Once upon a time, the cathode ray tube was pretty much the only type of display you’d find in a consumer television. As the analog broadcast world shifted to digital, we saw the rise of plasma displays and LCDs, which offered greater resolution and much slimmer packaging. Then there was the so-called LED TV, confusingly named—for it was merely an LCD display with an LED backlight. The LEDs were merely lamps, with the liquid crystal doing all the work of displaying an image.
Today, however, we are seeing the rise of true LED displays. Sadly, decades of confusing marketing messages have polluted the terminology, making it a confusing space for the modern television enthusiast. Today, we’ll explore how these displays work and disambiguate what they’re being called in the marketplace.
We’re lucky enough in 2026 to have cheap single-board computers fast enough to emulate machines from the 1990s, touching on the 32-bit era. We’ve seen a few projects as a result, emulating the Apple Macs of the 68000 era, but even with the best 3D printing, they can disappoint when it comes to the case. So when [This Does Not Compute] saw a novelty alarm clock using a very well-modelled mini replica of an early Mac, putting a Mac emulator in it was the obvious way to go.
The project uses a Raspberry Pi with a small colour LCD. The video below the break takes us through the process of gutting it and mounting the Pi and display on a custom 3D-printed bracket. In an unexpected touch, parts of the original LCD are used to give the curved corners, which owners of an original Mac will remember. It may have a little further to go in that its fake floppy drive is begging to be converted to an SD card slot, and it has a now-unused brightness dial. But we’d say it’s one of the best little Mac emulators we’ve seen so far, if perhaps not the smallest.
Looks just like the real deal in a dark cabinet. (Credit: Big Clive, YouTube)
These days, you can get fakes, bootlegs, and similar for just about anything. While a fake handbag isn’t such a big deal, in the case of a DIN-rail power supply, you’d better make sure that you got the real deal. Case in point, the fake ‘Mean Well’ DIN-rail PSU that [Big Clive] got his mitts on for a detailed analysis and teardown.
Even without taking a PSU apart there are often clear clues that you might be dealing with a fake, starting with the logo and the rest of the markings. Here it’s clear that the logo is designed to only appear to be the MW one at a quick glance, with the rest of the label being poorly copied English gibberish containing copious “unnecessary” double “quotes”.
So what do you get for £3-5 in this +12VDC, 1.25A rated PSU? Shockingly, the insides are actually quite decent and probably close to the genuine MW, with basic noise filtering, proper isolation, and apparently a real class-Y safety capacitor. Similarly, the chosen DK124 control IC is more than capable of the task, with a good circuit for the adjustable voltage control.
We’ve always been interested in fluidic logic and, based on [soiboi’s] videos, he is too. His latest shows how to use silicone and a vacuum to build a multiplexed dot matrix display. This is a fascinating look at how you design with air instead of electrons.
Just like a regular display, it isn’t efficient to control each element separately. Usually, it’s better to multiplex such that 16 “pixels” need only row and column air valves. Just as you might use transistors, the project uses “air transistors” to build logic gates.
This would be a bad time to slip. (Credit: onionboots, YouTube)
In the olden days, an administrator password on a BIOS was a mere annoyance, one quickly remedied by powering off the system and pulling its CMOS battery or moving a jumper around. These days, you’re more likely to find a separate EEPROM on the mainboard that preserves the password. This, too, is mostly just another annoyance, as [onionboots] knew. All it takes is shorting out this EEPROM at the right time to knock it offline, with the ‘right time’ turning out to be rather crucial.
While refurbishing this laptop for a customer, he thought it’d be easy: the guide he found said he just had to disassemble the laptop to gain access to this chip, then short out its reset pin at the right time to make it drop offline and keep it shorted. Important here is that you do not short it when you are still booting the system, or it won’t boot. This makes for some interesting prodding of tiny pins with a metal tool.
It probably won’t come as much of a surprise to find that most of the Hackaday staff aren’t exactly what you’d call sports fanatics, so we won’t judge if you didn’t tune in for the Super Bowl last week. But if you did, perhaps you noticed Ring’s Orwellian “Search Party” spot — the company was hoping to get customers excited about a new feature that allows them to upload a picture of their missing pet and have Ring cameras all over the neighborhood search for a visual match. Unfortunately for Ring, the response on social media wasn’t quite what they expected.
Nope, don’t like that.
One commenter on YouTube summed it up nicely: “This is like the commercial they show at the beginning of a dystopian sci-fi film to quickly show people how bad things have gotten.” You don’t have to be some privacy expert to see how this sort of mass surveillance is a slippery slope. Many were left wondering just who or what the new system would be searching for when it wasn’t busy sniffing out lost pups.
The folks at Wyze were quick to capitalize on the misstep, releasing their own parody ad a few days later that showed various three-letter agencies leaving rave reviews for the new feature. By Thursday, Ring announced they would be canceling a planned expansion that would have given the divisive Flock Safety access to their network of cameras. We’re sure it was just a coincidence.
Speaking of three-letter agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced this week that they will no longer incentivize the inclusion of stop-start systems on new automobiles. The feature, which shuts off the engine when the vehicle comes to a stop, was never actually required by federal law; rather, the EPA previously awarded credits to automakers that added the feature, which would help them meet overall emission standards. Manufacturers are free to continue offering stop-start systems on their cars if they wish, but without the EPA credits, there’s little benefit in doing so. Especially since, as Car and Driver notes, it seems like most manufacturers are happy to be rid of it. The feature has long been controversial with drivers as well, to the point that we’ve seen DIY methods to shut it off.
Back in the 1980s, your options for writing your own code and games were rather more limited than today. This also mostly depended on what home computer you could get your hands on, which was a market that — at least in Japan — Nintendo was very happy to slide into with their ‘Nintendo Family Computer’, or ‘Famicom’ for short. With the available peripherals, including a tape deck and keyboard, you could actually create a fairly decent home computer, as demonstrated by [Throaty Mumbo] in a recent video.
