Curated

76 Articles

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

Ask Hackaday: How Do You Digitize Your Documents?

January 29, 2026 by 84 Comments

Like many of you, I have a hard time getting rid of stuff. I’ve got boxes and boxes of weirdo bits and bobs, and piles of devices that I’ll eventually get around to stripping down into even more bits and bobs. Despite regular purges — I try to bring a car-load of crap treasure to local hackerspaces and meetups at least a couple times a year — the pile only continues to grow.

But the problem isn’t limited to hardware components. There’s all sorts of things that the logical part of me understands I’ll almost certainly never need, and yet I can’t bring myself to dispose of. One of those things just so happens to be documents. Anything printed is fair game. Could be the notes from my last appointment with the doctor, or fliers for events I attended years ago. Doesn’t matter, the stacks keep building up until I end up cramming it all into a box and start the whole process starts over again.

I’ve largely convinced myself that the perennial accumulation of electronic bric-à-brac is an occupational hazard, and have come to terms with it. But I think there’s a good chance of moving the needle on the document situation, and if that involves a bit of high-tech overengineering, even better. As such, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks investigating digitizing the documents that have information worth retaining so that the originals can be sent along to Valhalla in my fire pit.

The following represents some of my observations thus far, in the hopes that others going down a similar path may find them useful. But what I’m really interested in is hearing from the Hackaday community. Surely I’m not the only one trying to save some storage space by turn piles of papers into ones and zeros.

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The Amazing Maser

January 28, 2026 by 47 Comments

While it has become a word, laser used to be an acronym: “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”. But there is an even older technology called a maser, which is the same acronym but with light switched out for microwaves. If you’ve never heard of masers, you might be tempted to dismiss them as early proto-lasers that are obsolete. But you’d be wrong! Masers keep showing up in places you’d never expect: radio telescopes, atomic clocks, deep-space tracking, and even some bleeding-edge quantum experiments. And depending on how a few materials and microwave engineering problems shake out, masers might be headed for a second golden age.

Simplistically, the maser is — in one sense — a “lower frequency laser.” Just like a laser, stimulated emission is what makes it work. You prepare a bunch of atoms or molecules in an excited energy state (a population inversion), and then a passing photon of the right frequency triggers them to drop to a lower state while emitting a second photon that matches the first with the same frequency, phase, and direction. Do that in a resonant cavity and you’ve got gain, coherence, and a remarkably clean signal.

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Zombie Netscape Won’t Die

January 27, 2026 by 28 Comments

The very concept of the web browser began with a humble piece of software called NCSA Mosaic, all the way back in 1993. It was soon eclipsed by Netscape Navigator, and later Internet Explorer, which became the titans of the 1990s browser market. In turn, they too would falter. Navigator’s dying corpse ended up feeding what would become Mozilla Firefox, and Internet Explorer later morphed into the unexceptional browser known as Edge.

Few of us have had any reason to think about Netscape Navigator since its demise in 2008. And yet, the name lingers on. A zombie from a forgotten age, risen again to haunt us today.

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One Hundred Years Of Telly

January 26, 2026 by 13 Comments

Today marks an auspicious anniversary which might have passed us by had it not been for [Diamond Geezer], who reminds us that it’s a hundred years since the first public demonstration of television by John Logie Baird. In a room above what is today a rather famous Italian coffee shop in London’s Soho, he had assembled a complete mechanical TV system that he demonstrated to journalists.

Television is one of those inventions that owes its genesis to more than a single person, so while Baird was by no means the only one inventing in the field, he was the first to demonstrate a working system. With mechanical scanning and just 30 lines, it’s hardly HD or 4K, but it does have the advantage of being within the reach of the constructor.

Perhaps the saddest thing about Baird and his system is that while he was able to attract the interest of the BBC in it, when the time came for dedicated transmissions at a higher resolution, his by then partly mechanical system could not compete and he faded into relative obscurity. Brits instead received EMI’s 405 line system, which persisted until the very start of the 1980s, and eventually the German PAL colour system in the late 1960s.

So head on down to Bar Italia if you can to raise a coffee to his memory, and should you wish to have a go at Baird-style TV for yourself, then you may need to print yourself a disk.

Header image: Matt Brown, CC BY 2.0.

Art of 3D printer in the middle of printing a Hackaday Jolly Wrencher logo

Does Carbon Fiber PLA Make Sense?

January 26, 2026 by 33 Comments

Carbon fiber (CF) has attained somewhat of a near-mystical appeal in consumer marketing, with it being praised for being stronger than steel while simultaneously being extremely lightweight. This mostly refers to weaved fibers combined with resin into a composite material that is used for everything from car bodies to bike frames. This CF look is so sexy that the typical carbon-fiber composite weave pattern and coloring have been added to products as a purely cosmetic accent.

More recently, chopped carbon fiber (CCF) has been added to the thermoplastics we extrude from our 3D printers. Despite lacking clear evidence of this providing material improvements, the same kind of mysticism persists here as well. Even as evidence emerges of poor integration of these chopped fibers into the thermoplastic matrix, the marketing claims continue unabated.

As with most things, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. A recent paper by Sameh Dabees et al. in Composites for example covered the CF surface modifications required for thermoplastic integration with CF.

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Ancient Egyptian Flatness

January 24, 2026 by 37 Comments

Making a truly flat surface is a modern engineering feat, and not a small one. Even making something straight without reference tools that are already straight is a challenge. However, the ancient Egyptians apparently made very straight, very flat stone work. How did they do it? Probably not alien-supplied CNC machines. [IntoTheMap] explains why it is important and how they may have done it in a recent video you can see below.

The first step is to define flatness, and modern mechanical engineers have taken care of that. If you use 3D printers, you know how hard it is to even get your bed and nozzle “flat” with respect to each other. You’ll almost always have at least a 100 micron variation in the bed distances. The video shows how different levels of flatness require different measurement techniques.

The Great Pyramid’s casing stones have joints measuring 0.5 mm, which is incredible to achieve on such large stones with no modern tools. A stone box in the Pyramid of Seostris II is especially well done and extremely flat, although we can make things flatter today.

The main problem with creating a flat surface is that to do a good job, you need some flat things to start with. However, there is a method from the 19th century that uses three plates and multiple lapping steps to create three very flat plates. In modern times, we use a blue material to indicate raised areas, much as a dentist makes you chomp on a piece of paper to place a crown. There are traces of red ochre on Egyptian stonework that probably served the same purpose.

Lapping large pieces is still a challenge, but moving giant stones at scale appears to have been a solved problem for the Egyptians. Was this the method they used? We don’t know, of course. But it certainly makes sense.

It would be a long time before modern people could make things as flat. While we can do even better now, we also have better measuring tools.

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Size (and Units) Really Do Matter

January 23, 2026 by 93 Comments

We miss the slide rule. It isn’t so much that we liked getting an inexact answer using a physical moving object. But to successfully use a slide rule, you need to be able to roughly estimate the order of magnitude of your result. The slide rule’s computation of 2.2 divided by 8 is the same as it is for 22/8 or 220/0.08. You have to interpret the answer based on your sense of where the true answer lies. If you’ve ever had some kid at a fast food place enter the wrong numbers into a register and then hand you a ridiculous amount of change, you know what we mean.

Recent press reports highlighted a paper from Nvidia that claimed a data center consuming a gigawatt of power could require half a million tons of copper. If you aren’t an expert on datacenter power distribution and copper, you could take that number at face value. But as [Adam Button] reports, you should probably be suspicious of this number. It is almost certainly a typo. We wouldn’t be surprised if you click on the link and find it fixed, but it caused a big news splash before anyone noticed.

Thought Process

Best estimates of the total copper on the entire planet are about 6.3 billion metric tons. We’ve actually only found a fraction of that and mined even less. Of the 700 million metric tons of copper we actually have in circulation, there is a demand for about 28 million tons a year (some of which is met with recycling, so even less new copper is produced annually).

Simple math tells us that a single data center could, in a year, consume 1.7% of the global copper output. While that could be true, it seems suspicious on its face.

Digging further in, you’ll find the paper mentions 200kg per megawatt. So a gigawatt should be 200,000kg, which is, actually, only 200 metric tons. That’s a far cry from 500,000 tons. We suspect they were rounding up from the 440,000 pounds in 200 metric tons to “up to a half a million pounds,” and then flipped pounds to tons.

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