In the early 1990s I was privileged enough to be immersed in the world of technology during the exciting period that gave birth to the World Wide Web, and I can honestly say I managed to completely miss those first stirrings of the information revolution in favour of CD-ROMs, a piece of technology which definitely didn’t have a future. I’ve written in the past about that experience and what it taught me about confusing the medium with the message, but today I’m returning to that period in search of something else. How can we regain some of the things that made that early Web good?
We All Know What’s Wrong With The Web…
It’s likely most Hackaday readers could recite a list of problems with the web as it exists here in 2024. Cory Doctrow coined a word for it, enshitification, referring to the shift of web users from being the consumers of online services to the product of those services, squeezed by a few Internet monopolies. A few massive corporations control so much of our online experience from the server to the browser, to the extent that for so many people there is very little the touch outside those confines. Continue reading “A Look At The Small Web, Part 1”→
While plastics are very useful on their own, they can be much stronger when reinforced and mixed with a range of fibers. Not surprisingly, this includes the thermoplastic polymers which are commonly used with FDM 3D printing, such as polylactic acid (PLA) and polyamide (PA, also known as nylon). Although the most well-known fibers used for this purpose are probably glass fiber (GF) and carbon fiber (CF), these come with a range of issues, including their high abrasiveness when printing and potential carcinogenic properties in the case of carbon fiber.
So what other reinforcing fiber options are there? As it turns out, cellulose is one of these, along with basalt. The former has received a lot of attention currently, as the addition of cellulose and similar elements to thermopolymers such as PLA can create so-called biocomposites that create plastics without the brittleness of PLA, while also being made fully out of plant-based materials.
Regardless of the chosen composite, the goal is to enhance the properties of the base polymer matrix with the reinforcement material. Is cellulose the best material here?
Writing for Hackaday involves drinking from the firehose of tech news, and seeing the latest and greatest of new projects and happenings in the world of hardware. But sometimes you sit back in a reflective mood, and ask yourself: didn’t this all used to be more exciting? If you too have done that, perhaps it’s worth considering how our world of hardware hacking is fueled, and what makes stuff new and interesting.
Hardware projects are like startup fads
When AliExpress has hundreds of kits for them, Nixie clocks are a mature project sector, by any measure.
Hardware projects are like startup fads, they follow the hype cycle. Take Nixie clocks for instance, they’re cool as heck, but here in 2024 there’s not so much that’s exciting about them. If you made one in 2010 you were the talk of the town, in 2015 everyone wanted one, but perhaps by 2020 yours was simply Yet Another Nixie Clock. Now you can buy any number of Nixie clock kits on Ali, and their shine has definitely worn off. Do you ever have the feeling that the supply of genuinely new stuff is drying up, and it’s all getting a bit samey? Perhaps it’s time to explore this topic.
I have a theory that hardware hacking goes in epochs, each one driven by a new technology. If you think about it, the Arduino was an epoch-defining moment in a readily available and easy to use microcontroller board; they may be merely a part and hugely superseded here in 2024 but back in 2008 they were nothing short of a revolution if you’d previously has a BASIC Stamp. The projects which an Arduino enabled produced a huge burst of creativity from drones to 3D printers to toaster oven reflow and many, many, more, and it’s fair to say that Hackaday owes its early-day success in no small part to that little board from Italy. To think of more examples, the advent of affordable 3D printers around the same period as the Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, and the arrival of affordable PCB manufacture from China were all similar such enabling moments. A favourite of mine are the Espressif Wi-Fi enabled microcontrollers, which produced an explosion of cheap Internet-connected projects. Suddenly having Wi-Fi went from a big deal to built-in, and an immense breadth of new projects came from those parts. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday, What’s Next?”→
As we slowly wean ourselves away from our centuries-long love affair with fossil fuels in an attempt to reduce CO2 emissions and combat global warming, there has been a rapid expansion across a broad range of clean energy technologies. Whether it’s a set of solar panels on your roof, a wind farm stretching across the horizon, or even a nuclear plant, it’s clear that we’ll be seeing more green power installations springing up.
One of the green power options is biomass, the burning of waste plant matter as a fuel to generate power. It releases CO2 into the atmosphere, but its carbon neutral green credentials come from that CO2 being re-absorbed by new plants being grown. It’s an attractive idea in infrastructure terms, because existing coal-fired plants can be converted to the new fuel. Where this is being written in the UK we have a particularly large plant doing this, when I toured Drax power station as a spotty young engineering student in the early 1990s it was our largest coal plant; now it runs on imported wood pellets.
Once the nerve center of Windows operating systems, the Control Panel and its multitude of applets has its roots in the earliest versions of Windows. From here users could use these configuration applets to control and adjust just about anything in a friendly graphical environment. Despite the lack of any significant criticism from users and with many generations having grown up with its familiar dialogs, it has over the past years been gradually phased out by the monolithic Universal Windows Platform (UWP) based Settings app.
Whereas the Windows control panel features an overview of the various applets – each of which uses Win32 GUI elements like tabs to organize settings – the Settings app is more Web-like, with lots of touch-friendly whitespace, a single navigable menu, kilometers of settings to scroll through and absolutely no way to keep more than one view open at the same time.
Unsurprisingly, this change has not been met with a lot of enthusiasm by the average Windows user, and with Microsoft now officially recommending users migrate over to the Settings app, it seems that before long we may have to say farewell to what used to be an intrinsic part of the Windows operating system since its first iterations. Yet bizarrely, much of the Control Panel functionality doesn’t exist yet in the Settings app, and it remain an open question how much of it can be translated into the Settings app user experience (UX) paradigm at all.
Considering how unusual this kind of control panel used to be beyond quaint touch-centric platforms like Android and iOS, what is Microsoft’s goal here? Have discovered a UX secret that has eluded every other OS developer?
The Hackaday comments section is generally a lively place. At its best, it’s an endless wellspring of the combined engineering wisdom of millions of readers which serves to advance the state of the art in hardware hacking for all. At its worst — well, let’s just say that at least it’s not the YouTube comments section.
Unfortunately, there’s also a space between the best and the worst where things can be a bit confusing. A case in point is [Bryan Cockfield]’s recent article on a stealth antenna designed to skirt restrictions placed upon an amateur radio operator by the homeowners’ association (HOA) governing his neighborhood.
Hiding an antenna in plain sight.
Putting aside the general griping about the legal and moral hazards of living under an HOA, as well as the weirdly irrelevant side-quest into the relative combustibility of EVs and ICE cars, there appeared to be a persistent misapprehension about the reality of the US Federal Communications Commission’s “Over-the-Air Reception Devices” rules. Reader [Gamma Raymond] beseeched us to clarify the rules, lest misinformation lead any of our readers into the unforgiving clutches of the “golf cart people” who seem to run many HOAs.
According to the FCC’s own OTARD explainer, the rules of 47 CFR § 1.400 are intended only to prevent “governmental and nongovernmental restrictions on viewers’ ability to receive video programming signals” (emphasis added) from three distinct classes of service: direct satellite broadcasters, broadband radio service providers, and television broadcast services.
Specifically, OTARD prevents restrictions on the installation, maintenance, or use of antennas for these services within limits, such as dish antennas having to be less than a meter in diameter (except in Alaska, where dishes can be any size, because it’s Alaska) and restrictions on where antennas can be placed, for example common areas (such as condominium roofs) versus patios and balconies which are designated as for the exclusive use of a tenant or owner. But importantly, that’s it. There are no carve-outs, either explicit or implied, for any other kind of antennas — amateur radio, scanners, CB, WiFi, Meshtastic, whatever. If it’s not about getting TV into your house in some way, shape, or form, it’s not covered by OTARD.
It goes without saying that we are not lawyers, and this is not to be construed as legal advice. If you want to put a 40′ tower with a giant beam antenna on your condo balcony and take on your HOA by stretching the rules and claiming that slow-scan TV is a “video service,” you’re on your own. But a plain reading of OTARD makes it clear to us what is and is not allowed, and we’re sorry to say there’s no quarter for radio hobbyists in the rules. This just means you’re going to need to be clever about your antennas. Or, you know — move.
Some of the neatest products are made from the byproducts of other industries. Take petroleum jelly, for example. Its inventor, Robert Chesebrough, a chemist from New York, came upon his idea while visiting the oil fields of Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859. It took him ten years to perfect his formula, but the product has been a household staple ever since. Chesebrough so believed in Vaseline that he ingested a spoonful of it every day, and attributed his 96-year longevity to doing so.
Well, some byproducts can simply be beautiful, or at least interesting. On that note, welcome to a new series called Boss Byproducts. We recently ran an article about a laser-engraved painting technique that is similar to the production of Fordite. I had never heard of Fordite, but as soon as I found out what it was, I had to have some. So, here we go!
