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 56 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” →

In Praise Of Plasma TVs

November 18, 2025 by Tyler August 42 Comments

I’m sitting in front of an old Sayno Plasma TV as I write this on my media PC. It’s not a productivity machine, by any means, but the screen has the resolution to do it so I started this document to prove a point. That point? Plasma TVs are awesome.

Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Bride

An Egyptian god might see pixels on an 8K panel, but we puny mortals won’t. Image “Horus Eye 2” by [Jeff Dahl]

The full-colour plasma screens that were used as TVs in the 2000s are an awkward technological cul-de-sac. Everyone knows and loves CRTs for the obvious benefits they offer– bright colours, low latency, and scanlines to properly blur pixel art. Modern OLEDs have more resolution than the Eye of Horus, never mind your puny human orbs, and barely sip power compared to their forbearers. Plasma, though? Not old enough to be retro-cool, not new enough to be high-tech, plasma displays are sadly forgotten.

It’s funny, because I firmly believe that without plasma displays, CRTs would have never gone away. Perhaps for that I should hate them, but it’s for the very reasons that Plasma won out over HD-CRTs in the market place that I love them.

What You Get When You Get a Plasma TV

I didn’t used to love Plasma TVs. Until a few years ago, I thought of them like you probably do: clunky, heavy, power-hungry, first-gen flatscreens that were properly consigned to the dustbin of history. Then I bought a house.

The house came with a free TV– a big plasma display in the basement. It was left there for two reasons: it was worthless on the open market and it weighed a tonne. I could take it off the wall by myself, but I could feel the ghost of OSHA past frowning at me when I did. Hauling it up the stairs? Yeah, I’d need a buddy for that… and it was 2020. By the time I was organizing the basement, we’d just gone into lockdown, and buddies were hard to come by. So I put it back on the wall, plugged in my laptop, and turned it on.

I was gobsmacked. It looked exactly like a CRT– a giant, totally flat CRT in glorious 1080p. When I stepped to the side, it struck me again: like a CRT, the viewing angle is “yes”. Continue reading “In Praise Of Plasma TVs” →

Tech In Plain Sight: Pneumatic Tubes

November 17, 2025 by Al Williams 44 Comments

Today, if you can find a pneumatic tube system at all, it is likely at a bank drive-through. A conversation in the Hackaday bunker revealed something a bit surprising. Apparently, in some parts of the United States, these have totally disappeared. In other areas, they are not as prevalent as they once were, but are still hanging in there. If you haven’t seen one, the idea is simple: you put things like money or documents into a capsule, put the capsule in a tube, and push a button. Compressed air shoots the capsule to the other end of the tube, where someone can reverse the process to send you something back.

These used to be a common sight in large offices and department stores that needed to send original documents around, and you still see them in some other odd places, like hospitals or pharmacy drive-throughs, where they may move drugs or lab samples, as well as documents. In Munich, for example, a hospital has a system with 200 stations and 1,300 capsules, also known as carriers. Another medical center in Rotterdam moves 400 carriers an hour through a 16-kilometer network of tubes. However, most systems are much smaller, but they still work on the same principle.

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If IRobot Falls, Hackers Are Ready To Wrangle Roombas

November 13, 2025 by Tom Nardi 44 Comments

Things are not looking good for iRobot. Although their robotic Roomba vacuums are basically a household name, the company has been faltering financially for some time now. In 2024 there was hope of a buyout by Amazon, who were presumably keen to pull the bots into their Alexa ecosystem, but that has since fallen through. Now, by the company’s own estimates, bankruptcy is a very real possibility by the end of the year.

Hackaday isn’t a financial blog, so we won’t get into how and why iRobot has ended up here, although we can guess that intense competition in the market probably had something to do with it. We’re far more interested in what happens when those millions of domesticated robots start getting an error message when they try to call home to the mothership.

We’ve seen this scenario play out many times before — a startup goes belly up, and all the sudden you can’t upload new songs to some weirdo kid’s media player, or the gadget in your fridge stops telling you how old your eggs are. (No, seriously.) But the scale here is unprecedented. If iRobot collapses, we may be looking at one of the largest and most impactful smart-gadget screw overs of all time.

Luckily, we aren’t quite there yet. There’s still time to weigh options, and critically, perform the kind of research and reverse engineering necessary to make sure the community can keep the world’s Roombas chugging along even if the worst happens.

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Moving From Windows To FreeBSD As The Linux Chaos Alternative

November 11, 2025 by Maya Posch 119 Comments

Back in the innocent days of Windows 98 SE, I nearly switched to Linux on account of how satisfied I was with my Windows experience. This started with the Year of the Linux Desktop in 1999 that started with me purchasing a boxed copy of SuSE Linux and ended with me switching to Windows 2000. After this I continued tinkering with non-Windows OSes including QNX, BeOS, various BSDs, as well as Linux distributions that promised a ‘Windows-like’ desktop experience, such as Lindows.

Now that Windows 2000’s proud legacy has seen itself reduced to a rusting wreck resting on cinderblocks on Microsoft’s dying front lawn, the quiet discomfort that many Windows users have felt since Windows 7 was forcefully End-Of-Life-d has only increased. With it comes the uncomfortable notion that Windows as a viable desktop OS may be nearing its demise. Yet where to from here?

Although the recommendations from the peanut gallery seem to coalesce around Linux or Apple’s MacOS (formerly OS X), there are a few dissenting voices extolling the virtues of FreeBSD over both. There are definitely compelling reasons to pick FreeBSD over Linux, in addition to it being effectively MacOS’s cousin. Best of all is not having to deal with the Chaos Vortex that spawns whenever you dare to utter the question of ‘which Linux distro?’. Within the world of FreeBSD there is just FreeBSD, which makes for a remarkably coherent experience.

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