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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.

Hackaday Podcast 183: Stowaway Science, Cold Basements, And Warm Beers

August 26, 2022 by 8 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos met up on a secret server to discuss the cream of this week’s crop of hacks. After gushing about the first-ever Kansas City Keyboard Meetup coming up tomorrow — Saturday the 27th, we start off by considering the considerable engineering challenge of building a knife-throwing machine, the logistics of live-streaming on the go, and the thermodynamics of split-level homes.

This week, Kristina came up with the What’s-That-Sound and managed to stump Elliot for a while, though he did eventually guess correctly after the tape stopped rolling. Think you know what it is? Then fill out the form and you’ll earn the chance to win a genuine Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!

Later in the show, we look at a macro pad that breaks the mold, an ASCII terminal like it’s 1974, and a Z80 that never was (but definitely could have been). Stick around as we root for the CubeSats hitching a ride aboard Artemis I, and at last call on the ‘cast, it’s lagers vs. ales (vs. ciders).

Direct download.

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!

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This Week In Security: In Mudge We Trust, Don’t Trust That App Browser, And Firefox At Pwn2Own

August 26, 2022 by 19 Comments

There’s yet another brouhaha forming over Twitter, but this time around it’s a security researcher making noise instead of an eccentric billionaire. [Peiter Zatko] worked as Twitter’s security chief for just over a year, from November 2020 through January 2022. You may know Zatko better as [Mudge], a renowned security researcher, who literally wrote the book on buffer overflows. He was a member at L0pht Heavy Industries, worked at DARPA and Google, and was brought on at Twitter in response to the July 2020 hack that saw many brand accounts running Bitcoin scans.

Mudge was terminated at Twitter January 2022, and it seems he immediately started putting together a whistleblower complaint. You can access his complaint packet on archive.org, with whistleblower_disclosure.pdf (PDF, and mirror) being the primary document. There are some interesting tidbits in here, like the real answer to how many spam bots are on Twitter: “We don’t really know.” The very public claim that “…<5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts” is a bit of a handwave, as the monetizable Daily Active Users count is essentially defined as active accounts that are not bots. Perhaps Mr. Musk has a more legitimate complaint than was previously thought.
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Tech In Plain Sight: Rain-Sensing Wipers

August 25, 2022 by 38 Comments

While it is definitely a first-world problem that you don’t want to manually turn on your windshield wipers when it starts raining, it is also one of those things that probably sounds easier to solve than it really is. After all, you can ask a four-year-old if it is raining and expect a reasonable answer. But how do you ask that question of a computer? Especially a tiny cheap computer that is operating pretty much on its own.

You might want to stop here and try to think of how you’d do it. Measure the conductivity of the glass? Maybe water on the glass affects its dielectric constant and you could measure the resulting capacitance? Modern cars don’t do either. The problem is complicated because you need a solution that works with the glass and isn’t prone to false positives due to dirt or debris.

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Space-Based Solar Power: Folly Or Stroke Of Genius?

August 24, 2022 by 137 Comments

The Sun always shines in space, unless a pesky planet gets in the way. That’s more or less the essential thought behind space-based solar power (SBSP) as newly pitched by ESA’s director general, Josef Aschbacher on Twitter. Rather than putting photovoltatic solar panels on the Earth’s surface which has this annoying property of constantly rotating said panels away from the Sun during what is commonly referred to as ‘night’, the panels would be put stationary in space, unaffected by the Earth’s rotation and weather.

Although a simple idea, it necessitates the solving of a number of problems. The obvious first question is how to get these panels up in space, hundreds of kilometers from the Earth’s surface, to create a structure many times larger than the International Space Station. The next question is how to get the power back to Earth, followed by questions about safety, maintenance, transfer losses and the inevitable economics.

With organizations ranging from NASA to China’s Academy for Space Technology (CAST), to US institutions and others involved in SBSP projects, it would seem that these problems are at the very least deemed to be solvable. This raises the question of how ESA’s most recent proposal fits into this picture. Will Europe soon be powered from orbital solar panel arrays?

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IBM’s Early PC Attracts Time Travelers

August 23, 2022 by 53 Comments

It wasn’t long ago I was nostalgic about an old computer I saw back in the 1980s from HP. It was sort of an early attempt at a PC, although price-wise it was only in reach for professionals. HP wasn’t the only one to try such a thing, and one of the more famous attempts was the company that arguably did get the PC world rolling: IBM. Sure, there were other companies that made PCs before the IBM PC, but that was the computer that cemented the idea of a computer on an office desk or at your home more than any computer before it. Even now, our giant supercomputer desktop machines boot as though they were a vintage 1981 PC for a few minutes on each startup. But the PC wasn’t the first personal machine from IBM and, in fact, the IBM 5100 was not only personal, but it was also portable. Well, portable by 1970s standards that also had very heavy video cameras and luggable computers like the Osborne 1.

The IBM 5100 had a brief three-year life from 1975 to 1978. A blistering 1.9 MHz 16-bit CPU drove a 5-inch CRT monitor and you could have between 16K and 64K of RAM along with a fair amount of ROM. In fact, the ROMs were the key feature and a giant switch on the front let you pick between an APL ROM and a BASIC ROM (assuming you had bought both).

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A Brief History Of Drywall Or: How Drywall Came To Dominate The World Of Construction

August 22, 2022 by 106 Comments

Drywall is common and ubiquitous in commercial and residential buildings today. Many of us barely think about it until we have to repair a hole smashed in it.

However, drywall has not been around forever, and actually took many years to establish itself as a popular building material. Today, we’ll look at how it came about, and why it went on to dominate the world of construction.

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Superconference 2022 Hack Chat

August 22, 2022 by 6 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, August 24 August 31 at noon Pacific for the Superconference 2022 Hack Chat!

[Sorry folks — due to a scheduling snafu, we’ve got to push this off a week. — ed]

To say that a lot of water has passed under the bridge since 2019 is something of an understatement. When last we met as a group, in Pasadena in November of that year, the Covid-19 pandemic and its fallout were ahead of us. Supercon 2019 was a smashing success, a three-day meetup that brought together the best the hacker community has to offer to exchange ideas, share their projects, and meet up IRL rather than reading about everyone’s exploits and adventures online. It was a fantastic time, but how were we to know that it would be the last meatspace meetup for a painfully long time?

join-hack-chatThankfully, that’s all behind us now, and Supercon 2022 is back, live and in person! Everyone in the hacker community is going to want to be in Pasadena, but since it’s been so long since we’ve met up in person, we thought a Hack Chat focusing on Supercon would be a good idea. We’ve invited Majenta Strongheart on to field your questions, plus hopefully we’ll have a few surprise guests too. But this will mainly be your chance to sort of “pre-network” before the con. If you’re a Supercon first-timer, this is a great way to ask questions about how it all works and whether it’s worth it to attend (answer: it is — go buy tickets now!) For vets, this is your chance to share your stories of Supercons past, or perhaps to reconnect with con-buddies you’ve lost touch with. There’ll be something for everyone, both at the Hack Chat and at Supercon, so drop by the chat and find out what all the hype is about.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 31 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.