Windows 95, With Just A Floppy Drive

October 26, 2025 by Jenny List 45 Comments

It’s something of a shock to be reminded that Microsoft’s Windows 95 is now 30 years old — but the PC operating system that brought 32-bit computing to the masses and left behind a graphical interface legacy which persists to this day, is now old enough that many in the community have never actually seen it. The original requirements were a 386 or better, 4 megabytes of memory, and a hard drive. [Robert’s Retro] is exploding one of those requirements, creating a full Windows 95 install using only a floppy drive.

As you might imagine, even if you had one of the super-rare 2.88 megabyte drives, such a feat would require a few tricks. In this case the biggest trick is the FlashPath, a curious 1990s peripheral that allows a SmartMedia card to be used in a floppy drive. With a special DOS driver it allows what is in effect a 32 megabyte floppy disk, but even that’s not enough for ’95. In come a couple of further tricks, installing Windows 95 to a compressed DriveSpace volume which is copied to the FlashPath, and copying the Drivespace volume to a RAM drive and mounting it, on boot. It needs a conventional floppy to boot before swapping to the FlashPath and it seems the copying process is extremely slow, but we’d expect Windows 95 from RAM to be very quick indeed.

There have been other minimalist Windows 95s over the years, but what makes this one unusual is that it’s a full install. Five years ago at the OS’s quarter century we took a look at it with 2020 eyes, and tried gauge its effect on modern desktops.

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Robot Phone Home…Or Else

October 24, 2025 by Al Williams 64 Comments

We would have enjoyed [Harishankar’s] tear down of a robot vacuum cleaner, even if it didn’t have a savage twist at the end. Turns out, the company deliberately bricked his smart vacuum.

Like many of us, [Harishankar] is suspicious of devices beaming data back to their makers. He noted a new vacuum cleaner was pinging a few IP address, including one that was spitting out logging or telemetry data frequently. Of course, he had the ability to block the IP address which he did. End of story, right?

No. After a few days of working perfectly, the robot wouldn’t turn on. He returned it under warranty, but the company declared it worked fine. They returned it and, indeed, it was working. A few days later, it quit again. This started a cycle of returning the device where it would work, it would come home and work for a few days, then quit again.

You can probably guess where this is going, but to be fair, we gave you a big hint. The fact that it would work for days after blocking the IP address wouldn’t seem like a smoking gun in real time.

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Why Does The FCC Care About Computers?

October 23, 2025 by Al Williams 18 Comments

Unless you are over a certain age, you probably take it for granted that electronic gadgets you buy have some FCC marking on them. But it wasn’t always true. [Ernie] submits that the FCC’s regulation of the computer industry was indirectly the result of the success of CB radio in that same time period.

Today, there is a high chance you don’t watch TV directly over the airwaves or even consume audio from a traditional radio station. Even if you do, the signal is increasingly likely to be digital. But only analog radio and TV were highly susceptible to interference. When a professional radio station or the power company interfered with you watching I Love Lucy, you could count on them to resolve it. Even ham radio operators, a small segment of the population, would, in general, graciously help you if their transmissions interfered with your equipment.

Never mind that, in many cases, it was the cheap TV or some other problem on the receiving end. Then there was another source of potential interference: CB radio. At first, you were about as likely to encounter a CB operator as a ham radio operator. But then in the 1970s, CB exploded, becoming a cultural phenomenon, and you can hear what a state it was in by watching the contemporary TV report in the video below.

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2025 Hackaday Supercon: Two New Workshops, Costume Party, Lightning Talks, And A New-Space Panel

October 21, 2025 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

So much news, so little time left until Supercon! We hope you all have your tickets. If not: Workshop and general admission tickets are on sale now. We’re getting down to the last slightly-more-than-two-handfuls, so if you’re thinking of coming, the time for procrastination has passed.

First up, we have two late-addition workshops, and tickets were just made available. Maybe you noticed that Arduino was bought by Qualcomm, and they kicked off the union with a brand-new board? You can get yourself one, and learn how to use it. And not to be outdone, the CEO of Framework, makers of modular laptop computers, is coming with a grab-bag of parts for you to play with.

Leonardo Cavagnis & Tyler Wojciechowicz

Arduino x DigiKey Presents – From Blink to Think: Discover Arduino Uno Q

Explore the power of Arduino Uno Q, the new board combining a microcontroller and a microprocessor. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to get started with Uno Q and unlock its dual-core capabilities for intelligent and connected projects.

Nirav Patel
Framework Mystery Boxes: Swap & Build

This workshop is hosted by Framework’s Founder and CEO, Nirav Patel. You’ll receive a box of assorted returned/refurbished Framework Laptop parts at the start of the workshop. You can then trade parts with other attendees and work together to try to build a functioning computer of some kind. You’ll pick up some tips and tricks on debugging and repair along the way.

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Budget Stream Deck Clone Is Ripe For Hacking

October 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

The original Stream Deck was a purpose-built device to make it easier to manage a live video stream on the fly. Since its release, many other similar products have hit the market. Among them is the Ulanzi D200 U-Studio, which is proving popular with hackers for good reason.

[Rodrigo Laneth] has been digging into the D200, and found out it’s running Linux 5.10.160 on a quad-core Rockchip RK3308HS chip. Notably, he determined the kernel appears to be from Android, but that Ulanzi removed the Android userspace and “slapped Buildroot on top,” in his own words. Interesting, if not that unusual. What is key, however, is that the device has a fully open adb root shell, as noted by [lucasteske], which inspired [Rodrigo]’s investigation. This pretty much allows full access to the device, so you can make it do whatever weird thing your heart desires.

As you might expect, people are already making the D200 do fun stuff. [lucasteske] got it running DOOM in short order. Meanwhile, [Rodrigo] has it playing out Bad Apple!! at 30 FPS, with code and a deeper explanation available on GitHub.

It’s rare these days that manufacturers leave root open on any commercial device. You normally need to pull a few tricks to get that kind of access.

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Hackaday Links: October 19, 2025

October 19, 2025 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

After a quiet week in the news cycle, surveillance concern Flock jumped right back in with both feet, announcing a strategic partnership with Amazon’s Ring to integrate that company’s network of doorbell cameras into one all-seeing digital panopticon. Previously, we’d covered both Flock’s “UAVs as a service” model for combating retail theft from above, as well as the somewhat grassroots effort to fight back at the company’s wide-ranging network of license plate reader cameras. The Ring deal is not quite as “in your face” as drones chasing shoplifters, but it’s perhaps a bit more alarming, as it gives U.S. law enforcement agencies easy access to the Ring Community Request program directly through the Flock software that they (probably) already use.

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Channel Surfing Nostalgia Machine

October 17, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 6 Comments

As any generation of people get older, they tend to look back fondly on their formative years when there was less responsibility and more wonder. Even if things have objectively improved, we often have a fondness for the past. Such is the case for cable television, where even though ads were everywhere and nothing was on-demand, we can see that something was lost from this era in the modern streaming ecosystem. [Ricardo] brought back the good parts of this golden era of cable TV with this small channel surfing television.

The project attempts to keep the good parts of this era while discarding things we certainly don’t miss. The ability to channel surf is still here, with a rotary encoder standing in for an antique television channel selector knob, but dealing with any telecommunications company is out, including those of the Internet variety. Instead it is a fully offline machine with the user able to curate their own channels and programming with a Flask application, and [Ricardo]’s includes his own collection of commercials from Argentina.

The hardware itself is fairly straightforward as well, with a Raspberry Pi doing the heavy lifting, paired with a small screen and enclosed in a retro-themed television case. It’s a clever throwback to a time where we might not know what we wanted to see but there was always something on. Builds like this are gaining popularity right now as well, and we’ve even seen them recreate the cable company’s preview channel as well.

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