[Alexwlchan] noticed something funny. He knew that not putting a size for a video embedded in a web page would cause his page to jump around after the video loaded. So he put the right numbers in. But with some videos, the page would still refresh its layout. He learned that not all video sizes are equal and not all pixels are square.

For a variety of reasons, some videos have pixels that are rectangular, and it is up to your software to take this into account. For example, when he put one of the suspect videos into QuickTime Player, it showed the resolution was 1920×1080 (1350×1080). That’s the non-square pixel.

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The Key To Plotting

December 7, 2025 by 11 Comments

Plotters aren’t as common as they once were. Today, many printers can get high enough resolution with dots that drawing things with a pen isn’t as necessary as it once was. But certainly you’ve at least seen or heard of machines that would draw graphics using a pen. Most of them were conceptually like a 3D printer with a pen instead of a hotend and no real Z-axis. But as [biosrhythm] reminds us, some plotters were suspiciously like typewriters fitted with pens.

Instead of type bars, type balls, or daisy wheels, machines like the Panasonic Penwriter used a pen to draw your text on the page, as you can see in the video below. Some models had direct computer control via a serial port, if you wanted to plot using software. At least one model included a white pen so you could cover up any mistakes.

If you didn’t have a computer, the machine had its own way to input data for graphs. How did that work? Read for yourself.

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