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Longform articles, the best of what the Hackaday writing crew has to offer.

Hackaday At DEF CON 21

August 1, 2013 by 30 Comments

DEF CON 21 Badge

I’ve arrived at the Rio Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada for DEF CON 21. Over the next couple of days, I’ll be talking about what I get up to here.

The main event today is registration, which means getting a neat badge. This year’s badge was designed by [Ryan Clarke]. According to the DEF CON booklet, they are “non-electronic-electronic” badges this year, and DEF CON will be alternating between electronic badges every other year.

The playing card design is printed on a PCB, and uses the silkscreen, solder mask, and copper layers to provide three colors for the artwork. The badge is a crypto challenge, featuring some cryptic characters, numbers, and an XOR gate. I don’t have any ideas about it yet, but some people are already working hard on cracking the code.

Tomorrow, I’ll be heading to a few talks including one on hacking cars that we discussed earlier, and one on decapping chips. I’ll also be checking out some of the villages. The Tamper Evident Village is premiering this year, and they’ll be showing off a variety of tamper proofing tech. I’ll also try to get to the Beverage Cooling Contraption Contest, where competitors build devices to cool beverages (ie, beer) as quickly as possible.

If you have any DEF CON tips, let me know in the comments.

Hackaday Is Going To DEF CON!

July 27, 2013 by 7 Comments

EricEvenchick

This is Hackaday writer [Eric Evenchick]. He’s headed off to DEF CON, the annual hacking conference held every year at this time in Las Vegas. He’s hoping to see some cool stuff and make some networking connections that lead to a real job. If you’re not attending the conference here’s your chance to live vicariously. He’ll be writing on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of next week (August 1-3) about all the stuff he encounters at the event.

If you are attending, keep your eyes open for him. We’re sorry that we didn’t manage to get any swag to him for handing out to loyal readers (not his fault, we’ve been a bit preoccupied). If you know of something he just shouldn’t miss email him: eric at hackaday.com. This includes invites to any awesome parties you’ve got planned.

Oh, and don’t be shy about making him pose with you for pictures…. just make sure to Tweet it to @hackaday if you do.

Hello From SupplyFrame – Your New Evil Overlords !

July 25, 2013 by 234 Comments

A couple of weeks ago one of our engineers woke up and read that HackADay was going up for sale. His first reaction was much the same as most regular readers of HackADay, he was worried and concerned that a site that he has read daily for years was going to be sold to someone who would promptly carve it up and ruin it. So he bumped it up the chain here at SupplyFrame and we decided that HaD would be a good fit for us and so we made an offer and here we are!

Continue reading “Hello From SupplyFrame – Your New Evil Overlords !” →

NPR Science Friday Roundup

July 19, 2013 by 21 Comments

npr-science-friday-roundup

UPDATE: Listen to the segment here.

Did you know I’m going to be a guest on NPR Science Friday today? If this is the first you’re hearing about it you need to sign up for the mailing list (there’s a sign-up form in the right hand column of this page).

If you’ve already listened to the show and found your way here for the goods on the projects, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. Join us after the break for project links and details.

Continue reading “NPR Science Friday Roundup” →

Hackaday Looking For A Good Home

July 1, 2013 by 195 Comments

hackaday

Below is a statement from [Jason Calacanis], the owner of hackaday ———————-

HackADay.com, an awesome maker community, is looking for a new home
——–

tl;dr: HackADay is a passionate community of hackers doing awesome stuff. It deserves more attention than I can give it right now, as I’m ultra-focused on the launch of Inside.com. So, we’re looking for a caring new owner with a stellar track record of not f@#$ing up brands to take it over.

——–

We created HackADay back in 2004 because one of Engadget’s awesome bloggers, Phil Torrone, wanted to do super-geeky projects every day and the Engadget audience wasn’t exactly into that frequency.

In a phone call with PT I said, “So you want to do a hack a day?”

He was like, “Yeah, a hack a day.”

And I was like, “OK, let’s do hackaday.com.”

When we sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, we took HackADay out of the deal because it was doing stuff that a corporate parent’s legal arm might not feel comfortable with (e.g., hacking cable boxes!).

So, I bought it and kept it safe and warm inside of Mahalo.com for the past couple of years. However, since I’m super focused on the Inside.com launch, I need to find a new home for it.

It’s doing over $14k a month in advertising without a sales force (just AdSense mainly), and it’s got an amazing stable of bloggers. Given its 6m pageviews a month and with an advertising sales force doing a modest $15 RPM, Hackaday could do $90k a month.

We’ve got 5,674 members of our email list after just five months (should have started it 10 years ago, would have been at 100k+ by now!).

We’ve started doing some epic videos on YouTube. Collectively the videos have over 5m views and 31k subscribers: www.youtube.com/hackaday

This awesome video broke 1m views: http://youtu.be/LZkApleQQpk

Our Twitter handle has 29k followers.

We’re hoping someone like Maker, DemandMedia, InternetBrands, AOL (without Time Warner involved!), Gawker or another publisher can carry on this awesome, profitable and limitless brand.

If you’re interested, send a note to jason@inside.com.

Also, HackADay is looking for a new editor-in-chief. Please send sample projects, posts and whatever else you got to neweditor@hackaday.com.

Thanks for allowing me this and for your help with any new home ideas.

best @jason

Goodbye Hackaday, I’ll Miss You.

July 1, 2013 by 139 Comments

Farewell Hackaday, the time has come for me to move on. Don’t worry, hackaday will keep going, just like it did when [Eliot] moved on, and [Phil] before him.

I wrote my first post on July 9th, 2008. Since then I’ve had so much fun, and written a total of 1,552 posts (including this one). In my opinion, there is simply no other site like Hackaday.com, our readers are passionate and knowledgeable and it shows, even if some of you are incredibly rude to each other(that’s a sign of passion right?).

While some projects stand out in my mind, it is the people I have enjoyed the most. The people I met when I went to all the different hackerspaces, my co-writers[Mike Szczys] and[Brian Benchoff], past hackaday employees, our commenters,  and even my boss [Jason Calacanis].

If you want to find me, I’ll be at calebkraft.com or on facebook or G+. I have a twitter too, that I guess I’ll start using today.

Join me after the break just one more time while a take a trip down memory lane with a few of my favorite moments from the last few years.  Oh, and yes, I think saying “after the break” is stupid. What else do you say though?

Continue reading “Goodbye Hackaday, I’ll Miss You.” →