Hack On Self: Sense Of Time

August 6, 2024 by Arya Voronova 49 Comments

Every now and then, a commercial product aims to help you in your life journey, in a novel way, making your life better through its presence. Over the years, I’ve been disappointed by such products far more often than I have been reassured, seeing each one of them rendered unimaginative and purposeless sometimes even despite the creator’s best intentions. The pressures of a commercial market will choke you out without remorse, metal fingers firmly placed on your neck, tightening with every move that doesn’t promise profit, and letting money cloud your project’s vision. I believe that real answers can only come from within hacker communities, and as we explore, you might come to see it the same way.

This is the tip of the iceberg of a decade-long project that I hope to demonstrate in a year or two. I’d like to start talking about that project now, since it’s pretty extensive; the overall goal is about using computers to help with human condition, on a personal level. There’s a lot of talk about computers integrating into our lives – even more if you dare consult old sci-fi, much of my inspiration.

Tackling a gigantic problem often means cutting it down into smaller chunks, though, so here’s a small sub-problem I’ve been working on, for years now, on and off: Can you use computers to modify your sense of time?

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Radio Apocalypse: HFGCS, The Backup Plan For Doomsday

August 5, 2024 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

To the extent that you have an opinion on something like high-frequency (HF) radio, you probably associate it with amateur radio operators, hunched over their gear late at night as they try to make contact with a random stranger across the globe to talk about the fact that they’re both doing the same thing at the same time. In a world where you can reach out to almost anyone else in an instant using flashy apps on the Internet, HF radio’s reputation as somewhat old and fuddy is well-earned.

Like the general population, modern militaries have largely switched to digital networks and satellite links, using them to coordinate and command their strategic forces on a global level. But while military nets are designed to be resilient to attack, there’s only so much damage they can absorb before becoming degraded to the point of uselessness. A backup plan makes good military sense, and the properties of radio waves between 3 MHz and 30 MHz, especially the ability to bounce off the ionosphere, make HF radio a perfect fit.

The United States Strategic Forces Command, essentially the people who “push the button” that starts a Very Bad Day™, built their backup plan around the unique properties of HF radio. Its current incarnation is called the High-Frequency Global Communications System, or HFGCS. As the hams like to say, “When all else fails, there’s radio,” and HFGCS takes advantage of that to make sure the end of the world can be conducted in an orderly fashion.

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LightBurn Turns Back The Clock, Bails On Linux Users

July 31, 2024 by Tom Nardi 219 Comments

Angry Birds, flash mobs, Russell Brand, fidget spinners. All of these were virtually unavoidable in the previous decade, and yet, like so many popular trends, have now largely faded into obscurity. But in a recent announcement, the developers of LightBurn have brought back a relic of the past that we thought was all but buried along with Harambe — popular software not supporting Linux.

But this isn’t a case of the developers not wanting to bring their software to Linux. LightBurn, the defacto tool for controlling hobbyist laser cutters and engravers, was already multi-platform. Looking forward, however, the developers claim that too much of their time is spent supporting and packaging the software for Linux relative to the size of the user base. In an announcement email sent out to users, they reached even deeper into the mid-2000s bag of excuses, and cited the number of Linux distributions as a further challenge:

The segmentation of Linux distributions complicates these burdens further — we’ve had to provide three separate packages for the versions of Linux we officially support, and still encounter frequent compatibility issues on those distributions (or closely related distributions), to say nothing of the many distributions we have been asked to support.

We’re not sure how much of their time could possibly be taken up by responding to requests for supporting additional distributions (especially when the answer is no), but apparently, it was enough that they finally had to put their foot down — the upcoming 1.7.00 release of LightBurn will be the last to run on Linux.

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Polaroid In An Instant

July 31, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

Edwin Land, were he alive, would hate this post. He wanted to be known for this scientific work and not for his personal life. In fact, upon his death, he ordered the destruction of all his personal papers. However, Land was, by our definition, a hacker, and while you probably correctly associate him with the Polaroid camera, that turns out to be only part of the story.

It was obvious that Land was intelligent and inquisitive from an early age. At six, he blew all the fuses in the house. He was known for taking apart clocks and appliances. When his father forbade him from tearing apart a phonograph, he reportedly replied that nothing would deter him from conducting an experiment. We imagine many Hackaday readers have similar childhood stories.

Optics

He was interested in optics, and at around age 13, he became interested in using polarized light to reduce headlight glare. The problem was that one of the best polarizing crystals known — herapathite — was difficult to create in a large size. Herapathite is a crystalline form of iodoquinine sulfate studied in the 1800s by William Herapath, who was unable to grow large sizes of the crystal. Interestingly, one of Herapath’s students noticed the crystals formed when adding iodine to urine from dogs that were given quinine.

Land spent a year at Harvard studying physics, but he left and moved to New York. He continued trying to develop a way to make large, practical, light-polarizing crystals. At night, he would sneak into labs at Columbia University to conduct experiments.

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Undersea Cable Repair

July 30, 2024 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

The bottom of the sea is a mysterious and inaccessible place, and anything unfortunate enough to slip beneath the waves and into the briny depths might as well be on the Moon. But the bottom of the sea really isn’t all that far away. The average depth of the ocean is only about 3,600 meters, and even at its deepest, the bottom is only about 10 kilometers away, a distance almost anyone could walk in a couple of hours.

Of course, the problem is that the walk would be straight down into one of the most inhospitable environments our planet has to offer. Despite its harshness, that environment is home to hundreds of undersea cables, all of which are subject to wear and tear through accidents and natural causes. Fixing broken undersea cables quickly and efficiently is a highly specialized field, one that takes a lot of interesting engineering and some clever hacks to pull off.

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An Antenna To Throw You For A Loop

July 29, 2024 by Al Williams 27 Comments

It is one of Murphy’s laws, we think, that you can’t get great things when you need them. Back in the heyday of shortwave broadcasting, any of us would have given a week’s pay for even a low-end receiver today. Digital display? Memory? Digital filtering? These days, you have radios, and they aren’t terribly expensive, but there isn’t much to listen to. Making matters worse, it isn’t easy these days to string wires around in your neighborhood for a variety of reasons. Maybe you don’t have a yard, or you have deed restrictions, or your yard lacks suitable space or locations. This problem is so common that there are a crop of indoor antennas that seem attractive. Since I don’t often tune in shortwave and I don’t want to have to reset my antenna after every storm, I decided to look at the Tecsun AN-48X along with a YouLoop clone from China. Let’s start with the Tecsun. Continue reading “An Antenna To Throw You For A Loop” →

Ask Hackaday: Is Shortwave On Life Support?

July 26, 2024 by Al Williams 123 Comments

Between World War II and Y2K, shortwave listening was quite an education. With a simple receiver, you could listen to the world. Some of it, of course, was entertainment, and much of it was propaganda of one sort or another. But you could learn a lot. Kids with shortwave radios always did great in geography. Getting the news from a different perspective is often illuminating, too. Learning about other cultures and people in such a direct way is priceless. Getting a QSL card in the mail from a faraway land seemed very exciting back then.

Today, the shortwave landscape is a mere shadow of itself. According to a Wikipedia page, there are 235 active shortwave broadcasters from a list of 414, so nearly half are defunct. Not only are there many “dead” shortwave outlets, but many of the ones that are left are either not aimed at the world market or serve a niche group of listeners.

You can argue that with the Internet, you don’t need radio, and that’s probably correct in some ways but misses a few important points. Indeed, many broadcasters still exist as streaming stations or a mix of radio and streaming. I have to admit I listen to the BBC often but rarely on the air. My computer or phone plays it in crystal clarity 24 hours a day.

A future Hackaday author in front of an Eico shortwave radio

So, while a 14-year-old in 1975 might be hunched over a radio wearing headphones, straining to hear NHK World Radio, these days, they are likely surfing the popular social media site of the week. You could easily argue that content on YouTube, Instagram, and the like can come from all over the world, so what’s the problem?

The problem is information overload. Faced with a shortwave radio, there were a limited number of options available. What’s more, only a small part of the band might be “open” at any given time. It isn’t like the radio could play games or — unless you were a ham — allow you to chat with your friends. So you found radio stations from Germany to South Africa. From China and Russia, to Canada and Mexico. You knew the capital of Albania. You learned a little Dutch from Radio Nederlands.

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