Choice, Control, And Interruption

March 7, 2026 by Elliot Williams 36 Comments

We were talking about [Maya Posch]’s rant on smartphones, “The Curse of the Everything Device”. Maya’s main point is that because the smartphone, or computer, can do everything, it’s hard for a person to focus down and do one thing without getting distracted, checking their whatever feed, or getting an important push notification about the Oscars. She was suggesting tying your hands to the mast by using a device that can only accommodate the one function, like a dedicated writing tool or word processor.

[Kristina Panos] compared the all-singing, all-dancing black rectangle to an everything-device of old: the all-in-one stereo receiver with built-in tape player, record player, and not just FM, but also AM radio receiver. The point being, the hi-fi device also does a whole lot of things but isn’t similarly cursed. The tape player never interrupts your listening to the AM radio station. When the record is over, it doesn’t swap over to FM. Your agency is required.

Similarly, it’s probably not intrinsically problematic that the smartphone has a camera, a web browser, text messages, and heck even a telephone built in. It’s how they interact with each other and the user, each vying for user attention, and interrupting with popups and alarms. It’s maybe a simple matter of software! (Says the hardware guy.)

Where would a distraction-free, but fully featured, phone begin? With the operating system? It would be perverse to limit you to one app at a time, or to make switching between them more cumbersome. How about turning off notifications, and relying on changing context only when you think about it? Maybe that’s a middle ground. How do you cope with the endless distractions offered to you by your smartphone? By your main computer?

The printer-based "pen" has a pistol form factor.

DIY 3D Pen Is Born To Weld

March 7, 2026 by Tyler August 10 Comments

Depending who you ask, 3D pens are silly toys or handy tools. Those who use them as tools find them handy to fill gaps in printed assemblies or to use them as a PLA or PETG-based hot glue gun for their prints. [half-baked-research] on YouTube is in the second category, but knows that welding is better than gluing — so he built himself a 3D pen designed for plastic welding.

You can weld with a regular 3D pen, and [half-baked] demonstrates that in the video. But thanks to the low-conductivity tips on commercial pens, it’s a slow, fiddly business. By using a normal 3D printer hot-end, with its conductive brass nozzle, [half-baked] is able to get a lot more heat where it’s needed. That means the plastic on either side of the weld melts for a good bond with the stuff coming out the nozzle. He’s also able to push plastic much faster with the modified extruder he’s squeezed into the hot-glue-gun looking contraption. Those two things together conspire to make the whole process go much faster than with a commercial 3D pen. He calls his build a 3D pen, but given the form factor it might be more accurate to call it a ‘plastic extrusion gun’.

Starting at around 13:38 in the video, he performs some strength tests, something we wish more YouTubers would do. He’s able to demonstrate a stronger bond with his welding pen than the normal 3D pen, and a much, much stronger join than the usual superglue. A traditional plastic weld with hot air is even stronger, but [half-baked] points out elsewhere in the video that on thin-walled prints (as opposed to the solid test articles) hot air welding can be a very dicey business. Pen-welding offers much greater control, so is an interesting technique to keep in mind.

Alas, [half-baked-research] apparently still considers this idea too half-baked to release the design. If you don’t have time to wait or reinvent this particular wheel, we featured a much simpler implementation of a similar idea years ago, using PLA in a hot glue gun. If that won’t work for you — maybe you aren’t a fan of PLA — perhaps you might try friction welding with filament.

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Fixing An Onkyo Receiver With Multiple Faults

March 7, 2026 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Modern-day receivers are miracles of digital audio and video processing, but compared to their more analog brethren, they can come with a host of new and fascinating faults. The Onkyo TX-SA806 and SR806 receivers were released back in 2008, with [Tony359] recently getting the latter variant in for repair. Described as having weird digital distortion on the audio outputs, this particular issue got fixed by recapping the PCB with all the digital processing in the first video on this receiver, but this left the second issue unaddressed of a persistent hum, which is the topic of the second video on this repair.

Capacitor C5662 in the Onkyo TX-SR608 receiver with a slight bulge. (Credit: Tony359, YouTube) — Capacitor C5662 in the Onkyo TX-SR608 receiver with a slight bulge.

With the easy fix of recapping of the digital board already tried, next was a deep-dive into the receiver’s schematics to figure out where this low-frequency hum was coming from. With it sounding very much like mains frequency hum bleeding through, this was the starting point. Presumably somewhere on the power rails the normal filtering had broken down, so all rails had to be identified and checked for this interference.

With ripple on the 10V and 12V rails as well as the others seemingly in order, it wasn’t clear where the 100 Hz hum was coming from, but people on the BadCaps forum offered some help. After some back and forth it was deduced that the problem was the +15 VA rail, with heavy ripple on it due to a dead capacitor on the +22 V rail that comes straight from a transformer.

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Remotely Unlocking An Encrypted Hard Disk

March 6, 2026 by Al Williams 20 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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How An Old Automatic Stoker Was Hacked Onto A Modern Lancashire Boiler

March 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Usage of an automatic stoker. (Source: Claymills Pumping Station, YouTube)

Hacks are of all ages, with the Victorian-era Claymills Pumping Station being no exception. When its old Lancashire boilers from the 19th century were finally replaced with modern 1930s boilers, the 1920s-era automatic stokers were bodged onto the new boilers with a rather ill-fitting adapter plate, as there was no standard Lancashire boiler design. Nearly a hundred years later it was up to the volunteers at this Victorian-era pumping station to inspect and refurbish this solution, before fitting it back onto the boiler.

Lancashire boilers have two flue channels in which the coal is burned, which used to be done purely by hand. The automatic stokers are belt-driven devices that continuously add fresh fuel and massively lighten the workload. The 1920s stokers are still in place at this pumping station and a feature that they would love to retain.

Thus, after previously pressure-testing this #1 boiler to well beyond its operating pressure, the refurbished adapter plate was mounted back on with some percussive persuasion of the ‘very large beam’ variety.

Before the stokers could be mounted again, however, the boiler inspector had to give his OK to put the brickwork around the boiler back in place which helps to insulate it, among other functions. Once this is completed the boiler can finally see a fire again since it was last used in the 1970s. Whether these vintage stokers will work flawlessly will remain a surprise until then, but it’ll be a treat to see them operate.

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One Sailing Pulley To Rule Them All

March 6, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

When thinking of humanity’s ability to harness wind energy, many people will conjure images of windmills from places like The Netherlands or Persia. But people have been using wind energy for far longer than that in the form of sailing ships. Using the wind for transportation goes back another four thousand years or so, but despite our vast experience navigating the seas with wind alone there is still some room for improvement. Many modern sailboats use a number of different pulleys to manage all of the rigging, but this new, open-source pulley can replace many of them.

The pulley, or “block” as they are sometimes called, is built with a polymer roller made out of a type of nylon, which has the benefit of being extremely durable and self-lubricating but is a bit expensive. Durability and lack of squeakiness is important in sailing applications, though. The body is made from CNC-machined aluminum and is composed of two parts, which pivot around the pulley’s axis to allow various ropes (or “lines”) to be inserted without freeing one end of the rope. In testing, this design outperformed some proprietary stainless steel pulleys of similar size.

Another perk of this design is that it can be set up to work in many different applications on a sailboat, whether that’s for hoisting a mainsail or pulling in a jib or any other task a pulley could be used for. It can also be stacked with others in many different configurations to build custom pulleys of almost any type, and can support up to 14 mm lines. For a sailor this could be extremely valuable, because as it stands each pulley on a ship tends to be used in only certain applications, and might also be proprietary from a specific company. This pulley is being released into the open-source world, allowing anyone to create them who wants one.

Thanks to [Keith] for the tip!

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The World’s Smallest Marble Clock With Pick And Place Arm

March 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Clocks come in many styles and sizes, with perhaps the most visually pleasing ones involving marbles. Watching these little spheres obey gravity and form clearly readable numbers on a clock has strong mesmerizing qualities. If you’re not into really big marble clocks, or cannot quite find the space for a desk-sized clock, then the tiny marble clock by [Jens] may be an option.

While he totally loved the massive marble clock that [Ivan Miranda] built, it is a massive contraption that’s hard to justify as a permanent installation. His take on the concept thus makes it as small as possible, by using a pick-and-place style arm to place the marbles instead. Although the marbles don’t do a lot of rolling this way, it’s decidedly more quiet, and replace the rumbling and click-clacking of marbles with the smooth motion of a robotic arm.

Another benefit of this clock is that it’s cheap to make, with a price tag of less than $23. A big part of this is the use of cheap SG90 micro servos, and a permanent magnet along with a mechanism that pushes the marble off said magnet. Perhaps the biggest issue with this clock is that the arm somewhat obscures the time while it’s moving around, but it’s definitely another interesting addition to the gallery of marble clocks.

We have previously seen such clocks built out of wood and brass as well as 3D-printed using pendulum mechanisms, which can be made pretty compact as well, albeit with a more analog vibe.

Thanks to [Hari] for the tip.

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