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This excellent content from the Hackaday writing crew highlights recurring topics and popular series like Linux-Fu, 3D-Printering, Hackaday Links, This Week in Security, Inputs of Interest, Profiles in Science, Retrotechtacular, Ask Hackaday, Teardowns, Reviews, and many more.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 370: Softer Cyberdecks, A Simulated Clutch, And An Overstuffed Mailbox

May 22, 2026 by No comments

With Elliot back from Hackaday Europe, he and Al Williams had a lot to talk about with two weeks of Hackaday posts to catch up on. Not to mention the mailbag was overflowing.

This week, the guys look at girlie cyberdecks, a 3D printed circuit board, and talk electric motorcycles. Is 3D printing safe? Want an accurate moon on your desk? How about modern punch cards? All of that and much more were on the menu this week.

For the can’t miss articles, Zoe Skyforest weighs in on file sharing via LAN while Al Williams talks about the surprising state-of-the-art in vacuum tube tech right before their end.

What do you think? Leave us a comment or record something and send it to our mailbag.

Download a copy of the podcast with an MP3 this week in glorious pink and purple.

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This Week In Security: AI Generated Reports, More AI Generated Reports, GitHub Chaos, And More Linux Vulnerabilities

May 22, 2026 by 4 Comments

Google’s Project Zero demonstrates a new zero-click exploit for the Pixel 10 phones, showing a full escalation from remote to kernel without user interaction. During the investigation Project Zero found unprotected memory access from userspace in the Tensor G5 video processing chip driver, which allows direct write access to kernel memory.

Using previously discovered flaws in media decoding components — in this case CVE-2025-54957 in the Dolby digital audio decoder — Project Zero modified a Pixel 9 attack to work on the Pixel 10, despite newer protections built into the hardware to harden the system against memory corruption.

The author’s takeaway is mixed. Once the bug on Pixel 9 was reported, one could hope that the Android team would look into similar bugs in their newer systems. On the positive side, though, Project Zero reported the vulnerabilities to the Android team in November 2025 and they were patched in February of 2026, 71 days later. That’s 19 days short of the 90-day timeline.

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Tech In Plain Sight: The Mechanics Of String Trimmers

May 21, 2026 by 31 Comments

My old friend Jeff was always vocally upset that he didn’t come up with the idea of a string trimmer, commonly known as a Weed Eater or Weed Whacker. On the one hand, the idea is totally simple: spin some nylon line and cut grass and other relatively soft things. But, it turns out, that making the device actually usable requires a little bit of mechanical engineering.

Of course, the noisy part is a motor. The motor — driven by an engine, a battery, or a power cord — spins a flexible nylon line fast enough that the line becomes rigid from centrifugal force. That’s not the important part.

The humble spool at the bottom of the trimmer is where decades of mechanical engineering, questionable patents, consumer frustration, and genuine cleverness all meet. The earliest string trimmers were primitive. [George Ballas], who patented the Weed Eater in the early 1970s, reportedly got the idea from the rotating brushes in a car wash. Attach flexible cords to a spinning head, and they become cutting tools. In fact, the prototype used a tin can for the head. Elegant. But once the line wears down — which it does constantly — you need a way to expose fresh line. That turns out to be harder than it sounds.

The Simplest System

The easiest approach is fixed-length line. Some trimmers still work this way. You cut short pieces of heavy line (or buy it precut) and insert them into holes in the head. No spool. No springs. No moving parts.

These systems are rugged and are popular on commercial units designed to survive abuse. They also work well with thicker lines or even plastic blades. But they are annoying because every time the line wears out, you stop working and manually replace it. Spool-based systems became dominant very quickly.

The basic spool idea is straightforward enough. Wind a long nylon filament onto a reel. Some reels have two sections to feed line out on two sides of the rotating head. As the line wears away, feed out more line from the spool. But how do you do that while the thing is spinning at several thousand RPM?

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Spy Tech: A Quiet Radio For Spies

May 20, 2026 by 9 Comments

Normally, when you think of a radio transmitter, you want the strongest signal and range. But if your radio operator is secretly operating as a spy, broadcasting their position isn’t a feature; it is a liability. This fact didn’t escape World War II radio designers.

In late 1942, the British realized they needed a way for Special Operation Executive agents, resistance members, and other friendly forces to communicate with an aircraft without attracting undue attention. Two engineers from the Royal Corps of Signals developed a pair of transceivers — the S-Phone — operating around 380 MHz just for this purpose. Frequencies this high were unusual at the time, which further deterred enemy detection.

The output power was below 200 mW, and the ground equipment consisted of a dipole strapped to the operator. No transistors, so with rechargable batteries, the rig weighed about fifteen pounds and reused some parts of a paratrooper radio, Wireless Set Number 37. The other side of the connection was installed in an airplane.

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How Pulse Oximetry Figures Out Your Blood Oxygen Levels

May 19, 2026 by 13 Comments

If you’ve ever had a medical team investigating cardiac issues, you’ve probably had a bunch of electrodes stuck all over your chest and been hooked up to an electrocardiogram. This is the gold standard when it comes to understanding electrical activity in the heart and can diagnose a great many conditions. However, sometimes doctors just need the basic information—your pulse rate, and whether or not there’s actually any oxygen in your blood.

Thankfully, there’s a cheap and simple device that can offer that exact information. It’s the pulse oximeter, and it’s a key piece of equipment that’s just about vital for monitoring vitals. Let’s learn how it works!

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How To Make Steel That Breathes

May 18, 2026 by 15 Comments

There are plenty of porous materials out there that we’re all readily familiar with. Fabrics and wood are great examples, allowing liquids or gases to pass through to a certain degree—a property which is useful or problematic depending on the application.

Metals, however, are not something we would readily consider to be porous. They are solid, unyielding, and impermeable. However, with the right techniques, it is possible to produce so-called “breathable” steel, which has particularly interesting applications in the molding industry.

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This Week In Security: Android Exposes ADB, ShinyHunters Get Paid, Robot Dogs, And More

May 18, 2026 by 26 Comments

Google has patched an Android ADB bug in the May security patch set. If you have a Pixel phone you should already have the patches, and most other major manufacturers should be close behind. Unfortunately, the biggest risk from this patch will be to the vendors who are also the least likely to release timely – or any – security updates.

ADB, the Android Debug Bridge, is the main tool for installing apps during development and debugging apps while they’re running. It can also be used to side-load apps from a PC. While most normal users are unlikely to ever enable it, developers typically do and some power users might when jailbreaking a device or setting parameters not exposed in the Android UI. Debugging can be done locally via USB, or optionally over the network. To protect the device, the user must unlock the Android device and authorize each new debug agent.

Covered by Risky.Biz, a bug introduced in 2020, and present in every Android release since, allowed bypassing authorization entirely if network debugging was enabled and at least one connection had been made to the ADB service in the past. This happens because ADB compares the certificate of the incoming debug connection with the list of saved certificates. If the certificate type does not match — for instance supplying an Ed25519 certificate instead of a RSA certificate — ADB has been incorrectly handling the error code, and allowing the connection.

In most programming languages, false is considered zero, and true is considered anything not zero. The certificate API returns a 1 for a valid match, a zero for an invalid match, and a negative-one for a type mismatch. Negative one is not zero, so when treated as a boolean value, it becomes true.

To exploit the bug, ADB must be enabled in wireless mode, and there must be at least one trusted device in the ADB configuration. For the average user this is an unlikely combination, but for developers, the time to update is now.

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