Supercon 2022: Nick Poole Makes A Jolly Wrencher Tube

May 23, 2023 by Chris Lott 5 Comments

[Nick Poole] shared his circuitous journey into the obscure world of homemade vacuum tubes on the Supercon 2022 stage. It began innocently enough when he saw [Usagi Electric]’s single bit computer vacuum tube computer, which uses dozens of vacuum tubes. He got to wondering, could you make vacuum-tube-like devices containing multiple elements? There are some examples, like the 256-bit memory Selectron tube from the 1950’s, but nothing general purpose like a 555 timer or quad NAND gate packages. Unencumbered by a deep understanding of how vacuum tubes work, [Nick] proceeds to fill this void by imagining Integrated Thermionic, a fictitious company that exists in an alternate history where transistors were not invented and the vacuum tube reigns supreme. He also showcases a variety of innovative products that Integrated Thermionics manufactured over the decades, including surface mount tubes.

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Dear Ubuntu…

May 22, 2023 by Jenny List 279 Comments

Dear Ubuntu,

I hope this letter finds you well. I want to start by saying that our time together has been one of creativity and entertainment, a time in which you gave me the tools to develop a new career, to run a small electronics business, make fun things, and to write several thousand articles for Hackaday and other publications, but for all that it’s sadly time for our ways to part. The magic that once brought us together has faded, and what remains is in danger of becoming a frustration.

In our early days as an item you gave me for the first time a Linux distro that was complete, fast, and easy to use without spending too much time at the CLI or editing config files to make things happen; you gave me a desktop that was smooth and uncluttered, and you freed me from all those little utilities that were required to make Windows usable. You replaced the other distros I’d been using, you dual-booted with my Windows machines, and pretty soon you supplanted the Microsoft operating system entirely.

Ubuntu and me and a trusty Dell laptop, Oxford Hackspace, 2017. — Me and Ubuntu in 2017, good times.

We’ve been together for close to two decades now, and in that time we’ve looked each other in the eye across a variety of desktop and laptop computers. My trusty Dell Inspiron 640 ran you for over a decade through several RAM, HDD, and SSD upgrades, and provided Hackaday readers with the first few years of my writing. Even the Unity desktop couldn’t break our relationship, those Linux Mint people weren’t going to tear us asunder! You captured my text, edited my videos and images, created my PCBs and CAD projects, and did countless more computing tasks. Together we made a lot of people happy, and for that I will always be grateful. Continue reading “Dear Ubuntu…” →

Design For 3D Printing Hack Chat

May 22, 2023 by Dan Maloney No comments

Join us on Wednesday, May 24 at noon Pacific for the Design for 3D Printing Hack Chat with Eric Utley!

Like a lot of enabling technologies, 3D printing has had a strange trajectory. It started out as a laboratory oddity, moved on to industrial applications, and finally filtered down to the DIY set, first as scratch-built machines and later as inexpensive commodity printers that can be found almost anywhere. Pretty much everyone who needs a 3D printer now has one.

Not all additive manufacturing technologies are created equal, though, and there are plenty of applications for 3D printed parts where FDM just won’t cut it. Luckily, any of us can get access to the latest and greatest manufacturing technologies through job houses that specialize in everything from metal 3D printing to sheet metal fabrication, CNC machining, and even small-run injection molding. We may not be able to afford any of the machines, but in a lot of cases we can afford to rent time of them and get high-quality parts quickly.

But that raises another question: Is my design ready for printing? What works on an Ender on your shop bench might not quite translate to the latest SLS printer, and sending off an iffy design could just end up wasting time and money. Whether you’re sending your designs out and running them up on your own printer, you want to know what you’re doing will work. That’s why we’ve asked Eric Utley, an applications engineer with Protolabs, to stop by the Hack Chat. With 12 years of additive manufacturing experience, he’ll be able to help you tune up your designs and make sure they’re ready to print.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, May 24 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Hackaday Links: May 21, 2023

May 21, 2023 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

The reports of the death of automotive AM radio may have been greatly exaggerated. Regular readers will recall us harping on the issue of automakers planning to exclude AM from the infotainment systems in their latest offerings, which doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense given the reach of AM radio and its importance in public emergencies. US lawmakers apparently agree with that position, having now introduced a bipartisan bill to require AM radios in cars. The “AM for Every Vehicle Act” will direct the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to draw up regulations requiring every vehicle operating on US highways to be able to receive AM broadcasts without additional fees or subscriptions. That last bit is clever, since it prevents automakers from charging monthly fees as they do for heated seats and other niceties. It’s just a bill now, of course, and stands about as much chance of becoming law as anything else that makes sense does, so we’re not holding our breath on this one. But at least someone recognizes that AM radio still has a valid use case.

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How Far Can An EULA Go?

May 20, 2023 by Elliot Williams 70 Comments

We read this news with mixed glee and horror: a company called Telly is giving TVs away, for the low price of having to live with an always-on advertisement bar and some pretty stringent terms and conditions. Break the terms, and they’ll repossess your TV. If you don’t give them the TV, they have your credit card on record and they think the set is worth $1,000.

The hacker in me sees free hardware, so I checked out the terms and conditions, and it doesn’t look good. They’ve explicitly ruled out opening up or physically modifying the device, and it has to continually have WiFi – for which you pay, naturally. It sounds like it could easily tell if you try to tamper with it. My next thought was, perhaps too cynically, to get one, put it in the closet, and wait for the company to go bankrupt. Because you know that business model isn’t going to last.

But it’s clear that they’ve seen through me. The most bizarre clause is that you have to “Use the Product as the primary television in Your household”. Now, we’re not lawyers, but it seems like an amazing stretch that they can tell you how intensively you are to use the product. Can you imagine a license with a keyboard that demanded that you only use it to write sci-fi novels, or that you have to use it more than any other keyboard?

Nope. Too many hoops to jump through for a silly free TV. You can keep your dystopian future.

Hackaday Podcast 219: Lots Of Lasers, Heaps Of Ham Radio, And Breaching The Blood Brain Barrier

May 19, 2023 by Dan Maloney No comments

Elliot and Dan teamed up for the podcast this week, bringing you the week’s sweetest hacks. And news too, as the ESA performed a little percussive maintenance on a Jupiter-bound space probe, and we learned about how to get an Orwellian free TV that exacts quite a price. We talked about Bitcoin mining two ways, including a way to put all that waste heat to good use — just don’t expect it to make good financial sense. Why would you stuff zip ties into a hot glue gun? It might just help with plastic repair. Lugging a tube transmitter up a mountain doesn’t sound like a good idea, but with the right design, it’s a lot of fun — and maybe you’ll be better able to tap into Schumann resonances while you’re up there.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download a long series of ones and zeroes that, when appropriately interpreted, sound like two people talking about nerdy stuff!

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This Week In Security: .zip Domains, Zip Scanning

May 19, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 17 Comments

The world may not be ready, but the .zip Top Level Domain (TLD) is here. It’s a part of the generic TLD category, which was expanded to allow applications for custom TLDs. Google has led the charge, applying for 101 such new TLDs, with .zip being one of the interesting ones. Public registration for .zip domains has been open for a couple weeks, and some interesting domains have been registered, like update.zip, installer.zip, and officeupdate.zip.

The obvious question to ask is whether this new TLD can be abused for scamming and phishing purposes. And the answer is yes, sure it can. One of the trickiest ways is to use the AT symbol @ in a URL, which denotes user info at the beginning of the URL. It usually is used to include a username and password, like http://username:password@192.168.1.1/. That is pretty obvious, but what about https://google.com@bing.com? Still looks weird. The catch that really prevents this technique being abused is that slashes are disallowed in user data, so a abusive URL like https://google.com∕gmail∕inbox@bing.com is right out.

Except, take a look at that last link. Looks like it has slashes in it, so it should take you to google, and ignore the AT symbol. But it doesn’t, it goes to Bing. You may have guessed, it’s Unicode shenanigans again. Those aren’t slashes, they’re U2215, the division slash. And that means that a .zip TLD could be really sneaky, if the apparent domain is one you trust. Continue reading “This Week In Security: .zip Domains, Zip Scanning” →