Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Cheap-O Keyboard

January 12, 2026 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

All right, I’ll cut to the chase: Cheap03xD is mainly so cheap because the PCB falls within a 10 x 10 cm footprint. The point was to make a very affordable keyboard — all the parts come to ~40 Euro (~$47). So it would seem that [Lander03xD_] succeeded.

A 36-key, no-frills split keyboard whose PCBs fit in a 10 x 10 cm footprint. — Image by [Lander03xD_] via reddit

Cheap03xD is all the things — 36-key, split, column-staggered, wireless, hot-swappable, and uses ZMK. The batteries are easily replaceable, and no they don’t get in the way.

Those are MMD Princess silent switches, which I wouldn’t choose, but [Lander03xD_] is taking this board to the office, so I get it. They sure are a nice shade of pink, anyway, and they go really well with the pastels of the DSA keycaps and the bezel.

One cool thing to note is that the PCBs are reversible, like the ErgoDox. This isn’t [Lander03xD_]’s first board, and it won’t be the last.

Now, let’s talk batteries. [Saixos] pointed out that the design doesn’t appear to include a protection circuit. In case you can’t tell from where you’re sitting, those are nice!nano clones that [Lander03xD_] is using, and they expect a protection circuit.

[Lander03xD_] is going to look through the docs and see what’s what. The goal is not to have any daughter boards, so this may take some rethinking.

Via reddit

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A Linux Power User Puts SteamOS To Work

January 12, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 39 Comments

The line between a Linux user and a Linux power user is a bit gray, and a bit wide. Most people who install Linux already have more computer literacy than average, and the platform has long encouraged experimentation and construction in a way macOS and Windows generally aren’t designed for. Traditional Linux distributions often ask more of their users as well, requiring at least a passing familiarity with the terminal and the operating system’s internals especially once something inevitably breaks.

In recent years, however, a different design philosophy has been gaining ground. Immutable Linux distributions like Fedora Silverblue, openSUSE MicroOS, and NixOS dramatically reduce the chances an installation behaves erratically by making direct changes to the underlying system either impossible or irrelevant.

SteamOS fits squarely into this category as well. While it’s best known for its console-like gaming mode it also includes a fully featured Linux desktop, which is a major part of its appeal and the reason I bought a Steam Deck in the first place. For someone coming from Windows or macOS, this desktop provides a familiar, fully functional environment: web browsing, media playback, and other basic tools all work out of the box.

As a Linux power user encountering an immutable desktop for the first time, though, that desktop mode wasn’t quite what I expected. It handles these everyday tasks exceptionally well, but performing the home sysadmin chores that are second nature to me on a Debian system takes a very different mindset and a bit of effort. Continue reading “A Linux Power User Puts SteamOS To Work” →

For The Fun Of It

January 10, 2026 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

I was off at the Chaos Communication Congress last weekend, and one of the big attractions for one who is nerdily inclined is seeing all of the personal projects that everyone brings along with them. Inevitably, someone would ask me what my favorite is. Maybe it’s my decision paralysis, maybe it’s being forced to pick a favorite child on the spot, or maybe it’s just that I’m not walking around ranking them, but that question always left me drawing a blank.

But after a week of thinking about it, I’m pretty sure I know why: I don’t actually care what I think of other peoples’ projects! I’m simply stoked to talk to everyone who brought anything, and bathe in the success and failure, hearing about the challenges that they saw coming, and then the new challenges they met along the way. I want to know what the hacker thinks of their project, what their intention was, and how their story went. I’m just a spectator, so I collected stories.

The overwhelming, entirely non-surprising result of listening to a couple hundred hackers talk about their projects? They’re all doing it for the fun of it. Simply for the grins. And that held equally well for the supremely planned-out and technical projects as well as their simpler I-bought-these-surplus-on-eBay-one-night relatives. “We were sitting around and thought, wouldn’t it be fun…” was the start of nearly every story.

That’s what I absolutely love about our community: that people are hacking because it makes them happy, and that the amazing variety of projects suggests an endless possibility for hacker happiness. It’s hard to come away from an event like that without being energized. Some of that comes from the sharing of ideas and brainstorming and hanging out with like-minded folks, but what I find most important is simply the celebration of the joy of the project for its own sake.

Happy hacking!

Fighting Food Poisoning With A Patch

January 9, 2026 by Lewin Day 29 Comments

Food poisoning is never a fun experience. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll bite into something bad and realize soon enough to spit it out. Other times, you’ll only realize your mistake much later. Once the tainted food gets far enough into the digestive system, it’s too late. Your only option is to strap in for the ride as the body voids the toxins or pathogens by every means available, perhaps for several consecutive days.

Proper food storage and preparation are the key ways we avoid food poisoning today. However, a new development could give us a further tool in the fight—with scientists finding a way to actively hunt down and destroy angry little pathogens before they can spoil a good meal.

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NPAPI And The Hot-Pluggable World Wide Web

January 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

In today’s Chromed-up world it can be hard to remember an era where browsers could be extended with not just extensions, but also with plugins. Although for those of us who use traditional Netscape-based browsers like Pale Moon the use of plugins has never gone away, for the rest of the WWW’s users their choice has been limited to increasingly more restrictive browser extensions, with Google’s Manifest V3 taking the cake.

Although most browsers stopped supporting plugins due to “security concerns”, this did nothing to address the need for executing code in the browser faster than the sedate snail’s pace possible with JavaScript, or the convenience of not having to port native code to JavaScript in the first place. This led to various approaches that ultimately have culminated in the WebAssembly (WASM) standard, which comes with its own set of issues and security criticisms.

Other than Netscape’s Plugin API (NPAPI) being great for making even 1990s browsers ready for 2026, there are also very practical reasons why WASM and JavaScript-based approaches simply cannot do certain basic things.

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The Time Clock Has Stood The Test Of Time

January 8, 2026 by Kristina Panos 32 Comments

No matter the item on my list of childhood occupational dreams, one constant ran throughout: I saw myself using an old-fashioned punch clock with the longish time cards and everything. I now realize that I have some trouble with the daily transitions of life. In my childish wisdom, I somehow knew that doing this one thing would be enough to signify the beginning and end of work for the day, effectively putting me in the mood, and then pulling me back out of it.

But that day never came. Well, it sort of did this year. I realized a slightly newer dream of working at a thrift store, and they use something that I feel like I see everywhere now that I’ve left the place — a system called UKG that uses mag-stripe cards to handle punches. No it was not the same as a real punch clock, not that I have experience with a one. And now I just want to use one even more, to track my Hackaday work and other projects. At the moment, I’m torn between wanting to make one that uses mag-stripe cards or something, and just buying an old punch clock from eBay.

I keep calling it a ‘punch clock’, but it has a proper name, and that is the Bundy clock. I soon began to wonder how these things could both keep exact time mechanically, but also create a literal inked stamp of said time and date. I pictured a giant date stamper, not giant in all proportions, but generally larger than your average handheld one because of all the mechanisms that surely must be inside the Bundy clock. So, how do these things work? Let’s find out.

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How Do PAL And NTSC Really Work?

January 7, 2026 by Jenny List 38 Comments

Many projects on these pages do clever things with video. Whether it’s digital or analogue, it’s certain our community can push a humble microcontroller to the limit of its capability. But sometimes the terminology is a little casually applied, and in particular with video there’s an obvious example. We say “PAL”, or “NTSC” to refer to any composite video signal, and perhaps it’s time to delve beyond that into the colour systems those letters convey.

Know Your Sub-carriers From Your Sync Pulses

A close-up on a single line of composite video from a Raspberry Pi.

A video system of the type we’re used to is dot-sequential. It splits an image into pixels and transmits them sequentially, pixel by pixel and line by line. This is the same for an analogue video system as it is for many digital bitmap formats. In the case of a fully analogue TV system there is no individual pixel counting, instead the camera scans across each line in a continuous movement to generate an analogue waveform representing the intensity of light. If you add in a synchronisation pulse at the end of each line and another at the end of each frame you have a video signal.

But crucially it’s not a composite video signal, because it contains only luminance information. It’s a black-and-white image. The first broadcast TV systems as for example the British 405 line and American 525 line systems worked in exactly this way, with the addition of a separate carrier for their accompanying sound. Continue reading “How Do PAL And NTSC Really Work?” →