Hackaday Links: January 25, 2026

January 25, 2026 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

If predictions hold steady, nearly half of the United States will be covered in snow by the time this post goes live, with the Northeast potentially getting buried under more than 18 inches. According to the National Weather Service, the “unusually expansive and long-duration winter storm will bring heavy snow from the central U.S. across the Midwest, Ohio Valley, and through the northeastern U.S. for the remainder of the weekend into Monday.” If that sounds like a fun snow day, they go on to clarify that “crippling to locally catastrophic impacts can be expected”, so keep that in mind. Hopefully you didn’t have any travel plans, as CNBC reported that more than 13,000 flights were canceled as of Friday night. If you’re looking to keep up with the latest developments, we recently came across StormWatch (GitHub repo), a slick open source weather dashboard that’s written entirely in HTML. Stay safe out there, hackers.

Speaking of travel, did you hear about Sebastian Heyneman’s Bogus Journey to Davos? The entrepreneur (or “Tech Bro” to use the parlance of our times) was in town to woo investors attending the World Economic Forum, but ended up spending the night in a Swiss jail cell because the authorities thought he might be a spy. Apparently he had brought along a prototype for the anti-fraud device he was hawking, and mistakenly left it laying on a table while he was rubbing shoulders. It was picked up by security guards and found to contain a very spooky ESP32 development board, so naturally he was whisked off for interrogation. A search of his hotel room uncovered more suspicious equipment, including an electric screwdriver and a soldering iron. Imagine if a child had gotten their hands on them?

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Crazy Old Machines

January 24, 2026 by Elliot Williams 42 Comments

Al and I were talking about the IBM 9020 FAA Air Traffic Control computer system on the podcast. It’s a strange machine, made up of a bunch of IBM System 360 mainframes connected together to a common memory unit, with all sorts of custom peripherals to support keeping track of airplanes in the sky. Absolutely go read the in-depth article on that machine if it sparks your curiosity.

It got me thinking about how strange computers were in the early days, and how boringly similar they’ve all become. Just looking at the word sizes of old machines is a great example. Over the last, say, 40 years, things that do computing have had 4, 8, 16, 32, or even 64-bit words. You noticed the powers-of-two trend going on here, right? Basically starting with the lowly Intel 4004, it’s been round numbers ever since.

On the other side of the timeline, though, you get strange beasts. The classic PDP-8 had 12-bit words, while its predecessors the PDP-6 and PDP-1 had 36 bits and 18 bits respectively. (Factors of six?) There’s a string of military guidance computers that had 27-bit words, while the Apollo Guidance computer ran 15-bit words. UNIVAC III had 25-bit words, putting the 23-bit Harvard Mark I to shame.

I wasn’t there, but it gives you the feeling that each computer is a unique, almost hand-crafted machine. Some must have made their odd architectural choices to suit particular functions, others because some designer had a clever idea. I’m not a computer historian, but I’m sure that the word lengths must tell a number of interesting stories.

On the whole, though, it gives the impression of a time when each computer was it’s own unique machine, before the convergence of everything to roughly the same architectural ideas. A much more hackery time, for lack of a better word. We still see echoes of this in the people who make their own “retro” computers these days, either virtually, on a breadboard, or emulated in the fabric of an FPGA. It’s not just nostalgia, though, but a return to a time when there was more creative freedom: a time before 64 bits took over.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 354: Firearms, Sky Driving, And Dumpster Diving

January 23, 2026 by Al Williams 1 Comment

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams took a break to talk about their favorite hacks last week. You can drop in to hear about articulated mirrors, triacs, and even continuous 3D-printing modifications.

Flying on an airplane this weekend? Maybe wait until you get back to read about how the air traffic control works. Back home, you can order a pizza on a Wii or run classic Basic games on a calculator.

For the can’t miss articles, the guys talked about very low Earth orbit satellites and talked about readers who dumpster dive.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and don’t be shy. Tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

As always, this episode is available in DRM-free MP3.

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New Drug Hopes To Treat Sleep Apnea Without Masks

January 22, 2026 by Lewin Day 56 Comments

Sleep apnea is a debilitating disease that many sufferers don’t even realize they have. Those afflicted with the condition will regularly stop breathing during sleep as the muscles in their throat relax, sometimes hundreds of times a night. Breathing eventually resumes when the individual’s oxygen supply gets critically low, and the body semi-wakes to restore proper respiration. The disruption to sleep causes serious fatigue and a wide range of other deleterious health effects.

Treatment for sleep apnea has traditionally involved pressurized respiration aids, mechanical devices, or invasive surgeries. However, researchers are now attempting to develop a new drug combination that could solve the problem with pharmaceuticals alone.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 861: Big Databases With OpenRiak

January 21, 2026 by Jonathan Bennett 1 Comment

This week Jonathan chats with Nicholas Adams about OpenRiak! Why is there a Riak and an OpenRiak, which side of the CAP theorem does OpenRiak land on, and why is it so blazingly fast for some operations? Listen to find out!

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Retrotechtacular: RCA Loses Fight To IBM

January 21, 2026 by Al Williams 27 Comments

If you follow electronics history, few names were as ubiquitous as RCA, the Radio Corporation of America. Yet in modern times, the company is virtually forgotten for making large computers. [Computer History Archive Project] has a rare film from the 1970s (embedded below) explaining how RCA planned to become the number two supplier of business computers, presumably behind behemoth IBM. They had produced other large computers in the 1950s and 1960s, like the BIZMAC, the RCA 510, and the Spectra. But these new machines were their bid to eat away at IBM’s dominance in the field.

RCA had innovative ideas and arguably one of the first demand paging, virtual memory operating systems for mainframes. You can hope they were better at designing computers than they were at making commercials.

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What Isaac Roberts Saw Without A Space Telescope

January 20, 2026 by Al Williams 27 Comments

Space telescopes are all the rage, and rightfully so. The images they take are spectacular, and they’ve greatly increased what we know about the universe. Surely, any picture taken of, say, the Andromeda galaxy before space telescopes would be little more than a smudge compared to modern photos, right? Maybe not.

One of the most famous pictures of our galactic neighbor was taken in — no kidding — 1888. The astronomer/photographer was Isaac Roberts, a Welsh engineer with a keen interest in astrophotography. Around 1878, he began using a 180 mm refracting telescope for observations, and in 1883, he began taking photographs.

He was so pleased with the results that he ordered a reflecting telescope with a 510 mm first-surface mirror and built an observatory around it in 1885. Photography and optics back then weren’t what they are now, so adding more mirrors to the setup made it more challenging to take pictures. Roberts instead mounted the photographic plates directly at the prime focus of the mirror.

Andromeda

Because it took hours to capture good images, he developed techniques to keep the camera moving in sync with the telescope to track objects in the night sky. On December 29th, 1888 he used his 510 mm scope to take a long exposure of Andromeda (or M31, if you prefer). His photos showed the galaxy had a spiral structure, which was news in 1888.

Of course, it’s not as good as the Hubble’s shots. In all fairness, though, the Hubble’s is hard to appreciate without the interactive zoom tool. And 100 years of technological progress separate the two.

Roberts also invented a machine that could engrave stellar positions on copper plates. The Science Museum in London has the telescope in its collection.

Your Turn

Roberts did a great job with very modest equipment. These days, at least half of astrophotography is in post-processing, which you can learn. Want time on a big telescope? Consider taking an online class. You might not match the James Webb or the Hubble, but neither did Roberts, yet we still look at his plates with admiration.