Longform articles, the best of what the Hackaday writing crew has to offer.
The owner of Hackaday, [Jason Calacanis], wants to sell this site. The editors and contributors of Hackaday want to buy it and turn it into a nonprofit. You can help!
Here’s a really nice Powerpoint going over what we’re going to do while making Hackaday the best it can be.
Continue reading “Turning Hackaday Into A Virtual Hackerspace”
Below is a statement from [Jason Calacanis], the owner of hackaday ———————-
HackADay.com, an awesome maker community, is looking for a new home
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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.
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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
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?
Hold on tight. This is going to be a long post. I kept my temper in the video, but here I can just come out and let you know that I’m livid. Every time I start thinking about this, I feel so angry and helpless that my face gets hot and my hands get shaky. I’m getting ahead of myself though, so lets just back up a little bit and talk about a pretty cool kid named [Thomas].
[Thomas] has muscular dystrophy. This means he’s going to gradually lose strength and control in his muscles over time. He has already lost his ability to stand, and even holding buttons on a game-pad for extended times can be difficult. Gaming, as you can imagine, is very important to [Thomas] and people like him. It offers a release of frustration, like it does for all of us, but also a level playing ground. When he’s in the game, he’s like everyone else.
Continue reading “Building Custom Game Controllers For People With Physical Disabilities”
Today we are quite excited to announce HANDMADE.hackaday. HANDMADE is a place where we celebrate craftsmanship. Usually in the form of a stunning video, or a beautiful image gallery. We will also be sharing extremely detailed DIY projects as well as tutorials. Hop on over and take a peek for yourself to see what you’re in for, but be prepared to clear your schedule, you’re not leaving any time soon.
We are also producing some videos of our own for this that we hope you’ll like.
A personal note:
I am personally so excited about HANDMADE. I’ve been wanting to put this together for a very very long time. I eagerly consume every video of this nature I stumble across, often putting them full screen, high def, and putting in headphones. Any of you who know me personally will attest that getting my full attention on any single thing ever is a daunting task. Also note that these videos usually last several entire minutes; a lifetime in my attention span.
Watching people make things, while applying a practiced and refined skill is almost a religious experience for me. This is creation. I hope some of you will enjoy this area as much as I do.
Over the years we’ve had a tons of tips sent in that were more along the lines of “lifehacks”. Simple little tips to make life better. While we would occasionally squeeze them into hackaday, many got left behind. Now we’ve created an entire site called LIFE.hackaday that we’re filling with all these great ideas. Finally, a place for all those docks people send us!
Occasionally, there might be something that we feel works for the “classic” hackaday and “LIFE.”, in which case, we may just mention it here. We hope that by creating another site, we can give people the “lifehacks” they want while keeping hackaday focused on hardware hacking.
We have some other tricks up our sleeve, but they aren’t quite ready to be revealed yet.
Years ago we covered using thermite to destroy a hard drive. The idea is that if you melt through the platters, the data is completely unrecoverable. There are tons of videos of people doing this, but they all have a similar format. There’s a hard drive, with a flower pot or soda can sitting on top full of thermite. They then light this with a strip of magnesium and a torch.
I wanted to do something a little different. I wanted to implement thermite as a self destruct mechanism inside the device. To do this, I had to come up with a way to ignite the thermite. This stuff is very difficult to light. You have to get it really really hot. The easiest way is to use magnesium, which itself isn’t the easiest thing to light.
What I finally landed on was an ignition system that uses model rocket igniters, gun powder, and magnesium to light the thermite. The model rocket igniter can be set off from the 12v line inside your computer. However, it isn’t hot enough to light magnesium shavings, much less thermite. To get it to work, I needed to add some gunpowder. A small amount of gun powder would get hot enough to light the magnesium shavings, which in turn were hot enough to light the thermite. I had to be careful though, because too much gunpowder would cause a rapid expansion, blowing the thermite everywhere instead of lighting it. You can actually see some red thermite being blown out of the external hard drive and the laptop as the gunpowder ignites.
Effectiveness of external hard drive self destruction:
I wasn’t sure about this one. There isn’t a whole lot of space for thermite and the ignition system inside the box. On top of that, the only space was at the side of the hard drive, where the walls are the thickest. I had no idea if the small amount of thermite I used would penetrate the drive. It did, just barely as you can see in these pictures. It looks as if it pooled in the screw holes and made it inside. The platters are damaged.
Effectiveness of laptop destruction:
I decided to completely replace the cd rom with thermite. This gave me a ton of space to put things. I was pretty positive this would work. The hard drive is in the center of this laptop, which meant I had to place it on its side for this to be effective. You can see the thermite work its way down toward the drive in the video. As you can see in the pictures below, the drive cover is completely gone and the platters are destroyed. Success!
Since this system can be powered by batteries or the internal power of your computer, it can be put inside a working device only to be used when needed. Obviously it is a ridiculous fire hazard that no one should bother with. It was a fun experiment though and I really feel like it is something that would fit in well in the world of [James Bond]
