Curated

76 Articles

Hackaday’s finest original content articles curated by the Hackaday editors

The Brits Made A Rocket. What Happened To It?

April 9, 2026 by 11 Comments

Like many long-established broadcasters, the BBC put out a selection of their archive material for us all to enjoy online. Their most recent may be of interest to Hackaday readers and has more than a bit of personal interest to your scribe, as it visits the Spadeadam rocket test range on the event of its closure in 1973. This marked the final chapter in the story of Blue Streak, the British intercontinental missile project that later became part of the first European space launcher.

It’s possible citizens of every country see their government as uniquely talented in the throwing away of taxpayer’s money, but the sad story here isn’t in Blue Streak itself which was obsolete as a missile by the time it was finished. Instead it lies in the closure of the test range as part of the ill-advised destruction of a nascent and successful space industry, just as it had made the UK the third nation to have successfully placed a satellite in orbit.

We normally write in the second person in our daily posts here at Hackaday, but for now there’s a rare switch into the first person. My dad spent a large part of the 1950s working as a technician for de Haviland Propellers, later part of Hawker Siddeley, and then British Aerospace. He was part of the team working on Blue Streak at Spadeadam and the other test site at RAF Westcott in Buckinghamshire, and we were brought up on hair-raising tales of near-disasters in the race to get British nukes flying. He’s not one of the guys in the video below, as by that time he was running his metalwork business in Oxfordshire, but I certainly recognise the feeling of lost potential they express. Chances are I’ll never visit what remains of the Spadeadam test stands in person as the site is now the UK’s electronic warfare test range, so the BBC film represents a rare chance for a closer look.

In a related story, the trackers for the same program in Australia were saved from the scrapheap.

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AI For The Skeptics: Pick Your Reasons To Be Excited

April 8, 2026 by 64 Comments

It’s odd being a technology writer in 2026, because around you are many people who will tell you that your craft is outdated. Like the manufacturers of buggy-whips at the turn of the twentieth century, the automobile (in the form of large language model AI) is on the market, and your business will soon be an anachronism. Adapt or go extinct, they tell you. It’s an argument I’ve found myself facing a few times over the last year in my wandering existence, and it’s forced me to think about it. What are the reasons everyone is excited about AI and are those reasons valid, what is there to be scared of, and what are the real reasons people should be excited about it?

If We Gotta Take This Seriously, How Can We Do It?

A couple in a horse drawn buggy, circa 1900ish
The futures looking bright in the buggy-whip department! Public domain.

I’ll start by repeating my tale from a few weeks ago when I asked readers what AI applications would survive when the hype is over. The reaction of a friend with decades of software experience on trying an AI coding helper stuck with me; she referenced her grandfather who had been born in rural America in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and recalled him describing the first time he saw an automobile. I agree with her that this has the potential to be a transformative technology, and while it’s entertaining to make fun of its shortcomings as I did three years ago when the idea of what we now call vibe coding first appeared, it’s already making itself useful in some applications. Simply dismissing it is no longer appropriate, but equally, drinking freely of the Kool-Aid seems like joining yet another hype bandwagon that will inevitably derail. A middle way has to be found. Continue reading “AI For The Skeptics: Pick Your Reasons To Be Excited” →

CCA Ethernet Cables: Not Up To Scratch, But Are They Dangerous?

April 7, 2026 by 47 Comments

If you’ve ever bought a suspiciously cheap Ethernet cable from an online listing, there’s a decent chance you’ve encountered Copper Clad Aluminum. Better known as CCA, it’s exactly what it sounds like—an aluminium conductor with a thin skin of copper deposited on the outside. Externally, cables made with this material look largely like any other, with perhaps the only obvious tell being that they feel somewhat lighter in the hand.

CCA is cheaper than proper copper cabling, and it conducts signals well enough to function in an Ethernet cable. And yet, it’s a prime example of corner-cutting that keeps standards bodies and professional installers up at night. But just how dangerous is this silent scourge, found lurking in so many network cabinets around the world?

Not Up To Scratch

CCA wire is typically made by wrapping an aluminium core with copper strip and then extruding it through a die. Credit: USPTO

Everything you need to know about CCA is in the name—it refers to an aluminium wire with a thin copper cladding, typically applied through a die extrusion process. The reasoning behind this exploits a real physical phenomenon called the skin effect, wherein higher-frequency AC signals tend to travel along the outer surface of a conductor. The idea goes that since most of the current moves through the outer copper skin layer anyway, the less-conductive aluminium core doesn’t unduly impact the wire’s performance. Using copper-clad aluminium wiring is, in theory, desirable because aluminium is much cheaper than copper, which can really add up over long cable runs. Imagine you’re wiring a building with with hundreds of miles of Ethernet cabling, all with eight conductors each—the savings add up pretty quickly.

There’s a problem with CCA cabling in these contexts, though. Due to prevailing cabling standards, any cable made with CCA is technically not even a real Ethernet cable at all. The relevant documents are unambiguous.

ANSI/TIA-568.2-D requires conductors in Category-rated cable to be solid or stranded copper. No other materials are acceptable, and thus CCA is explicitly excluded from use in Category cable applications. A cable with CCA conductors cannot legitimately carry a Cat5e, Cat6, or any related designation under any circumstances. Similarly, ISO/IEC 11801 has the same requirement. The U.S. National Electrical Code also states that conductors in communications cables, other than coaxial cable, shall be copper. This isn’t a suggestion or a best practice; it’s the letter of the code. Anything lesser is simply not allowed. Continue reading “CCA Ethernet Cables: Not Up To Scratch, But Are They Dangerous?” →

With Affordable Storage Options Dwindling, Where To Store Our Data?

April 6, 2026 by 63 Comments

These days our appetite for more data storage is larger than ever, with video files larger, photo resolutions higher, and project files easily zipping past a few hundred MB. At the same time our options for data storage are becoming more and more limited. For the longest time we could count on there always being a newer, roomier, faster, and cheaper form of storage to come along, but those days would seem to be over.

We can look back and laugh at low capacity USB Flash drives of the early 2000s, yet the first storage drive to hit 1 TB capacity did so in 2007, with a Hitachi Deskstar 7k100, only for that level of capacity in PCs to not really be exceeded nineteen years later.

We also had Blu-ray discs (BD) promise to cram the equivalent of dozens of DVDs onto a single BD, with two- and even four-layer BDs storing up to a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight GB. Yet today optical media is dying a slow death as the sole remaining cheap storage option. NAND Flash storage has only increased in price, and the options for those of us who have large cold storage requirements would seem to be decreasing every day.

So what is the economical solution here? Invest in LTO tapes using commercial left-overs, or give up and sign up for Cloud Storage™ for the low-low price of a monthly recurring fee?

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Ask Hackaday: How Much Compute Is Enough?

April 2, 2026 by 75 Comments

Over the history of this business, a lot of people have foreseen limits that look rather silly in hindsight– in 1943, IBM President Thomas Watson declared that “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” That was more than a little wrong. Depending on the definition of computers– particularly if you include microcontrollers, there’s probably trillions of the things.

We might as well include microcontrollers, considering how often we see projects replicating retrocomputers on them. The RP2350 can do a Mac 128k, and the ESP32-P4 gets you into the Quadra era. Which, honestly, covers the majority of daily tasks most people use computers for.

The RP2350 and ESP32-P4 both have more than 640kB of RAM, so that famous Bill Gates quote obviously didn’t age any better than Thomas Watson’s prediction. As Yogi Berra once said: predictions are hard, especially about the future. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: How Much Compute Is Enough?” →

Reflective pool of the Court of the Myrtles, looking north towards the Comares Tower. (Credit: Tuxyso, Wikimedia)

Medieval Alhambra’s Pulser Pump And Other Aquatic Marvels

March 30, 2026 by 8 Comments

Recently the Practical Engineering YouTube channel featured a functional recreation of a pump design that is presumed by some to have been used to pump water up to the medieval Alhambra palace and its fortress, located in what is today Spain. This so-called pulser pump design is notable for not featuring any moving parts, but the water pump was just one of many fascinating engineering achievements that made the Alhambra a truly unique place before the ravages of time had their way with it.

Although the engineering works were said to still have been functional in the 18th century, this pumping system and many other elements that existed at the peak of its existence had already vanished by the 19th century for a number of reasons. During this century a Spanish engineering professor, Cáceres, tried to reconstruct the mechanism as best as he could based on the left-over descriptions, but sadly we’ll likely never know for certain that it is what existed there.

Similarly, the speculated time-based fountain in the Court of the Lions and other elements are now forever lost to time, but we have plenty of theories on how all of this worked in a pre-industrial era.

Continue reading “Medieval Alhambra’s Pulser Pump And Other Aquatic Marvels” →