Ask Hackaday: What Puts This Photo In The Pink?

November 2, 2026 by Jenny List 15 Comments

It’s an exciting time to be a camera hacker, because we are at a moment when even cheap camera hardware is starting to have high resolution sensors, and the awesome camera phones of a few years ago are now in people’s junkboxes. Lens swapping has been a feature of the art for a while now, usually taking the form of a C-mount add-on. So with a bit of 3D printing and glue, you can now make something more interesting from an AliExpress purchase or that old phone. These cameras have all the resolution and sharpness that the sensor can deliver assuming that their software isn’t too awful, but there’s a persistent problem . The photographs invariably have a pinkish tint, as reported in a recent Hackaday-featured project, just to name one. The original lens doesn’t have this problem, so what’s up?

A mobile phone with a C-mount lens attached to its back, propped up on a laptop keyboard with the screen towards us. The screen shows a blurry view of the laptop. — Without the pink stuff, it’s not a bad camera, really.

Of course, the more astute readers are immediately thinking about IR filters. I did too, when one of my on-and-off projects had the pink tint. It’s a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, an ancient Android 5 phone with a rather useless and gimmicky stylus, and a rather nice camera sensor. I bought a replacement camera module for it on AliExpress so I’d have something to experiment with, removed its lens assembly, and had a phone with a bare sensor peeking from the back of it. A 3D printed adjustable lens mount assembly that I’ll eventually clean up and release so any phone can have the same modification followed.

Faced with the dreaded pink when I started taking pictures, I ineptly glued an IR filter to the back of it, and awaited my perfect shots. Sadly they never came, so rather than admit defeat, I’m hoping one of you lot can help. Are any Hackaday readers in the optics business and can tell me what’s up? Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: What Puts This Photo In The Pink?” →

Hackaday Links: November 1, 2026

November 1, 2026 by Tom Nardi No comments

We’re less than a week away from the 2026 Hackaday Supercon, and things are getting a little… intense. So we trust you’ll forgive us if this week’s post weighs in a bit less than usual and reaches you a little later in the day. Especially since we’ll start it off with the official schedule for this year’s festivities.

Earlier this week we announced the more than 30 speakers who will be gracing the stage at this year’s Supercon, and before that we told you about the dozen deep dive workshops designed for attendees who want to get their hands dirty. Now those of us joining you in Pasadena can finally start plotting our course through the weekend to make sure we maximize our hacking journey.

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Bring On Supercon!

October 31, 2026 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

In just under a week from today, almost 700 hackers will be getting together in Pasadena, CA for three days of scheming, soldering, and socializing. If you’re able to join us, you absolutely should – there is no substitute for attending a hacker convention in person.

But even if you can’t make it to Supercon, you’re not shut out. We have an absolutely killer slate of talks, and we’ll be streaming at least one stage’s worth during the event. Watching a good talk isn’t just entertainment, but it can plant new seeds of possibility in your brain, or give you new perspectives on something that you thought you already knew. A super talk can launch a thousand hacks.

It’s a funny part of our culture, that even though we all have the Internet where the printed word and the video reign supreme, many of our best ideas are still transmitted the old fashioned way: one person who has thought deeply about a topic gets up in front of a room and lets loose. Maybe it’s because presentations require so much preparation that they’re so powerful? I don’t know, but I do know that I’ve seen a number of Supercon (and other!) talks that have literally changed the way I see the world. A good presentation sticks with you.

Hackaday strives to be the equivalent of the newspaper of record for everything going on in our scene. If there is a cool hack out there, we want to showcase it so that everyone can draw from it. In just exactly the same vein, we are stoked and honored to be the stage for the next round of great talks. Whether you’re there in the audience live with us, or watching along at home, and whichever of the topics you’re interested in, we hope that the signal gets out to you.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 393: Epaper, Tamagotchi Hacks, And Supercon Talks Galore

October 30, 2026 by Jenny List No comments

This week’s podcast comes from Europe, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, who wishes to apologies for the poor sound quality from her headset microphone. The news this week is our Supercon conference which is upcoming, we’ve released more speaker details.

We start the hacks with a follow-up to an exciting development. We’ve seen e-paper screens driven at high frame rates, but do the techniques used shorten the life of these displays? Then we have Tamagotchi hacking, re-using an old mobile phone as a flight controller, the oldest Windows app to run on Windows 11, and probably the prettiest mini TV studio rack you will ever see. Pushing Bluetooth out to 12 kilometres is the cherry on the cake.

In quick hacks there’s a swash plate-less helicopter, Commodore 64 keycaps, and the history of the mouse, before our can’t-miss look at infra-red transmission, and a forgotten Google VR headset.

Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments, or drop us a line on the mailbag.

Download yourself a little podcast, won’t you?

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 393: Epaper, Tamagotchi Hacks, And Supercon Talks Galore” →

This Week In Security: Broken Embargoes, UEFI Overflow, Wormable Tailscale, Starlink Ad Snooping, And A DHS Directory Dump

October 30, 2026 by Mike Kershaw 6 Comments

Last week brought us at least two broken embargoes: php2shell leaked onto Hacker News a day early, and a batch of Linux kernel bugs landed on the public kernel mailing list instead of the private security list. This week has been slightly less exciting overall, fortunately, but Akamai’s security team published a pointed essay titled “TLP Is Not a Suggestion”, and it’s hard to argue with the timing.

When a researcher finds a serious bug, the usual process is “coordinated disclosure”. The developers get time to build a fix, and downstream vendors get advance notice under embargo so patches and protections are ready the moment details go public. The Traffic Light Protocol (TLP) is the vocabulary everyone uses to say who may know what: TLP:RED for named recipients only, TLP:AMBER for an organization and its clients on a need-to-know basis, TLP:GREEN for a trusted community, and TLP:CLEAR for anyone. It has no legal teeth whatsoever. It’s not classified data in a legal sense. It works because everyone involved agrees to make it work.

Akamai’s complaint isn’t really about the original php2shell leak, but about what came after: vendors and researchers racing to confirm, reproduce, and publish first. According to Akamai, a researcher published a reconstruction of the bug before the patch existed, and exploitation attempts started before most admins knew there was anything to patch. They draw parallels to Heartbleed in 2014, where a handful of companies got early notice and then advertised that they were already safe while Linux distributions were caught flat-footed, and to Meltdown and Spectre in 2018, where a six-month embargo collapsed six days early.

In the rush to publish, it’s also become less clear what the actual severity of the bug is in the real world. It clearly exists, and is of concern, but groups are still struggling to prove a complete exploit path, with several challenges showing results but nothing definitive so far.

Their advice boils down to “protect first, publish second”: push the detection rules and virtual patches, tell your customers privately, and save the blog post for after the official advisory. With AI tooling shrinking the time between “details exist” and “working exploit” to hours, the cost of a broken embargo is going up, not down.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Broken Embargoes, UEFI Overflow, Wormable Tailscale, Starlink Ad Snooping, And A DHS Directory Dump” →

2026 Hackaday Supercon: All The Speakers!

October 29, 2026 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

We announced our first round of speakers, and then the workshops, and we were going to dribble out updates on the rest of the speakers as they came in, but then time slipped away from us. So we are left here announcing a veritable cornucopia of twenty wonderful talks that you absolutely won’t want to miss.

Supercon is just about a week away, and there are still a few tickets left, so grab them now before it’s too late.

And the talks are just half the fun. Between food, merriment, a killer badge with the biggest e-paper display that you’ve ever seen, and all the assorted shenanigans, it’s the highlight of our hacking year. Come join us!

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Hackaday Links: October 25, 2026

October 25, 2026 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

Some disappointing, but perhaps not entirely unsurprising news this week out of Denmark — after announcing last year that they would transition away from Microsoft’s proprietary software, the realities of making it work seem to have caught the government off guard. The word is that a trial program immediately ran into problems when government employees that had been given Collabora tried to collaborate with their peers running Office, and has since been quietly abandoned.

Although there’s probably a joke to be made about different parts of the government not knowing what the other ones are talking about, the reality is that if one group of staffers can’t reliably access the data being produced by another, that’s a pretty big problem. Of course, had they simply asked us nerds, we could have advised them that these sort of issues are inevitable if you don’t fully commit to the effort.

Had the entire government moved to the Open Document Format (ODF) at once they would have avoided the issue, at least when it came to newly created documents, but obviously that’s a considerably larger undertaking than installing Collabora or OpenOffice on a few dozen machines and calling it a day. There’s no word yet on how this stumble will impact Denmark’s larger effort to free themselves of proprietary software, but we’d hazard a guess it’s not a great sign. Hopefully things go better for the Dutch.

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