Old FM Radio Upcycled Into Classy Bluetooth Speaker

December 23, 2025 by No comments

[Distracted by Design] loves gear from the 1980s, though some of it isn’t as useful as it used to be. He happened across a cheap old FM radio with a great look, but wanted to repurpose it into something more modern. Thus, he set about turning this cheap piece of old electronics into a stylish Bluetooth speaker.

All of the original electronics were stripped out, while the original speaker was kept since it neatly fit the case. Electronically, the build relies on a Bluetooth module harvested from an existing speaker. 3D-printed bracketry was used to fasten it neatly into place inside the radio housing, with the buttons neatly presented where the original radio had its tone and volume controls. Power is via an internal lithium-ion battery, charged over USB-C thanks to an off-the-shelf charging module.

Where the build really shines, though, is the detailing. The original cheap plastic handle was replaced with a CNC-machined wooden piece, bolted on with machined aluminium side plates. Similarly, the original clear plastic tuning window was replaced with another tasteful piece of wood that dropped perfectly into place. At the back, the charge port is nicely integrated. Where the radio formerly had a removable door for the power cable storage, it now has a machined aluminium plate hosting the USB-C charge port. Little 3D-printed button actuators were also used to integrate the Bluetooth module’s controls into the case.

It’s a very stylish build, overall. Perhaps the one area it’s a let down is in the sound quality. The ancient speaker simply doesn’t sound great compared to modern Bluetooth speakers and their finely-tuned, bassy audio. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—sometimes it’s nice to have an audio source with a limited frequency response. It can be nice for use in an area where you may want to be able to easily speak over the music.

If you want to build a Bluetooth speaker of your own, you might like to whip up an open-source design from scratch. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Old FM Radio Upcycled Into Classy Bluetooth Speaker” →

Tackling Tremors With DIY Technology

December 23, 2025 by No comments

[It’s Triggy!] had a problem to solve. His grandma was having issues with hand tremors, which made the basic tasks of daily life difficult to perform. He decided to explore whether a high-tech solution could help best the tremors and make life easier.

The video covers multiple ideas on how to stabilize a hand suffering involuntary tremors. The first build involved a gyroscope, which proved unsuccessful, but led to the idea of building a reaction wheel. The concept is simple — get the reaction wheel to counteract the forces from tremors to stabilize the hand. To achieve this, an accelerometer was employed to track the movements of the arm and the hand. The magnitude of the movement was then used to control a powerful brushless motor mounted on the wrist. If the tremor was driving a hard tilt to the left, the motor would spin up to create a counter-torque, cancelling out the involuntary movement. This worked to a degree, but the resulting device was large and noisy, which made it impractical.

This thus inspired a return to earlier work involving the use of a tuned mass damper to settle tremors. The combination of some 3D printed wrist mounts along with various spring and cantilever designs… ultimately didn’t work that well. By this point, [It’s Triggy!] had noticed the tremor was mostly in the hands, while the wrist stayed steady. Thus was inspired a wrist-mounted handle for the wearer to wrap their hand around. This allowed the use of simple handheld objects like kitchen utensils, with the wearer’s own grip suppressing the tremor successfully.

As this project demonstrates, sometimes high-tech solutions are the way to go, and other times… a more passive design will actually serve you better.

Continue reading “Tackling Tremors With DIY Technology” →

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Ultimate Portable Split

December 23, 2025 by No comments

What do you look for in a travel keyboard? For me, it has to be split, though this condition most immediately demands a carrying solution of some kind. Wirelessness I can take or leave, so it’s nice to have both options available. And of course, bonus points if it looks so good that people interrupt me to ask questions.

A pair of hands poised above a blue split keyboard that packs easily for travel in a 3D-printed case. The case doubles as a laptop stand.
Image by [kleshwong] via YouTube
Depending on your own personal answers to this burning question, the PSKEEB 5 just may be your endgame. And, lucky for you, [kleshwong] plans to open source it soon. All he asks for is your support by watching the video below and doing the usual YouTube-related things.

You’ll see a couple of really neat features, like swing-out tenting feet, a trackpoint, rotary encoders, and the best part of all — a carrying case that doubles as a laptop stand. Sweet!

Eight years in the making, this is the fifth in a series, thus the name: the P stands for Portability; the S for Split. [kleshwong] believes that 36 keys is just right, as long as you have what you need on various layers.

So, do what you can in the like/share/subscribe realm so we can all see the GitHub come to pass, would you? Here’s the spot to watch, and  you can enjoy looking through the previous versions while you wait with your forks and stars.

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Ultimate Portable Split” →

The Nokia N900 Updated For 2025

December 23, 2025 by 5 Comments

Can a long-obsolete Linux phone from 2009 be of use in 2025? [Yaky] has a Nokia N900, and is giving it a go.

Back in the 2000s, Nokia owned the mobile phone space. They had a smartphone OS, even if they didn’t understand app distribution, they had the best cameras, screens, antennas, the lot. They threw it all away with inept management that made late-stage Commodore look competent. Apple and Android came along, and now a Nokia is a rarity. Out of this mess came one good thing, though: the N900 was a Linux-based smartphone that became the go-to hacker mobile for a few years.

First up with this N900 is the long-dead battery. He makes a fake battery with a set of supercapacitors and resistors to simulate the temperature sensor, and is then able to power it from an external PSU. This is refined to a better fake battery using the connector from the original. The device also receives a USB-C port, though due to space constraints, not the PD identifiers, making it (almost) modern.

Because it was a popular hacker device, it’s possible to upgrade the software on an N900. He’s given it U-Boot, and now it boots Linux from an SD card and functions as an online radio device.

That’s impressive hackability and longevity for a phone, if only we could have more like it.

Surviving The RAM Apocalypse With Software Optimizations

December 23, 2025 by 39 Comments

To the surprise of almost nobody, the unprecedented build-out of datacenters and the equipping of them with servers for so-called ‘AI’ has led to a massive shortage of certain components. With random access memory (RAM) being so far the most heavily affected and with storage in the form of HDDs and SSDs not far behind, this has led many to ask the question of how we will survive the coming months, years, decades, or however-long the current AI bubble will last.

One thing is already certain, and that is that we will have to make our current computer systems last longer, and forego simply tossing in more sticks of RAM in favor of doing more with less. This is easy to imagine for those of us who remember running a full-blown Windows desktop system on a sub-GHz x86 system with less than a GB of RAM, but might require some adjustment for everyone else.

In short, what can us software developers do differently to make a hundred MB of RAM stretch further, and make a GB of storage space look positively spacious again?

Continue reading “Surviving The RAM Apocalypse With Software Optimizations” →

Libxml2 Narrowly Avoids Becoming Unmaintained

December 23, 2025 by 34 Comments

In an excellent example of one of the most overused XKCD images, the libxml2 library has for a little while lost its only maintainer, with [Nick Wellnhofer] making good on his plan to step down by the end of the year.

XKCD's dependency model
Modern-day infrastructure, as visualized by XKCD. (Credit: Randall Munroe)

While this might not sound like a big deal, the real scope of this problem is rather profound. Not only is libxml2 part of GNOME, it’s also used as dependency by a huge number of projects, including web browsers and just about anything that processes XML or XSLT. Not having a maintainer in the event that a fresh, high-risk CVE pops up would obviously be less than desirable.

As for why [Nick] stepped down, it’s a long story. It starts in the early 2000s when the original author [Daniel Veillard] decided he no longer had time for the project and left [Nick] in charge. It should be said here that both of them worked as volunteers on the project, for no financial compensation. This when large companies began to use projects like libxml2 in their software, and were happy to send bug reports. Beyond a single Google donation it was effectively unpaid work that required a lot of time spent on researching and processing potential security flaws sent in.

Of note is that when such a security report comes in, the expectation is that you as a volunteer software developer drop everything you’re working on and figure out the cause, fix and patched-by-date alongside filing a CVE. This rather than you getting sent a merge request or similar with an accompanying test case. Obviously these kind of cases seems to have played a major role in making [Nick] burn out on maintaining both libxml2 and libxslt.

Fortunately for the project two new developers have stepped up to take over as maintainers, but it should be obvious that such churn is not a good sign. It also highlights the central problem with the conflicting expectations of open source software being both totally free in a monetary fashion and unburdened with critical bugs. This is unfortunately an issue that doesn’t seem to have an easy solution, with e.g. software bounties resulting in mostly a headache.

Using An E-Book Reader As A Secondary Display

December 23, 2025 by 8 Comments

[Alireza Alavi] wanted to use an e-ink tablet as a Linux monitor. Why? We don’t need to ask. You can see the result of connecting an Onyx BOOX Air 2 to an Arch Linux box in the video below.

Like all good projects, this one had a false start. Deskreen sounds good, as it is an easy way to stream your desktop to a browser. The problem is, it isn’t very crisp, and it can be laggy, according to the post. Of course, VNC is a tried-and-true solution. The Onyx uses Android, so there were plenty of VNC clients, and Linux, of course, has many VNC servers.

Putting everything together as a script lets [Alireza] use the ebook as a second monitor. Using it as a main monitor would be difficult, and [Alireza] reports using the two monitors to mirror each other, so you can glance over at the regular screen for a color image, for example.

Another benefit of the mirrored screens is that VNC lets you use the tablet’s screen as an input device, which is handy if you are drawing in GIMP or performing similar tasks.

We sometimes use VNC on Android just to get to a fake Linux install running on the device.

Continue reading “Using An E-Book Reader As A Secondary Display” →