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.
This week Jonathan and Randal chat with Jose Valim about Elixir! What led Jose to create this unique programming language? What do we mean that it’s a functional language with immutability?
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 860: Elixir Origin Story”
For those born with certain types of congenital deafness, the cochlear implant has been a positive and enabling technology. It uses electronics to step in as a replacement for the biological ear that doesn’t quite function properly, and provides a useful, if imperfect, sense of hearing to its users.
New research has promised another potential solution for some sufferers of congenital deafness. Instead of a supportive device, a gene therapy is used to enable the biological ear to function more as it should. The result is that patients get their sense of hearing, not from a prosthetic, but from their own ears themselves.
Continue reading “Genetic Therapy Aims To Bring Hearing To Those Born Deaf”
I’m not proud. When many of us were kids, we were unabashedly excited when trash day came around because sometimes you’d find an old radio or — jackpot — an old TV out by the curb. Then, depending on its size, you rescued it, or you had your friends help, or, in extreme cases, you had to ask your dad. In those days, people were frugal, so the chances of what you found being fixable were slim to none. If it was worth fixing, the people would have probably fixed it.
While TVs and radios were the favorites, you might have found other old stuff, but in those days, no one was throwing out a computer (at least not in a neighborhood), and white goods like refrigerators and washing machines had very little electronics. Maybe a mechanical timer or a relay, but that’s about it.
Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Do You Curb Shop Components?”
All right, I’ll cut to the chase: Cheap03xD is mainly so cheap because the PCB falls within a 10 x 10 cm footprint. The point was to make a very affordable keyboard — all the parts come to ~40 Euro (~$47). So it would seem that [Lander03xD_] succeeded.
Those are MMD Princess silent switches, which I wouldn’t choose, but [Lander03xD_] is taking this board to the office, so I get it. They sure are a nice shade of pink, anyway, and they go really well with the pastels of the DSA keycaps and the bezel.
One cool thing to note is that the PCBs are reversible, like the ErgoDox. This isn’t [Lander03xD_]’s first board, and it won’t be the last.
Now, let’s talk batteries. [Saixos] pointed out that the design doesn’t appear to include a protection circuit. In case you can’t tell from where you’re sitting, those are nice!nano clones that [Lander03xD_] is using, and they expect a protection circuit.
[Lander03xD_] is going to look through the docs and see what’s what. The goal is not to have any daughter boards, so this may take some rethinking.
Via reddit
Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Cheap-O Keyboard”
I was off at the Chaos Communication Congress last weekend, and one of the big attractions for one who is nerdily inclined is seeing all of the personal projects that everyone brings along with them. Inevitably, someone would ask me what my favorite is. Maybe it’s my decision paralysis, maybe it’s being forced to pick a favorite child on the spot, or maybe it’s just that I’m not walking around ranking them, but that question always left me drawing a blank.
But after a week of thinking about it, I’m pretty sure I know why: I don’t actually care what I think of other peoples’ projects! I’m simply stoked to talk to everyone who brought anything, and bathe in the success and failure, hearing about the challenges that they saw coming, and then the new challenges they met along the way. I want to know what the hacker thinks of their project, what their intention was, and how their story went. I’m just a spectator, so I collected stories.
The overwhelming, entirely non-surprising result of listening to a couple hundred hackers talk about their projects? They’re all doing it for the fun of it. Simply for the grins. And that held equally well for the supremely planned-out and technical projects as well as their simpler I-bought-these-surplus-on-eBay-one-night relatives. “We were sitting around and thought, wouldn’t it be fun…” was the start of nearly every story.
That’s what I absolutely love about our community: that people are hacking because it makes them happy, and that the amazing variety of projects suggests an endless possibility for hacker happiness. It’s hard to come away from an event like that without being energized. Some of that comes from the sharing of ideas and brainstorming and hanging out with like-minded folks, but what I find most important is simply the celebration of the joy of the project for its own sake.
Happy hacking!
Food poisoning is never a fun experience. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll bite into something bad and realize soon enough to spit it out. Other times, you’ll only realize your mistake much later. Once the tainted food gets far enough into the digestive system, it’s too late. Your only option is to strap in for the ride as the body voids the toxins or pathogens by every means available, perhaps for several consecutive days.
Proper food storage and preparation are the key ways we avoid food poisoning today. However, a new development could give us a further tool in the fight—with scientists finding a way to actively hunt down and destroy angry little pathogens before they can spoil a good meal.
This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
On What’s That Sound, Kristina had no idea what was going on, but [Flippin’ Heck] knew it was a flip dot display, and won a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! Congratulations!
After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, with not one but two ways of seeing sound. We also take a look at benchmarking various Windows releases against each other on 12-year-old hardware.
We also talk about painting on floppies and glitching out jpegs in a binary text editor. Finally, we discuss the history and safety of autopilot, and take a look at the humble time clock.
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 in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.
Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 352: Visualizing Sound, And Windows 11 Is A Dog”
