Curated

76 Articles

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

Handling Bulk Material: Why Does My Cat Food Get Stuck?

May 24, 2022 by 44 Comments

Bulk material is stuff handled ‘in bulk’. One LEGO piece is a brick but 1,000 poured into a bag is bulk material. Corn starch, sand, flour, powder-coat powder, gravel, cat food, Cap’n Crunch, coins, screws, Styrofoam beads, lead shot, and gummy worms are bulk materials.

Applications abound where you need to move stuff in bulk. Selective sintering 3D printers, animal feeders, DIY injection molders, toner based PCB makers, home powder coating, automatic LEGO/domino/whatever sorters or assemblers, automated gardeners, airsoft accessories – handling bulk material is part of hacking. College science classes cover solids and liquids, but rarely bulk materials.

Most hackers just pray it works and tap the bin when it doesn’t. Industry does better, but the slang term “bin rash”, the long term result of tapping a 300 ton bin with sledgehammers (video),  shows they don’t get it right all the time either. At the same time, it’s a fun area you can experiment with using kitchen items. So come along with us for a short series on the basics of bulk material handling. Continue reading “Handling Bulk Material: Why Does My Cat Food Get Stuck?” →

Knowing Your Place: The Implications Of GPS Spoofing And Jamming

May 23, 2022 by 31 Comments

Artificial satellites have transformed the world in many ways, not only in terms of relaying communication and for observing the planet in ways previously inconceivable, but also to enable incredibly accurate navigation. A so-called global navigation satellite system (GNSS), or satnav for short, uses the data provided by satellites to pin-point a position on the surface to within a few centimeters.

The US Global Positioning System (GPS) was the first GNSS, with satellites launched in 1978, albeit only available to civilians in a degraded accuracy mode. When full accuracy GPS was released to the public under the 1990s Clinton administration, it caused a surge in the uptake of satnav by the public, from fishing boats and merchant ships, to today’s navigation using nothing but a smartphone with its built-in GPS receiver.

Even so, there is a dark side to GNSS that expands beyond its military usage of guiding cruise missiles and kin to their target. This comes in the form of jamming and spoofing GNSS signals, which can hide illicit activities from monitoring systems and disrupt or disable an enemy’s systems during a war. Along with other forms of electronic warfare (EW), disrupting GNSS signals form a potent weapon that can render the most modern avionics and drone technology useless.

With this in mind, how significant is the threat from GNSS spoofing in particular, and what are the ways that this can be detected or counteracted?

Continue reading “Knowing Your Place: The Implications Of GPS Spoofing And Jamming” →

Natural Language AI In Your Next Project? It’s Easier Than You Think

May 18, 2022 by 25 Comments

Want your next project to trash talk? Dynamically rewrite boring log messages as sci-fi technobabble? Happily (or grudgingly) answer questions? Doing that sort of thing and more can be done with OpenAI’s GPT-3, a natural language prediction model with an API that is probably a lot easier to use than you might think.

In fact, if you have basic Python coding skills, or even just the ability to craft a curl statement, you have just about everything you need to add this ability to your next project. It’s not free in the long run, although initial use is free on signup, but for personal projects the costs will be very small.

Basic Concepts

OpenAI has an API that provides access to GPT-3, a machine learning model with the ability to perform just about any task that involves understanding or generating natural-sounding language.

OpenAI provides some excellent documentation as well as a web tool through which one can experiment interactively. First, however, one must create an account and receive an API key. After that is done, the doors are open.

Creating an account also gives one a number of free credits that can be used to experiment with ideas. Once the free trial is used up or expires, using the API will cost money. How much? Not a lot, frankly. Everything sent to (and received from) the API is broken into tokens, and pricing is from $0.0008 to $0.06 per thousand tokens. A thousand tokens is roughly 750 words, so small projects are really not a big financial commitment. My free trial came with 18 USD of credits, of which I have so far barely managed to spend 5%.

Let’s take a closer look at how it works, and what can be done with it!

Continue reading “Natural Language AI In Your Next Project? It’s Easier Than You Think” →

When Hams Helped Polar Researchers Come In From The Cold

May 17, 2022 by 26 Comments

We always enjoy [The History Guy] videos, although many of them aren’t much about technology. However, when he does cover tech topics, he does it well and his recent video on how ham radio operators assisted in operation Deep Freeze is a great example. You can watch the video, below.

The backdrop is the International Geophysical Year (IGY) where many nations cooperated to learn more about the Earth. In particular, from 1957 to 1958 there was a push to learn more about the last unexplored corner of our planet: Antarctica. Several of the permanent bases on the icy continent today were started during the IGY.

It’s hard for modern audiences to appreciate what the state of personal communication was in 1957. There were no cell phones and if you are thinking about satellites, don’t forget that Sputnik didn’t launch until late 1957, so that wasn’t going to happen, either.

Operation Deep Freeze had ten U. S. Navy vessels that brought scientists, planes, and Seabees (slang for members of the Naval Construction Batallion) — about 1,800 people in all over several years culminating in the IGY. Of course, the Navy had radio capabilities, but it wasn’t like the Navy to let you just call home to chat. Not to mention, a little more than 100 people were left for each winter and the Navy ships went home. That’s where ham radio operators came in.

Hams would do what is called a phone patch for the people stationed in Antarctica. Some hams also send radiograms to and from the crew’s families. One teen named Jules was especially dedicated to making connections to Antarctica. We can’t verify it, but one commenter says that Jules was so instrumental in connecting his father in Antarctica to his fiancee that when his parents married, Jules was their best man.

Jules and his brother dedicated themselves to keeping a morale pipeline from New Jersey to the frozen stations. He figures prominently in recollections of many of the written accounts from people who wintered at the nascent bases. Apparently, many of the men even traveled to New Jersey later to visit Jules. What happened to him? Watch the end of the video and you’ll find out.

While being a ham today doesn’t offer this kind of excitement, hams still contribute to science. Want to get in on the action? [Dan Maloney] can tell you how to get started on the cheap.

Continue reading “When Hams Helped Polar Researchers Come In From The Cold” →

Kindle, EPUB, And Amazon’s Love Of Reinventing Wheels

May 17, 2022 by 48 Comments

Last last month, a post from the relatively obscure Good e-Reader claimed that Amazon would finally allow the Kindle to read EPUB files. The story was picked up by all the major tech sites, and for a time, there was much rejoicing. After all, it was a feature that owners have been asking for since the Kindle was first released in 2007. But rather than supporting the open eBook format, Amazon had always insisted in coming up with their own proprietary formats to use on their readers. Accordingly, many users have turned to third party programs which can reliably convert their personal libraries over to whatever Amazon format their particular Kindle is most compatible with.

Native support for EPUB would make using the Kindle a lot less of a hassle for many folks, but alas, it was not to be. It wasn’t long before the original post was updated to clarify that Amazon had simply added support for EPUB to their Send to Kindle service. Granted this is still an improvement, as it represents a relatively low-effort way to get the open format files on your personal device; but in sending the files through the service they would be converted to Amazon’s KF8/AZW3 format, the result of which may not always be what you expected. At the same time the Send to Kindle documentation noted that support for AZW and MOBI files would be removed later on this year, as the older formats weren’t compatible with all the features of the latest Kindle models.

If you think this is a lot of unnecessary confusion just to get plain-text files to display on the world’s most popular ereader, you aren’t alone. Users shouldn’t have to wade through an alphabet soup of oddball file formats when there’s already an accepted industry standard in EPUB. But given that it’s the reality when using one of Amazon’s readers, this seems a good a time as any for a brief rundown of the different ebook formats, and a look at how we got into this mess in the first place.

Continue reading “Kindle, EPUB, And Amazon’s Love Of Reinventing Wheels” →

Things Are Getting Rusty In Kernel Land

May 17, 2022 by 163 Comments

There is gathering momentum around the idea of adding Rust to the Linux kernel. Why exactly is that a big deal, and what does this mean for the rest of us? The Linux kernel has been just C and assembly for its entire lifetime. A big project like the kernel has a great deal of shared tooling around making its languages work, so adding another one is quite an undertaking. There’s also the project culture developed around the language choice. So why exactly are the grey-beards of kernel development even entertaining the idea of adding Rust? To answer in a single line, it’s because C was designed in 1971, to run on the minicomputers at Bell Labs. If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, C will hand you the loaded firearm.

On the other hand, if you want to write a kernel, C is a great language for doing low-level coding. Direct memory access? Yep. Inline assembly? Sure. Runs directly on the metal, with no garbage collection or virtual machines in the way? Absolutely. But all the things that make C great for kernel programming also make C dangerous for kernel programming.

Now I hear your collective keyboards clacking in consternation: “It’s possible to write safe C code!” Yes, yes it is possible. It’s just very easy to mess up, and when you mess up in a kernel, you have security vulnerabilities. There’s also some things that are objectively terrible about C, like undefined behavior. C compilers do their best to do the right thing with cursed code like i++ + i++; or a[i] = i++;. But that’s almost certainly not going to do what you want it to, and even worse, it may sometimes do the right thing.

Rust seems to be gaining popularity. There are some ambitious projects out there, like rewriting coreutils in Rust. Many other standard applications are getting a Rust rewrite. It’s fairly inevitable that the collection of Rust developers started to ask, could we invade the kernel next? This was pitched for a Linux Plumbers Conference, and the mailing list response was cautiously optimistic. If Rust could be added without breaking things, and without losing the very things that makes Rust useful, then yes it would be interesting. Continue reading “Things Are Getting Rusty In Kernel Land” →

Silence Of The IPods: Reflecting On The Ever-Shifting Landscape Of Personal Media Consumption

May 16, 2022 by 71 Comments

On October 23rd of 2001, the first Apple iPod was launched. It wasn’t the first Personal Media Player (PMP), but as with many things Apple the iPod would go on to provide the benchmark for what a PMP should do, as well as what they should look like. While few today remember the PMP trailblazers like Diamond’s Rio devices, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t know what an ‘iPod’ is.

Even as Microsoft, Sony and others tried to steal the PMP crown, the iPod remained the irrefutable market leader, all the while gaining more and more features such as video playback and a touch display. Yet despite this success, in 2017 Apple discontinued its audio-only iPods (Nano and Shuffle), and as of May 10th, 2022, the Apple iPod Touch was discontinued. This marks the end of Apple’s foray into the PMP market, and makes one wonder whether the PMP market of the late 90s is gone, or maybe just has transformed into something else.

After all, with everyone and their pet hamster having a smartphone nowadays, what need is there for a portable device that can ‘only’ play back audio and perhaps video?

Continue reading “Silence Of The IPods: Reflecting On The Ever-Shifting Landscape Of Personal Media Consumption” →