Deep Space DX Hack Chat

March 3, 2025 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, March 5 at noon Pacific for the Deep Space DX Hack Chat with David Prutchi!

In the past 70-odd years, the world’s space-faring nations have flung a considerable amount of hardware out into the Void. Most of it has fallen back into Earth’s gravity well, and a lot of what remains is long past its best-by date, systems silenced by time and the harsh conditions that rendered these jewels of engineering into little more than space flotsam.

Luckily, though, there are still a few spacecraft plying the lonely spaces between the planets and even beyond that still have active radios, and while their signals may be faint, we can still hear them. True, many of them are reachable only using immense dish antennas.

Not every deep-space probe needs the resources of a nation-state to be snooped on, though. David Prutchi has been listening to them for years using a relatively modest backyard antenna farm and a lot of hard-won experience. He’s been able to bag some serious DX, everything from rovers on Mars to probes orbiting Jupiter. If you’ve ever wanted to give deep space DX a try, here’s your chance to get off on the right foot.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 5 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

FOSDEM 2025, A Hardware Hacker’s Haven

March 3, 2025 by Arya Voronova 5 Comments

Have you been to FOSDEM? It’s a yearly two-day megaconference in Brussels, every first weekend of February. Thousands of software and hardware hackers from all across Europe come here each year, make friends, talk software and hardware alike, hold project-specific meetups to drink beer and talk shop, and just have a fun weekend surrounded by like-minded people.

In particular, FOSDEM has free admission – drop by for the weekend, no need to buy entry tickets, just sort out your accomodation, food, travel, and visit for a day or two. I’ve covered FOSDEM quite extensively in 2023, so if you want to know more about how it works, I invite you to check out that article – plenty of stories, cool facts about FOSDEM, showcases, and so on. This year, I’ve also been to FOSDEM, it’s been pretty great, and I’d like to tell you about cool things I’ve seen happen during FOSDEM 2025.

FOSDEM is often described as an open software conference, and you might’ve had been fooled by this if you simply have checked the Wikipedia page. However, let me assure you – there’s always plenty of hardware, large amounts of it! This year, I feel like hardware has taken the spotlight in particular – let me show you at least some of it, so that you know what kinds of cool stuff you can expect and plan for in 2026.

Continue reading “FOSDEM 2025, A Hardware Hacker’s Haven” →

Hackaday Links: March 2, 2025

March 2, 2025 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

It’s been quite a week for asteroid 2024 YR4, which looked like it was going to live up to its “city killer” moniker only to be demoted to a fraction of a percent risk of hitting us when it swings by our neighborhood in 2032. After being discovered at the end of 2024, the 55-meter space rock first popped up on the (figurative) radar a few weeks back as a potential risk to our home planet, with estimates of a direct strike steadily increasing as more data was gathered by professional and amateur astronomers alike. The James Webb Space Telescope even got in on the action, with four precious hours of “director’s discretionary” observation time dedicated to characterizing the size and shape of the asteroid before it gets too far from Earth. The result of all this stargazing is that 2024 YR4 is now at a Level 1 on the Torino Scale of NEO collision risk, with a likely downgrade to 0 by the time the asteroid next swings through again in 2028. So, if like us you were into the whole “Fiery Space Rock 2032” thing, you’ll just have to find something else to look forward to.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: March 2, 2025” →

Tech In Plain Sight: Shopping Cart Locks

February 28, 2025 by Al Williams 48 Comments

Shopping carts are surprisingly expensive. Prices range up to about $300 for a cart, which may seem like a lot, but they have to be pretty rugged and are made to work for decades. Plastic carts are cheaper, but not by much.

And carts have a way of vanishing. We’ve seen estimates that cart theft costs hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide annually. To stem the tide, stores sometimes pay a reward to people to round up carts off the street and return them to the store — it’s cheaper than buying a new one. That led [Elmer Isaacks] to patent a solution to this problem in 1968.

The [Isaacks] system used lots of magnets. A cart leaving the store had a brake that would be armed by running over a magnet. Customers were expected to follow a path surrounded by magnets to prevent the brake from engaging. If you left the track, a rod passing through the wheel locked it.

A third magnet would disarm the brake when you entered the store again. This is clever, but it has several problems. First, you have to insert magnets all over the place. Second, if someone knows how the system works, a simple magnet will hold the brake off no matter what. Continue reading “Tech In Plain Sight: Shopping Cart Locks” →

This Week In Security: Malicious Themes, Crypto Heists, And Wallbleed

February 28, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 13 Comments

It’s usually not a good sign when your downloaded theme contains obfuscated code. Yes, we’re talking about the very popular Material Theme for VSCode. This one has a bit of a convoluted history. One of the authors wanted to make some money from all those downloads. The original Material Theme was yanked from the VSCode store, the source code (improperly) re-licensed as closed source, and replaced with freemium versions. And this week, those freemium versions have been pulled by Microsoft for containing malware.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Malicious Themes, Crypto Heists, And Wallbleed” →

Linux Fu: USB Everywhere

February 27, 2025 by Al Williams 21 Comments

It is a common problem: I have a USB device on a computer out in the shop, and I want to use it from the comfort of my office. What to do? Well, you could remote desktop into the distant machine. But, honestly, I always find any remote desktop more than ssh clunky and somewhat undesirable. Fortunately, Linux can do virtually anything if you only know how to do it. So, this time, I’ll show you how to transport a USB device over your network. Of course, I have a network that reaches out to the shop. It should be a simple matter to tell my desktop machine that one of its USB devices lives across the network. Well, it wasn’t that simple, but it is doable.

The Tools

The whole thing involves a program called usbip. That should be the end of it, but of course, it isn’t. In order for this to work, both machines on the network will need some kernel modules and a daemon on the server: the machine with the USB devices to share.

You may be able to install usbip from your package manager. On Ubuntu, it is in the linux-tools-common package, so a simple apt-get might give you everything you need. I wasn’t so lucky. Continue reading “Linux Fu: USB Everywhere” →

What Game Should Replace Doom As The Meme Port Of Choice?

February 27, 2025 by Lewin Day 113 Comments

DOOM. The first-person shooter was an instant hit upon its mrelease at the end of 1993. It was soon ported off the PC platform to a number of consoles with varying success. Fast forward a few years, and it became a meme. People were porting Doom to everything from thermostats to car stereos and even inside Microsoft Word itself.

The problem is that porting Doom has kind of jumped the shark at this point. Just about every modern microcontroller or piece of consumer electronics these days has enough grunt to run a simple faux-3D game engine from 1993. It’s been done very much to death at this point. The time has come for a new meme port!

Good Game

Doom became a popular meme port for multiple reasons. For one, it’s just complex and resource-intensive enough to present a challenge, without being so demanding as to make ports impractical or impossible. It’s also been open-source for decades, and the engine has been hacked to death. It’s probably one of the best understood game engines out there at this point. On top of that, everybody plays Doom at some point, and it was one of the biggest games of the 90s. Put all that together, and you’ve got the perfect meme port.

However, you can always have too much of a good thing. Just as The Simpsons got old after season 10 and Wonderwall is the worst song you could play at a party, Doom ports have been overdone. But what other options are there? Continue reading “What Game Should Replace Doom As The Meme Port Of Choice?” →