A Modern Smalltalk

October 30, 2026 by No comments

In the history of object-oriented (OO) computer languages, Smalltalk has a special place. It wasn’t the first OO language, and it hasn’t spread as well as some others. But it was the first OO language many people encountered, and it influenced many other languages you’ve probably seen. Developed at the famed Xerox PARC, it also introduced many people to the “model/view/controller” (MVC) architecture. Cuis Smalltalk is a free and portable modern Smalltalk-80 environment. It replaces the traditional MVC framework with Morphic, but otherwise, it would be very familiar to someone who used Smalltalk in the 1990s. The project’s goal is to stay simple at the core, although you can add complexity via packages.

The software has been around for a while, but it is on a rolling release model, so the install page suggests you clone the Git repo. You can, however, get a stable release, which might be important if you were deploying applications. Running the program results in a Cuis desktop where you can open various things like workspaces, help documents, and the transcript.

Smalltalk throws some people because it takes OO to an extreme. For example, you don’t add two and three using an operator. You send the object two a message that includes another object, three. You can think of sending a message as calling a method on an object. As with virtual functions in C++, different objects can respond differently to the same request. For example, an Animal class might have a speak message that causes a cow to print “moo” and a chicken to print “cluck.”

You get used to it, and there’s a very nice class browser that lets you examine classes and what you can do with them. There are even packages to work with an Arduino over a serial port. They haven’t been updated lately, so they might (or might not) need a little work.

We’ve looked at GNU Smalltalk before. We’ve also seen a version that runs directly on a Raspberry Pi.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 393: Epaper, Tamagotchi Hacks, And Supercon Talks Galore

October 30, 2026 by No comments

This week’s podcast comes from Europe, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, who wishes to apologies for the poor sound quality from her headset microphone. The news this week is our Supercon conference which is upcoming, we’ve released more speaker details.

We start the hacks with a follow-up to an exciting development. We’ve seen e-paper screens driven at high frame rates, but do the techniques used shorten the life of these displays? Then we have Tamagotchi hacking, re-using an old mobile phone as a flight controller, the oldest Windows app to run on Windows 11, and probably the prettiest mini TV studio rack you will ever see. Pushing Bluetooth out to 12 kilometres  is the cherry on the cake.

In quick hacks there’s a swash plate-less helicopter, Commodore 64 keycaps, and the history of the mouse, before our can’t-miss look at infra-red transmission, and a forgotten Google VR headset.

Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments, or drop us a line on the mailbag.

Download yourself a little podcast, won’t you?

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How Britain Narrowly Escaped A Grid Blackout In June 2026

October 30, 2026 by 9 Comments

Amidst one of the worst heatwaves in European history, Britain’s national grid saw itself faced with a quiet crisis this summer. On June 23rd, the grid frequency dropped to 49.657 Hz, down from the nominal 50 Hz — getting very close to the lower bound before safeties would start disconnecting parts of the grid. In a video by [The Electric Brit] this event is investigated, including its causes and how France’s spare capacity managed to save the day.

Under normal operating conditions the UK grid is kept above 49.8 Hz, with the statutory lower limit being 49.5. Meaning that another drop of 0.157 Hz would have set in motion a series of quite extreme grid protection mechanisms including the possibility of local blackouts.

Fortunately the cessation of energy exports and the importing of French power from hydro and nuclear power stations managed to nip this issue in the bud before it could get any worse. Although an example of correct grid management, it also shows how poorly planned maintenance and events like a heatwave can line up quite a few holes in the cheese slices that invite disaster.

The problems here began weeks prior to the event, with 21.2 GW of generating capacity offline. Of this, 12.6 GW was planned maintenance, another 8.6 GW was unexpectedly offline, while another 2.6 GW of gas generation was mostly unavailable due to the heatwave curtailing production. A couple of interconnections with Ireland and other nations were also down for maintenance, leaving the grid control room with precious few options.

Although the UK’s transmission system operator (TSO) NESO had its predicted capacities for variable renewable sources (VRE) like solar, it could not see local demand and production from e.g. rooftop solar in the control room. This became rather exciting when the evening neared and rooftop solar output dropped. Here NESO turned out to be lucky, but such hidden factors form a major risk factor when such consumers return to grid power.

As VRE sources fell quiet across Europe that evening, this put the onus on remaining generating sources and brought the slowly developing crisis to its apex. Fortunately importing energy from France saved the day here, but there are many lessons to be learned here, many grounded in how complex AC grid management is once you consider all aspects that affect not just generators but also transmission lines.

This event is different from the frequency oscillations that triggered the blackout on the Iberian peninsula in 2025. In that case a problem existed with reactive power management, with oscillations amplified by grid-following converters from solar farms and insufficient capacity on the grid to absorb this surge in reactive power, ultimately leading to the cascading blackout.

Amidst these lessons on grid-management the discussions on whether baseload power generating is truly dead among other tropes, as well as the calls by European TSOs to make grid-forming converters mandatory on VRE generators will no doubt intensify.

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This Week In Security: Broken Embargoes, UEFI Overflow, Wormable Tailscale, Starlink Ad Snooping, And A DHS Directory Dump

October 30, 2026 by 1 Comment

Last week brought us at least two broken embargoes: php2shell leaked onto Hacker News a day early, and a batch of Linux kernel bugs landed on the public kernel mailing list instead of the private security list. This week has been slightly less exciting overall, fortunately, but Akamai’s security team published a pointed essay titled “TLP Is Not a Suggestion”, and it’s hard to argue with the timing.

When a researcher finds a serious bug, the usual process is “coordinated disclosure”. The developers get time to build a fix, and downstream vendors get advance notice under embargo so patches and protections are ready the moment details go public. The Traffic Light Protocol (TLP) is the vocabulary everyone uses to say who may know what: TLP:RED for named recipients only, TLP:AMBER for an organization and its clients on a need-to-know basis, TLP:GREEN for a trusted community, and TLP:CLEAR for anyone. It has no legal teeth whatsoever. It’s not classified data in a legal sense. It works because everyone involved agrees to make it work.

Akamai’s complaint isn’t really about the original php2shell leak, but about what came after: vendors and researchers racing to confirm, reproduce, and publish first. According to Akamai, a researcher published a reconstruction of the bug before the patch existed, and exploitation attempts started before most admins knew there was anything to patch. They draw parallels to Heartbleed in 2014, where a handful of companies got early notice and then advertised that they were already safe while Linux distributions were caught flat-footed, and to Meltdown and Spectre in 2018, where a six-month embargo collapsed six days early.

In the rush to publish, it’s also become less clear what the actual severity of the bug is in the real world. It clearly exists, and is of concern, but groups are still struggling to prove a complete exploit path, with several challenges showing results but nothing definitive so far.

Their advice boils down to “protect first, publish second”: push the detection rules and virtual patches, tell your customers privately, and save the blog post for after the official advisory. With AI tooling shrinking the time between “details exist” and “working exploit” to hours, the cost of a broken embargo is going up, not down.

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The Sounds Of The World, One Random Album At A Time

October 30, 2026 by 1 Comment

In the streaming era it’s easy to forget that there’s still a lot of stuff being broadcast over the radio for anyone who cares enough to dial in their receiver. Give me an antenna big enough and a tower on which to place it, and I shall listen to the world.

Of course, so you can’t actually listen to everything being blasted out all over the planet yourself. But if you’d like to at least have a little taste, check out Impermanence Series A — a project by [Sam Scorsby] that randomly combines bits and pieces of audio pulled down from shortwave and FM broadcasts with some web streams, live microphones, and even a bit of the Internet Archive each day into a one of a kind album. We’re not sure we’d call it music, exactly. But it’s certainly fascinating to listen to, a bit like randomly spinning the dial on a planet-wide radio receiver.

[Sam] has shared the Python scripts that pull together each day’s album, and he’s not shy about the fact that the project was created with the help of artificial intelligence tools. In fact, that’s sort of the point. [Sam] puts himself somewhere in the middle when it comes to the current debate over AI, and acknowledges that while computers are good at processing raw data, it still takes a human touch to put it all into context.

So each day [Sam] will listen to the latest computer-generated album and pick his favorite tracks, and once the project has run its course, he’ll put together a human-curated “Best Of” collection. Man and machine working together, each doing what they do best.

We know something of opinionated folks on the Internet, and our experience tells us that Impermanence Series A is unlikely to change anyone’s minds when it comes to AI. But we do appreciate the thoughtful approach [Sam] has taken with the project, and look forward to hearing what he comes up with in the end.

Snake On A Seven-Segment Display Is Gloriously Bad

October 30, 2026 by 2 Comments

You’ve no doubt heard the saying, “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” But there’s actually a counter-perspective to this particular philosophy that says it’s also worth doing things badly, with the general idea being that even a semi-successful attempt at something is better than no attempt at all.

We’re not sure if that’s the principle [José Luis Monteiro] and his father had in mind while working on a way to play the classic Snake on a seven-segment LED display salvaged from an old DVD player, but surely the end result is the same. It’s not so much that the display isn’t a good fit for the eponymous snake, in fact, it actually makes a strange amount of sense. Each of the segments can stand in for a piece of the ever-growing serpent, and they’re already arranged in a roughly rectangular grid that makes moving around straightforward enough.

The issue is that the resolution — such as it is — of the display it pretty unforgiving for anything else. Namely, the “food” that your sake is after is naturally identical to one of its own segments, so it doesn’t take long before it’s all rather confusing visually. But in those brief opening moments, it actually works pretty well.

Even if you’re not interested in Snake, between the documentation, source code, and the video below, this project is a great primer on reverse engineering these types of displays. With a microcontroller, a datasheet, and a bit of patience, you could put together an unattractive and frustrating gameplay experience of your very own! If that’s not the dream, what is?

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Is This The Only Instrument You Need?

October 29, 2026 by 24 Comments

When working on an electronic project it’s likely you will find yourself working with a variety of different instruments, be they logic analysers, oscilloscopes, or whatever. These can take up a lot of space, not to mention cost a bundle of cash. [Max.K] came up with PicoLab as a solution, it’s an all-in-one box containing a four-channel oscilloscope, eight-channel logic analyser, GPIOs, a data logger, and serial, SPI, and i2C interfaces. There’s even an adjustable power supply!

Behind it all is an RP2350, in its larger package with more pins, coupled to some custom interface and protection circuitry. Perhaps the cleverest part is its interface, which it serves as a web site on the network card it exposes through the USB port. Any OS that supports a web browser and USB networking can thus use this thing. You can find all the code in a GitHub repository, should you wish to have a go at building one yourself. We like this idea.