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974 Articles

VRML And The Dream Of Bringing 3D To The World Wide Web

August 7, 2025 by 17 Comments

You don’t have to be a Snow Crash or Tron fan to be familiar with the 3D craze that characterized the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular. From phrases like ‘surfing the information highway’ to sectioning websites as if to represent 3D real-life equivalents or sorting them by virtual streets like Geocities did, there has always been a strong push to make the Internet a more three-dimensional experience.

This is perhaps not so strange considering that we humans are ourselves 3D beings used to interacting in a 3D world. Surely we could make this fancy new ‘Internet’ technology do something more futuristic than connect us to text-based BBSes and serve HTML pages with heavily dithered images?

Enter VRML, the Virtual Reality Modelling Language, whose 3D worlds would surely herald the arrival of a new Internet era. Though neither VRML nor its successor X3D became a hit, they did leave their marks and are arguably the reason why we have technologies like WebGL today.

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What Happens When Lightning Strikes A Plane?

August 5, 2025 by 24 Comments

Lightning is a powerful force, one seemingly capable of great destruction in the right circumstances. It announces itself with a searing flash, followed by a deep rumble heard for miles around.

Intuitively, it might seem like a lightning strike would be disastrous for something like a plane flying at altitude. And yet, while damage is possible, more often than not—a plane will get through a lightning storm unscathed. Let’s explore the physics at play.

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Power Line Patrols: The Grid’s Eye In The Sky

July 29, 2025 by 18 Comments

Those of us who like to monitor air traffic with ADS-B aggregators such as FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange tend to see some interesting flight paths. I’m not talking about the truly ambitious pictures drawn by pilots, or even the more ribald ones, but rather flights that follow paths that seem to make little sense from either a commercial or leisure standpoint.

Most of these mystery flights have long straight stretches interrupted by occasional tight loops, and often cover great distances across rural and urban landscapes alike. A glance at the ADS-B data indicates that these flights are usually pretty close to the ground, and are often completed by helicopters. Occasionally, the registration of the aircraft will even indicate ownership by some “three-letter” federal agency.

Although mystery helicopters flying odd patterns in the sky seems like a good excuse to don a tinfoil hat and head to one’s bunker, chances are pretty good that these aircraft are engaged in a far less nefarious and far more useful endeavour: aerial transmission line patrols. These flights are key to keeping the transmission lines that form the backbone of the grid in tip-top shape, especially at a time of unprecedented growth in load and a shift in the generation profile away from fossil fuels towards renewables.

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The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics

July 23, 2025 by 191 Comments

It’s often said that what’s inside matters more than one’s looks, but it’s hard to argue that a product’s looks and its physical user experience are what makes it instantly recognizable. When you think of something like a Walkman, an iPod music player, a desktop computer, a car or a TV, the first thing that comes to mind is the way  that it looks along with its user interface. This is the domain of industrial design, where circuit boards, mechanisms, displays and buttons are put into a shell that ultimately defines what users see and experience.

Thus industrial design is perhaps the most important aspect of product development as far as the user is concerned, right along with the feature list. It’s also no secret that marketing departments love to lean into the styling and ergonomics of a product. In light of this it is very disconcerting that the past years industrial design for consumer electronics in particular seems to have wilted and is now practically on the verge of death.

Devices like cellphones and TVs are now mostly flat plastic-and-glass rectangles with no distinguishing features. Laptops and PCs are identified either by being flat, small, having RGB lighting, or a combination of these. At the same time buttons and other physical user interface elements are vanishing along with prominent styling, leaving us in a world of basic geometric shapes and flat, evenly colored surfaces. Exactly how did we get to this point, and what does this mean for our own hardware projects?

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A Field Guide To The North American Cold Chain

July 17, 2025 by 22 Comments

So far in the “Field Guide” series, we’ve mainly looked at critical infrastructure systems that, while often blending into the scenery, are easily observable once you know where to look. From the substations, transmission lines, and local distribution systems that make up the electrical grid to cell towers and even weigh stations, most of what we’ve covered so far are mega-scale engineering projects that are critical to modern life, each of which you can get a good look at while you’re tooling down the road in a car.

This time around, though, we’re going to switch things up a bit and discuss a less-obvious but vitally important infrastructure system: the cold chain. While you might never have heard the term, you’ve certainly seen most of the major components at one time or another, and if you’ve ever enjoyed fresh fruit in the dead of winter or microwaved a frozen burrito for dinner, you’ve taken advantage of a globe-spanning system that makes sure environmentally sensitive products can be safely stored and transported.

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Hacking When It Counts: DIY Prosthetics And The Prison Camp Lathe

July 14, 2025 by 13 Comments

There are a lot of benefits to writing for Hackaday, but hands down one of the best is getting paid to fall down fascinating rabbit holes. These often — but not always — delightful journeys generally start with chance comments by readers, conversations with fellow writers, or just the random largesse of The Algorithm. Once steered in the right direction, a few mouse clicks are all it takes for the properly prepared mind to lose a few hours chasing down an interesting tale.

I’d like to say that’s exactly how this article came to be, but to be honest, I have no idea where I first heard about the prison camp lathe. I only know that I had a link to a PDF of an article written in 1949, and that was enough to get me going. It was probably a thread I shouldn’t have tugged on, but I’m glad I did because it unraveled into a story not only of mechanical engineering chops winning the day under difficult circumstances, but also of how ingenuity and determination can come together to make the unbearable a little less trying, and how social engineering is an important a skill if you want to survive the unsurvivable.

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Personal Reflections On Immutable Linux

July 10, 2025 by 51 Comments

Immutable distributions are slowly spreading across the Linux world– but should you care? Are they hacker friendly? What does “immutable” mean, anyway?

Immutable means “not subject or susceptible to change” according to Merriam-Webster, which is not 100% accurate in this context, but it’s close enough and the name is there so we’re stuck with it. Immutable distributions are subject to change, it’s just that how you change them is quite a bit different than bog-standard Linux. Will this matter to you? Read on to find out! (Or, if you know the answers already, read on to find out how angry you should be in the comments section.) Continue reading “Personal Reflections On Immutable Linux” →