Secret Ingredients

January 31, 2026 by Elliot Williams 16 Comments

We were talking on the podcast about rope. But not just any rope – especially non-stretchy rope for using in a mechanical context. The hack in question was a bicycle wheel that swapped out normal metal spokes for lighter and stronger high-density polypropylene weave, and if you can tension up a bike wheel and ride it around, you know it’s not your garden-variety twine.

Now, it just so happens that I’ve got basically the same stuff in my parts drawer: some 1 mm diamaeter Dyneema-brand rope. This is an amazing material. It’s rated to a breaking strength of 195 kg (430 lbs) yet it weighs just under one gram per meter, and if you buy the pre-stretched variant, it’s guaranteed to stretch less than 1% of its length under load. It’s flexible, wears well, and is basically in every way superior to braided steel wire.

It’s nearly magical, and it’s just what you need if you’re making a cable robot or anything where the extreme strength and non-elongation characteristic are important. It’s one of those things that there’s just no substitute for when you need it, and that’s why I have some in my secret-ingredients drawer. What else is in there? Some high-temperature tape, low-temperature solder, and ultra-light-weight M3 PEEK screws for airplane building.

But our conversation got me thinking about the parts, materials, and products that are unique: for which there is just no reasonable substitute. I’m sure the list gets longer the more interesting projects or disciplines that you’re into. What are your secret ingredients, and what’s the specific niche that they fit into?

Hackaday Podcast Episode 355: Person Detectors, Walkie Talkies, Open Smartphones, And A WiFi Traffic Light

January 30, 2026 by Jenny List No comments

Another chilly evening in Western Europe, as Elliot Williams is joined this week by Jenny List to chew the fat over the week’s hacks.

It’s been an auspicious week for anniversaries, with the hundredth since the first demonstration of a working television system in a room above a London coffee shop. John Logie Baird’s mechanically-scanned TV may have ultimately been a dead-end superseded by the all-electronic systems we all know, but the importance of television for the later half of the 20th century and further is beyond question.

The standout hacks of the week include a very clever use of the ESP32’s WiFi API to detect people moving through a WiFi field, a promising open-source smartphone, another ESP32 project in a comms system for cyclists, more cycling on tensegrity spokes, a clever way to smooth plaster casts, and a light sculpture reflecting Wi-Fi traffic. Then there are a slew of hacks including 3D printed PCBs and gem-cut dichroic prisms, before we move to the can’t-miss articles. There we’re looking at document preservation, and a wallow in internet history with a look at the Netscape brand.

As usual all the links you need can be found below, so listen, and enjoy!

Or download the podcast old-school, with a direct link to the MP3 file in question.

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Did We Overestimate The Potential Harm From Microplastics?

January 29, 2026 by Maya Posch 48 Comments

Over the past years there have appeared in the media increasingly more alarming reports about micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) and the harm that they are causing not only in the environment, but also inside our bodies. If some of the published studies were to be believed, then MNPs are everywhere inside our bodies, from our blood and reproductive organs to having deeply embedded themselves inside our brains with potentially catastrophic health implications.

Early last year we covered what we thought we knew about the harm from MNPs in our bodies, but since then more and more scientists have pushed back against these studies, calling them ‘flawed’ and questioning the used methodology and conclusions. Despite claims of health damage in mice, institutions like the German federal risk assessment institute also do not acknowledge evidence of harm to human health from MNPs.

All of which raises the question whether flawed studies have pushed us into our own Chicken Little moment, and whether it’s now time to breathe a sigh of relief that the sky isn’t falling after all.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 862: Have Your CAKE And Eat It Too

January 28, 2026 by Jonathan Bennett 1 Comment

This week Jonathan chats with Toke Hoiland-Jorgensen about CAKE_MQ, the newest Kernel innovation to combat Bufferbloat! What was the realization that made CAKE parallelization? When can we expect it in the wild? And what’s new in the rest of the kernel world? Watch to find out!

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The Fancy Payment Cards Of Taiwan

January 28, 2026 by Lewin Day 22 Comments

If you’re an old-schooler, you might still go to the local bar and pay for a beer with cash. You could even try and pay with a cheque, though the pen-and-paper method has mostly fallen out of favor these days. But if you’re a little more modern, you might use a tap-to-pay feature on a credit or debit card.

In Taiwan, though, there’s another unique way to pay. The island nation has a whole ecosystem of bespoke payment cards, and you can even get one that looks like a floppy disk!

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Regrowing Teeth Might Not Be Science Fiction Anymore

January 27, 2026 by Lewin Day 32 Comments

The human body is remarkably good at handling repairs. Cut the skin, and the blood will clot over the wound and the healing process begins. Break a bone, and the body will knit it back together as long as you keep it still enough. But teeth? Our adult teeth get damaged all the time, and yet the body has almost no way to repair them at all. Get a bad enough cavity or knock one out, and it’s game over. There’s nothing to be done but replace it.

Finding a way to repair teeth without invasive procedures has long been a holy grail for dental science. A new treatment being developed in Japan could help replace missing teeth in the near future.

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Split With The Num Pad

January 26, 2026 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

I love, love, love Saturn by [Rain2], which comes in two versions. The first, which is notably more complex, is shown here with its rings-of-Saturn thumb clusters.

A brightly-colored split with a built-in num pad on the right half. — Image by [Rain2] via reddit

So what was the impetus for this keyboard? It’s simple: a friend mentioned that ergo keyboards are a no-go if you need a num pad really bad.

Saturn has one built right in. The basic idea was to add a num pad while keeping the total number of keys to a minimum. Thanks to a mod key, this area can be many things, including but not limited to a num pad.

As far as the far-out shape goes, and I love that the curvature covers the thumb cluster and the index finger, [Rain2] wanted to get away from the traditional thumb cluster design. Be sure to check out the back of the boards in the image gallery.

Unfortunately, this version is too complicated to make, so v2 does not have the cool collision shapes going for it. But it is still an excellent keyboard, and perhaps will be open source someday.

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