Featured

2991 Articles

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

Identify That Antenna By Sight

November 1, 2022 by 75 Comments

It’s a skill that radio amateurs pick up over years but which it sometimes comes as a surprise to find that is not shared by everyone, the ability to casually glance at an antenna on a mast or a rooftop and guess what it might be used for. By which of course I mean not some intuitive ability to mentally decode radio signals from thin air, but most of us can look at a given antenna and immediately glean a lot of information about its frequency and performance. Is this privileged knowledge handed down from the Elmers at the secret ceremony of conferring a radio amateur’s licence upon a baby ham? Not at all, in fact stick around, and I’ll share some of the tricks. Continue reading “Identify That Antenna By Sight” →

Moving Big Stuff Without The Tears

October 31, 2022 by 104 Comments

It’s something that has probably happened to more than one of us over the years, there’s an unmissable opportunity at the machinery auction or on eBay, with the small snag that it weighs a ton and requires a flatbed truck to transport. A big lathe, a bandsaw, or the like.

The sensible option would be to hire a crane or a forklift to do the job, but cash is tight so at the appointed hour the truck turns up at the end of your driveway to meet you and as big a group of your friends as you could muster. You’re going to shift this thing with pure muscle power! If you grow up around any form of workshop-based small business it’s something you’ll no doubt be familiar with. Craftsmen seem to have a network for such moments, so just as the blacksmith might find himself helping the woodworker unload a huge saw bench, so might they both spend an unexpected afternoon at the engineering shop manhandling a lathe.

It came as a shock in a casual hackerspace conversation to realise how many times I’d been involved in such maneuvers at home, for friends, or at hackerspaces, and how that experience in doing so safely isn’t necessarily something that’s universal. Maybe it’s time to tell the story of moving big machines on limited resources. This is something that starts by thinking ahead and planning what you’ll need and where you’ll need it. Continue reading “Moving Big Stuff Without The Tears” →

Cursive Out Loud: Dealing With Dragons

October 28, 2022 by 21 Comments

When we last left this broadening subject of handwriting, cursive, and moveable type, I was threatening to sing the praises of speech-to-text programs. To me, these seem like the summit of getting thoughts committed to what passes for paper these days.

A common thread in humanity’s tapestry is that we all walk around with so much going on in our heads, and no real chance to get it out stream-of-consciousness style without missing a word — until we start talking to each other. I don’t care what your English teacher told you — talking turns to writing quite easily; all it takes is a willingness to follow enough of the rules, and to record it all in a readable fashion.

But, alas! That suggests that linear thinking is not only possible, but that it’s easy and everyone else is already doing it. While that’s (usually) not true, simply thinking out loud can get you pretty far down the road in a lot of mental vehicles. You just have to record it all somehow. And if your end goal is to have the words typed out, why not skip the the voice recorder and go the speech-to-text route?

Continue reading “Cursive Out Loud: Dealing With Dragons” →

M.2 For Hackers – Expand Your Laptop

October 27, 2022 by 55 Comments

You’ve seen M.2 cards in modern laptops already. If you’re buying an SSD today, it’s most likely an M.2 one. Many of our laptops contain M.2 WiFi cards, the consumer-oriented WWAN cards now come in M.2, and every now and then we see M.2 cards that defy our expectations. Nowadays, using M.2 is one of the most viable ways for adding new features to your laptop. I have found that the M.2 standard is quite accessible and also very hackable, and I would like to demonstrate that to you.

If you ever searched the Web trying to understand what makes M.2 tick, you might’ve found one of the many confusing articles which just transcribe stuff out of the M.2 specification PDF, and make things look more complicated than they actually are. Let’s instead look at M.2 real-world use. Today, I’ll show you the M.2 devices you will encounter in the wild, and teach you what you need to know to make use of them. In part 2, I will show you how to build your own M.2 cards and card-accepting devices, too!

Well Thought-Out, Mostly

You can genuinely appreciate the M.2 standard once you start looking into it, especially if you have worked with mPCIe devices for some amount of time. mPCIe is what we’ve been using for all these years, and it gradually became a mish-mash of hardly-compatible pinouts. As manufacturers thought up all kinds of devices they could embed, you’d find hacks like mSATA and WWAN coexistence extensions, and the lack of standardization is noticeable in things like mPCIe WWAN modems as soon as you need something like UART or PCM. The M.2 specification, thankfully, accounted for all of these lessons.

Continue reading “M.2 For Hackers – Expand Your Laptop” →

Robots Are Folding Laundry, But They Suck At It

October 26, 2022 by 36 Comments

Robots are used in all sorts of industries on a wide variety of tasks. Typically, it’s because they’re far faster, more accurate, and more capable than we are. Expert humans could not compete with the consistent, speedy output of a robotic welder on an automotive production line, nor could they as delicately coat the chocolate on the back of a KitKat.

However, there are some tasks in which humans still have the edge. Those include driving, witty repartee, and yes, folding laundry. That’s not to say the robots aren’t trying, though, so let’s take a look at the state of the art.

Continue reading “Robots Are Folding Laundry, But They Suck At It” →

Mastercard’s New Card: Safer From Quantum Attacks?

October 25, 2022 by 28 Comments

Quantum computers present a unique threat to many aspects of modern information technology. In particular, many cryptographic systems could be at risk of compromise in the event a malicious actor came into possession of a capable quantum computer.

Mastercard is intending to stay ahead of the game in this regard. It has launched a new contactless credit card that it says is impervious to certain types of quantum attack.

Continue reading “Mastercard’s New Card: Safer From Quantum Attacks?” →

Dancers Now Help Power Glasgow Nightclub

October 24, 2022 by 60 Comments

Humanity thus far has supplied most of its electricity needs by burning stuff, mostly very old stuff that burns great but is hard to replace. That stuff is getting increasingly expensive, and the pollution is a bother too, so renewable sources of energy are becoming more popular.

While wind or solar power are commonly used at the grid level, one Glasgow nightclub has taken a different tack. It’s capturing energy from its patrons to help keep the lights on.

Continue reading “Dancers Now Help Power Glasgow Nightclub” →