Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop?

If you read “Jenny’s Daily Drivers” or “Linux Fu” here on Hackaday, you know we like Linux. Jenny’s series, especially, always points out things I want to try on different distributions. However, I have a real tendency not to change my distro, especially on my main computer. Yet I know people “distro hop” all the time. My question to you? How do you do it?

The Easy but Often Wrong Answer

Sure, there’s an easy answer. Keep your /home directory on a separate disk and just use it with a new boot image. Sounds easy. But the truth is, it isn’t that easy. I suppose if you don’t do much with your system, that might work. But even if you don’t customize things at the root level, you still have problems if you change desktop environments or even versions of desktop environments. Configuration files change over time. Good luck if you want to switch to and from distros that are philosophically different, like systemd vs old-school init; apparmor vs SELinux. So it isn’t always as simple as just pointing a new distro at your home directory.

One thing I’ve done to try out new things is to use a virtual machine. That’s easy these days. But it isn’t satisfying if your goal is to really switch to a new distro as your daily driver. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop?”

Blocky tread, yellow hub-- yep, it looks like LEGO

10″ LEGO Tyre Is Practical Nostalgia

If there’s one thing that has come to define the generations after the baby boom, it’s probably nostalgia. It’s heavily marketed and weaponized by the market: yearning for better, simpler times seems to be a core thread of the consumer economy these days. [Makerneer] combined his xilennial love of LEGO bricks with the flat tires on his log splitter to produce a 10″ TPU tyre will never go flat, and provide a dopamine release every time he sees it.

The tyre is a custom model to fit his particular rims, but he does provide STEP and F3D files if you’d like to try modifing it for your own purpose — they’re at Step 6 of the Instructable. Props to [Makerneer] for truly open-sourcing the design instead of just tossing STL files online. His build log also takes the time to point out the ways he had to modify the LEGO tyre profile to make it amenable to 3D printing: notably chamfering some of the tread pattern to eliminate bridging, which is a bit of a no-no with TPU.

As you can see in the (unfortunately vertical) demo video below, it’s a bit quite a bit squishier than a regular run-flat tyre, but that was part of [Makerneer]’s design goal. He didn’t like how rigid the non-pneumatic tyres he’d tried were, so endevoured to design something himself; the whole LEGO thing was just for fun. If you wanted to replicate this tyre with a bit less skoosh, you need only tune the infill on your print.

While only time will tell how long this LEGO-inspired add-on will continue adding whimsy to [Makerneer]’s log-splitting, we have tests to show it will outperform any other plastic he might have printed. This project is probably more practical than a 3D printed bicycle tyre, which doesn’t even have the side benefit of whimsy. Continue reading “10″ LEGO Tyre Is Practical Nostalgia”

Two Decades Of Hackaday In Words

I think most of us who make or build things have a thing we are known for making. Where it’s football robots, radios, guitars, cameras, or inflatable textile sculptures, we all have the thing we do. For me that’s over the years been various things but has recently been camera hacking, however there’s another thing I do that’s not so obvious. For the last twenty years, I’ve been interested in computational language analysis. There’s so much that a large body of text can reveal without a single piece of AI being involved, and in pursuing that I’ve created for myself a succession of corpus analysis engines. This month I’ve finally been allowed to try one of them with a corpus of Hackaday articles, and while it’s been a significant amount of work getting everything shipshape, I can now analyse our world over the last couple of decades.

The Burning Question You All Want Answered

A graph of "arduino" versis "raspberry", comparing Arduino and Raspberry Pi coverage over time.
Battle of the Boards, over the decades.

A corpus engine is not clever in its own right, instead it will simply give you straightforward statistics in return for the queries you give it. But the thing that keeps me coming back for more is that those answers can sometimes surprise you. In short, it’s a machine for telling you things you didn’t know. To start off, it’s time to settle a Hackaday trope of many years’ standing. Do we write too much about Arduino projects? Into the engine goes “arduino”, and for comparison also “raspberry”, for the Raspberry Pi.

What comes out is a potted history of experimenter’s development boards, with the graph showing the launch date and subsequent popularity of each. We’re guessing that the Hackaday Arduino trope has its origins in 2011 when the Italian board peaked, while we see a succession of peaks following the launch of the Pi in 2012. I think we are seeing renewals of interest after the launch of the Pi 3 and Pi 4, respectively. Perhaps the most interesting part of the graph comes on the right as we see both boards tail off after 2020, and if I had to hazard a guess  as to why I would cite the rise of the many cheap dev boards from China.

Continue reading “Two Decades Of Hackaday In Words”

Mini Laptop Needs Custom Kernel

These days, you rarely have to build your own Linux kernel. You just take what your distribution ships, and it usually works just fine. However, [Andrei] became enamored with a friend’s cyberdeck and decided that he’d prefer to travel with a very small laptop. The problem is, it didn’t work well with a stock kernel. So, time to build the kernel again.

Of course, he tried to simply install Linux. The installer showed a blank screen. You might guess that you need to add ‘nomodeset’ to the kernel options. But the screen was still a bit wacky. [Andrei] likens troubleshooting problems like this to peeling an onion. There are many layers to peel back, and you are probably going to shed some tears.

Continue reading “Mini Laptop Needs Custom Kernel”

InfinityTerminal Brings Infinite Horizontal Scrolling

The creator of infinite vertical scrolling in social media, [Aza Raskin], infamously regrets his creation that has helped to waste a tremendous amount of human attention and time on the Internet. But that’s vertical scrolling. [bujna94] has created infinityTerminal, a program with infinite scrolling, but in the horizontal direction instead. This tool has had the opposite effect to go along with its opposite orientation: increased productivity and improved workflow.

The impetus for infinityTerminal is [bujna94]’s need for many simultaneous SSH sessions, and the fact that no other terminal program can support an indefinite number of visible terminal windows. This application starts with four terminal windows in a 2×2 grid, and allows the user to open more terminals, two at a time, to form a 2xN grid. As many terminals as needed will open in pairs in the horizontal direction with smooth, trackpad-compatible scrolling and automatic color-coded backgrounds for servers accessed by SSH.

For anyone with a similar dislike of tabs like [bujna94], this might be worth trying out. It’s built with Electron, xterm.js, and node-pty.

There are a few more details about the project on a Reddit post. [Bujna94] also made it completely open source and freely available with the files on a GitHub page, and welcomes anyone to try out his creation that wants to. For more terminal magic, we’d also recommend checking out Notcurses, a terminal application capable enough to output SNES-level detail natively.

WALL-E’s Forgotten Sibling Rebuilt

Do you remember the movie WALL-E? Apparently, [Leviathan engineering] did, and he wasn’t as struck by the title character, or Eva, or even the Captain. He was captivated by BURN-E. His working model shows up in the video below.

We’ll be honest. BURN-E didn’t ring a bell for us, though we remember the movie. He grabbed a 3D design for the robot on the Internet and planned out holes for some servos and other hardware.

Continue reading “WALL-E’s Forgotten Sibling Rebuilt”

Playing DOOM In Discord With A Special Image URL

Can you play DOOM in Discord? At first glance, that may seem rather nonsensical, as Discord is a proprietary chat service and neither a hardware device nor something else that may seem like an obvious target for being (ab)used for demon-shooting points. That is, until you look at Discord’s content embedding feature. This is where [PortalRunner]’s Doomcord hack comes into play, allowing you to play the entire game in a Discord client by submitting text messages after embedding a very special image URL.

Rather than this embedding being done in the client as done with e.g., IRC clients, the Discord backend handles the content fetching, caching, and handing off to clients. This system can easily be used with an animated GIF of gameplay, but having it be seen as a GIF file required adding .gif to the end of the URL to trick Discord’s backend into not simply turning it into a static PNG. After this, Discord’s throttling of message speed turned out to kill the concept of real-time gameplay, along with the server load.

Plan C thus morphed into using Chocolate Doom headless, rendering gameplay into cached video files by using the demo gameplay feature in DOOM. The Doomcord server template project provides a server if you want to give it a whirl yourself. Since this uses recorded gameplay, the switch was made from GIF to the WEBP format to save space, along with a cache expiry system. Just level 1 with all possible input sequences takes up 12 TB of disk space.

Continue reading “Playing DOOM In Discord With A Special Image URL”