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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Cipher-Capable Typewriter

November 17, 2025 by Kristina Panos 23 Comments

I must confess that my mouth froze in an O when I saw [Jeff]’s Typeframe PX-88 Portable Computing System, and I continue to stare in slack-jawed wonder as I find the words to share it with you. Let me give it a shot.

[Jeff] tells us that he designed Typeframe for his spouse to use as a writer deck. That’s good spousing, if you ask me. Amazingly, this is [Jeff]’s first project of this type and scope, and somehow it’s an elegant, yet easy build that’s quite well documented to boot. Whatever Typeframe’s design may borrow, it seems to give back in spades.

The Typeframe PX-88 Portable Computing System. — Image by [Jeff] via Typeframe.net

Use Typeframe for what you will — cyberdeck, writer deck, travel PC — this baby can handle whatever you throw at it. And of course, it’s open source from front to back.

This Raspberry Pi 4B-based productivity machine has all sorts of neat features. The touch screen flips upward at an angle, so you don’t have to hunch over it or carry a mouse around. Want to sit back a bit while you work? The aesthetically spot-on keyboard is detachable. Yeah.

If that’s not enough to get you interested, Typeframe is designed for simple construction with minimal soldering, and the sliding panels make maintenance a breeze.

A little more about that keyboard — this is Keebin’, after all. It’s an MK Point 65, which boasts hot-swap sockets under those DSA Dolch keycaps. See? Minimal soldering. In fact, the only things you have to solder to make the Typeframe your own are the power switch and the status light. Incredible.

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Cipher-Capable Typewriter” →

Hackaday Links: November 16, 2025

November 16, 2025 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

We make no claims to be an expert on anything, but we do know that rule number one of working with big, expensive, mission-critical equipment is: Don’t break the big, expensive, mission-critical equipment. Unfortunately, though, that’s just what happened to the Deep Space Network’s 70-meter dish antenna at Goldstone, California. NASA announced the outage this week, but the accident that damaged the dish occurred much earlier, in mid-September. DSS-14, as the antenna is known, is a vital part of the Deep Space Network, which uses huge antennas at three sites (Goldstone, Madrid, and Canberra) to stay in touch with satellites and probes from the Moon to the edge of the solar system. The three sites are located roughly 120 degrees apart on the globe, which gives the network full coverage of the sky regardless of the local time.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: November 16, 2025” →

The Value Of A Worked Example

November 15, 2025 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

I was looking over the week’s posts on Hackaday – it’s part of my job after all – and this gem caught my eye: a post about how to make your own RP2040 development board from scratch. And I’ll admit that my first thought was “why would you ever want to do that?” (Not a very Hackaday-appropriate question, honestly.) The end result will certainly cost more than just buying a Pi Pico off the shelf!

Then it hit me: this isn’t a project per se, but rather [Kai] was using it as an test run to learn the PCB-production toolchain. And for that, replicating a Pico board is perfect, because the schematics are easily available. While I definitely think that a project like this is a bit complicated for a first PCB project – I’d recommend making something fun like an SAO – the advantage of making something slightly more involved is that you run into all of the accompanying ~~problems~~ learning experiences. What a marvelous post-complete-beginner finger exercise!

And then it hit me again. [Kai]’s documentation of everything learned during the project was absolutely brilliant. It’s part KiCAD tutorial, part journal about all the hurdles of getting a PCB made, and just chock-full of helpful tips along the way. The quality of the write-up turns it from being just a personal project into something that can help other people who are in exactly the same boat, and I’m guessing that’s a number of you out there.

In the end, this was a perfect Hackaday project. Yes, it was “too simple” for those who have made their 30th PCB design. (Although I’d bet you could still pick up a KiCAD tip or two.) And yes, it doesn’t make economic sense to replicate mass-market devices in one-off. And of course, it doesn’t need that fun art on the board either. But wrap all these up together, and you get a superbly documented guide to a useful project that would walk you through 95% of what you’ll need to make more elaborate projects later on. Superb!

Surely you do “finger exercises” too. Why not write them up, and share the learning? And send them our way – we know just the audience who will want to read it.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 345: A Stunning Lightsaber, Two Extreme Cameras, And Wrangling Roombas

November 14, 2025 by Jenny List 1 Comment

It’s a wet November evening across Western Europe, the steel-grey clouds have obscured a rare low-latitude aurora this week, and Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for this week’s podcast. And we’ve got a fine selection for your listening pleasure!

The 2025 Component Abuse Challenge has come to an end, so this week you’ll be hearing about a few of the entries. We’ve received an impressive number, and as always we’re bowled over by the ingenuity of Hackaday readers in pushing parts beyond their limits.

In the news is the potential discovery of a lost UNIX version in a dusty store room at the University of Utah, Version 4 of the OS, which appeared in 1973. Check out your own stores, for hidden nuggets of gold. In the hacks, we have two cameras at the opposite end of the resolution spectrum, but sharing some impressive reverse engineering. Mouse cameras and scanner cameras were both a thing a couple of decades ago, and it’s great to see people still pushing the boundaries. Then we look at the challenge of encoding Chinese text as Morse code, an online-upgraded multimeter, the art of making lenses for an LED lighting effect, and what must be the best recreation of a Star Wars light sabre we have ever seen. In quick hacks we have a bevvy of Component Abuse Challenge projects, a Minecraft server on a smart light bulb, and a long term test of smartphone battery charging techniques.

We round off with a couple of our long-form pieces, first the uncertainties about iRobot’s future and what it might mean for their ecosystem — think: cheap hackable robotics platform! — and then a look at FreeBSD as an alternative upgrade path for Windows users. It’s a path not without challenges, but the venerable OS still has plenty to give.

As always, you can listen using the links below, and we’ve laidout links to all the articles under discussion at the bottom of the page.

Download our finest MP3 right here.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 345: A Stunning Lightsaber, Two Extreme Cameras, And Wrangling Roombas” →

This Week In Security: Landfall, Imunify AV, And Sudo Rust

November 14, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 7 Comments

Let’s talk about LANDFALL. That was an Android spyware campaign specifically targeted at Samsung devices. The discovery story is interesting, and possibly an important clue to understanding this particular bit of commercial malware. Earlier this year Apple’s iOS was patched for a flaw in the handling of DNG (Digital NeGative) images, and WhatsApp issued an advisory with a second iOS vulnerability, that together may have been used in attacks in the wild.

Researchers at Unit 42 went looking for real-world examples of this iOS threat campaign, and instead found DNG images that exploited a similar-yet-distinct vulnerability in a Samsung image handling library. These images had a zip file appended to the end of these malicious DNG files. The attack seems to be launched via WhatsApp messaging, just like the iOS attack. That .zip contains a pair of .so shared object files, that are loaded to manipulate the system’s SELinux protections and install the long term spyware payload.

The earliest known sample of this spyware dates to July of 2024, and Samsung patched the DNG handling vulnerability in April 2025. Apple patched the similar DNG problem in August of 2025. The timing and similarities do suggest that these two spyware campaigns may have been related. Unit 42 has a brief accounting of the known threat actors that could have been behind LANDFALL, and concludes that there just isn’t enough solid evidence to make a determination.

Not as Bad as it Looks

Watchtowr is back with a couple more of their unique vulnerability write-ups. The first is a real tease, as they found a way to leak a healthy chunk of memory from Citrix NetScaler machines. The catch is that the memory leak is a part of an error message, complaining that user authentication is disabled. This configuration is already not appropriate for deployment, and the memory leak wasn’t assigned a CVE.

There was a second issue in the NetScaler system, an open redirect in the login system. This is where an attacker can craft a malicious link that points to a trusted NetScaler machine, and if a user follows the link, the NetScaler will redirect the user to a location specified in the malicious link. It’s not a high severity vulnerability, but still got a CVE and a fix. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Landfall, Imunify AV, And Sudo Rust” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 854: The Big Daddy Core

November 12, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett No comments

This week Jonathan and Ben chat with Jason Shepherd about Ocre and Atym.io! That’s the lightweight WebAssembly VM that lets you run the same containers on Linux and a host of embedded platforms, on top of the Zephyr embedded OS. What was the spark that led to this project’s creation, what does Atym.io bring to the equation, and what are people actually doing with it? Watch to find out!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 854: The Big Daddy Core” →

Gene Therapy Aims To Slow Huntington’s Disease To A Crawl

November 11, 2025 by Lewin Day 22 Comments

Despite the best efforts of modern medicine, Huntington’s disease is a condition that still comes with a tragic prognosis. Primarily an inherited disease, its main symptoms concern degeneration of the brain, leading to issues with motor control, mood disturbance, with continued degradation eventually proving fatal.

Researchers have recently made progress in finding a potential treatment for the disease. A new study has indicated that an innovative genetic therapy could hold promise for slowing the progression of the disease, greatly improving patient outcomes.

Continue reading “Gene Therapy Aims To Slow Huntington’s Disease To A Crawl” →