Give Us One Manual For Normies, Another For Hackers

December 2, 2025 by Lewin Day 67 Comments

We’ve all been there. You’ve found a beautiful piece of older hardware at the thrift store, and bought it for a song. You rush it home, eager to tinker, but you soon find it’s just not working. You open it up to attempt a repair, but you could really use some information on what you’re looking at and how to enter service mode. Only… a Google search turns up nothing but dodgy websites offering blurry PDFs for entirely the wrong model, and you’re out of luck.

These days, when you buy an appliance, the best documentation you can expect is a Quick Start guide and a warranty card you’ll never use. Manufacturers simply don’t want to give you real information, because they think the average consumer will get scared and confused. I think they can do better. I’m demanding a new two-tier documentation system—the basics for the normies, and real manuals for the tech heads out there.

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3D Printing And The Dream Of Affordable Prosthetics

December 1, 2025 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

As amazing as the human body is, it’s unfortunately not as amazing as e.g. axolotl bodies are, in the sense that they can regrow entire limbs and more. This has left us humans with the necessity to craft artificial replacement limbs to restore some semblance of the original functionality, at least until regenerative medicine reaches maturity.

Despite this limitation, humans have become very adept at crafting prosthetic limbs, starting with fairly basic prosthetics to fully articulated and beautifully sculpted ones, all the way to modern-day functional prosthetics. Yet as was the case a hundred years ago, today’s prosthetics are anything but cheap. This is mostly due to the customization required as no person’s injury is the same.

When the era of 3D printing arrived earlier this century, it was regularly claimed that this would make cheap, fully custom prosthetics a reality. Unfortunately this hasn’t happened, for a variety of reasons. This raises the question of whether 3D printing can at all play a significant role in making prosthetics more affordable, comfortable or functional.

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Chinese Regulators May Kill Retractable Car Door Handles That Never Should Have Existed

November 26, 2025 by Lewin Day 157 Comments

Headlights. Indicators. Trunk releases. Seatbelts. Airbags. Just about any part of a car you can think of is governed by a long and complicated government regulation. It’s all about safety, ensuring that the car-buying public can trust that their vehicles won’t unduly injure or maim them in regular operation, or in the event of accident.

However, one part of the modern automobile has largely escaped regulation—namely, the humble door handle. Automakers have been free to innovate with new and wacky designs, with Tesla in particular making waves with its electronic door handles. However, after a series of deadly incidents where doors wouldn’t open, regulators are now examining if these door handles are suitable for road-going automobiles. As always, regulations are written in blood, but it raises the question—was not the danger of these complicated electronic door handles easy to foresee?

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So Long Firefox, Hello Vivaldi

November 25, 2025 by Jenny List 114 Comments

It’s been twenty-three years since the day Phoenix was released, the web browser that eventually became Firefox. I downloaded it on the first day and installed it on my trusty HP Omnibook 800 laptop, and until this year I’ve used it ever since. Yet after all this time, I’m ready to abandon it for another browser. In the previous article in this series I went into my concerns over the direction being taken by Mozilla with respect to their inclusion of AI features and my worries about privacy in Firefox, and I explained why a plurality of browser engines is important for the Web. Now it’s time to follow me on my search for a replacement, and you may be surprised by one aspect of my eventual choice.

Where Do I Go From Here?

Hackaday in the Ladybird browser — It’s Hackaday, in Ladybird! (Ooof, that font.)

Happily for my own purposes, there are a range of Firefox alternatives which fulfill my browser needs without AI cruft and while allowing me to be a little more at peace with my data security and privacy. There’s Chromium of course even if it’s still way too close to Google for my liking, and there are a host of open-source WebKit and Blink based browsers too numerous to name here.

In the Gecko world that should be an easier jump for a Firefox escapee there are also several choices, for example LibreWolf, and Waterfox. In terms of other browser engines there’s the extremely promising but still early in development Ladybird, and the more mature Servo, which though it is available as a no-frills browser, bills itself as an embedded browser engine. I have not considered some other projects that are either lightweight browser engines, or ones not under significant active development. Continue reading “So Long Firefox, Hello Vivaldi” →

The Unexpected Joys Of Hacking An Old Kindle

November 24, 2025 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

In the closing hours of JawnCon 0x2, I was making a final pass of the “Free Stuff for Nerds” table when I noticed a forlorn Kindle that had a piece of paper taped to it. The hand-written note explained that the device was in shambles — not only was its e-ink display visibly broken, but the reader was stuck in some kind of endless boot loop. I might have left it there if it wasn’t for the closing remark: “Have Fun!”

Truth is, the last thing I needed was another Kindle. My family has already managed to build up a collection of the things. But taking a broken one apart and attempting to figure out what was wrong with it did seem like it would be kind of fun, as I’d never really had the opportunity to dig into one before. So I brought it home and promptly forgot about it as Supercon was only a few weeks away and there was plenty to keep me occupied.

The following isn’t really a story about fixing a Kindle, although it might seem like it on the surface. It’s more about the experience of working on the device, and the incredible hacking potential of these unassuming gadgets. Whether you’ve got a clear goal in mind, or just want to get your hands dirty in the world of hardware hacking, you could do far worse than picking a couple of busted Kindles up for cheap on eBay.

If there’s a singular takeaway, it’s that the world’s most popular e-reader just so happens to double as a cheap and impressively capable embedded Linux development environment for anyone who’s willing to crack open the case.

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Mating Cycles: Engineering Connectors To Last

November 20, 2025 by Dan Maloney 57 Comments

If you take a look around you, chances are pretty good that within a few seconds, your eyes will fall on some kind of electrical connector. In this day and age, it’s as likely as not to be a USB connector, given their ubiquity as the charger of choice for everything from phones to flashlights. But there are plenty of other connectors, from mains outlets in the wall to Ethernet connectors, and if you’re anything like us, you’ve got a bench full of DuPonts, banana plugs, BNCs, SMAs, and all the rest of the alphabet soup of connectors.

Given their propensity for failure and their general reputation as a necessary evil in electrical designs, it may seem controversial to say that all connectors are engineered to last. But it’s true; they’re engineered to last, but only for as long as necessary. Some are built for only a few cycles of mating, while others are built for the long haul. Either way, connectors are a great case study in engineering compromise, one that loops physics, chemistry, and materials science into the process.

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Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia

November 19, 2025 by Lewin Day 66 Comments

We’re taught how to call emergency numbers from a young age; whether it be 911 in the US, 999 in the UK, or 000 in Australia. The concept is simple—if you need aid from police, fire, or ambulance, you pick up a phone and dial and help will be sent in short order.

It’s a service many of us have come to rely on; indeed, it’s function can swing the very balance between life or death. Sadly, in Australia, that has come to pass, with a person dying when their Samsung phone failed to reach the Triple Zero (000) emergency line. It has laid bare an obscure technical issue that potentially leaves thousands of lives at risk. Continue reading “Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia” →