99% Inspiration, 99% Perspiration, And 99% Collaboration

March 6, 2021 by Elliot Williams 52 Comments

I was watching an oldish TEDx talk with Rodney Mullen, probably the most innovative street skater ever, but that’s not the point, and it’s not his best talk either. Along the way, he makes a claim that ideas — in particular the idea that a particular skateboard trick is even possible — are the most important thing.

His experience, travelling around the world on skateboard tours, is that there are millions of kids who are talented enough that when they see a video demonstrating that a particular trick idea is possible, they can replicate it in short order. Not because the video showed them how, but because it expanded their mind’s-eye view of what is possible. They were primed, and so what pushed them over the edge was the inspiration.

On the other side of the street, we’ve got Thomas Edison and his “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” routine. Edison famously tried a bazillion filament recipes ~~before settling on tungsten~~, and attributes his success to “putting his time in” or “good old-fashioned hard work” or similar. So who’s right?

The inventor of Casper Slide and the phonograph are both right. Rodney is taking it for granted that these kids have put their time in; they are skaters after all, they skate. He doesn’t see the 99% perspiration because it is the natural background, while the inspiration flashes out in Eureka moments.

Similarly, Thomas E. way underestimates inspiration. He’s already fixated on this novel idea to take an arc lamp and contain it in a glass envelope — that’s what he’s spending all of his perspiration on, after all. But without that key inspiration, all he’d be is sweaty.

And they’re also both wrong! They’re both missing a third ingredient: collaboration. Certainly Mullen, who spent his life hanging out with other skaters, teaching them what he knows, and learning from them in turn, wouldn’t say the community of skaters didn’t shape him. Even in the loner’s sport of skating, nobody is alone. And Edison? His company profited greatly from broader advances in science, and the scientific literature. Menlo Park existed to take bright, well-trained minds and put them all in one place, sharing, teaching, and working together. It embodied the idea of collaborative innovation, and that’s where some of his best work was done.

So I’m with Isaac Newton, “standing on the shoulders of giants“. Success is 99% collaboration. This leaves us with one problem: the percentages don’t add up. But that’s alright by me.

The Rise And Fall Of The Fan Car

March 5, 2021 by Lewin Day 51 Comments

The advent of aerodynamic wings in motorsport was one of the most dramatic changes in the mid-20th century. Suddenly, it was possible to generate more grip at speed outside of altering suspension setups and fitting grippier tyres. However, it was just the beginning, and engineers began to look at more advanced ways of generating downforce without the drag penalty incurred by fitting wings to a racecar.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of this was the fan car. Mechanically complex and arguably dangerous, the technology offered huge downforce with minimal drag. However, the fan car’s time in the spotlight was vanishingly brief, despite the promise inherent in the idea. Let’s take a look at the basic theory behind the fan car, how they worked in practice, and why we don’t see them on racetracks today. Continue reading “The Rise And Fall Of The Fan Car” →

Hackaday Podcast 108: Eulogizing Daft Punk Helmets, Bitcoin Feeling The Heat, Squeezing Soft Robots, And Motorizing Ice Skates

March 5, 2021 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys travel through the greatest hacks the week had on offer. Charge up your ice skates (literally) by adding spiked electric motors to push you across the frozen pond. If that’s too cold for early March, snuggle up with a good book under the warm light of a clever lamp made from a rotary-dial telephone. We discuss CAD and CAM in your browser, and a software tool to merge images with PCB gerber files. The episode wraps up with a discussion on the balance of quality versus speed when prototyping, and digesting the environmental impact of the Bitcoin network.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (~60 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

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This Week In Security: Text Rendering On Windows, GNU Poke, And Bitsquatting

March 5, 2021 by Jonathan Bennett 27 Comments

Project Zero just unrestricted the details on CVE-2021-24093, a potentially nasty vulnerability in Windows 10’s DirectWrite, a text rendering library. The flaw got fixed in this month’s patch Tuesday roundup. The flaw is accessible in all the major browsers on Windows 10, as they use DirectWrite for font rendering. The trick here is to use a malicious font that uses some nonsense values. Those values result in a buffer allocation that is too small for complex characters such as Æ.

Because the vulnerability is a Windows library, it’s possible that an exploit would automatically work as a sandbox escape, but I haven’t seen confirmation either way. Let us know if you have some insight there.

Via Bleeping Computer

GNU Poke

The good folks at GNU have minted the 1.0 release of poke, a new binary editing tool. The real killer feature of poke is that it can interpret binary data, decoding it back into readable data structures. If you’re familiar with the way Wireshark can decode packets and give useful, organized output, it seems that poke will provide a similar function, but not limited to network traffic.

It looks like it could become a useful tool for getting a look inside otherwise opaque binaries. What poke brings is a system where you can write pretty-printing templates on the fly, which should be very useful when mapping out an unfamiliar binary. Distros will likely pick up and start packaging poke in the coming weeks, making it even easier to get and play with. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Text Rendering On Windows, GNU Poke, And Bitsquatting” →

Arduboy FX Mod-Chip: Now You’re Playing With Power

March 4, 2021 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

Traditionally, a forum full of technical users trying integrate their own hardware into a game system for the purposes of gaining unfettered access to its entire software library was the kind of thing that would keep engineers at Sony and Nintendo up at night. The development and proliferation of so called “mod chips” were an existential threat to companies that made their money selling video games, and as such, sniffing out these console hackers and keeping their findings from going public for as long as possible was a top priority.

But the Arduboy is no traditional game system. Its games are distributed for free, so a chip that allows users to cram hundreds of them onto the handheld at once isn’t some shady attempt to pull a fast one on the developers, it’s a substantial usability improvement over the stock hardware. So when Arduboy creator Kevin Bates found out about the grassroots effort to expand the system’s internal storage on the official forums, he didn’t try to put a stop to it. Instead, he asked how he could help make it a reality for as many Arduboy owners as possible.

Now, a little less than three years after forum member Mr.Blinky posted his initial concept for hanging an external SPI flash chip on the system’s test pads, the official Arduboy FX Mod-Chip has arrived. Whether you go the DIY route and build your own version or buy the ready-to-go module, one thing is for sure: it’s a must-have upgrade for the Arduboy that will completely change how you use the diminutive handheld.

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Retrotechtacular: Philips Factory Tour, Circa 1930s

March 3, 2021 by Dan Maloney 34 Comments

If you’ve got a half-hour or so to spare, you could do worse than this video trip through a Philips factory in the 1930s.

The film is presented without narration, but from the Dutch title cards and the fact that it’s Philips, we gather that this factory of gigantic proportions was somewhere in the Netherlands. In any case, it looks like something right out of [Fritz Lang]’s Metropolis and turned the rawest of materials into finished consumer products.

Much of the film focuses on the making of vacuum tubes; the sheer physicality of the job is what really stands out here. The upper body strength that the glassblowers had to have boggles the mind. Check out the chops — and the soon-to-be very unfashionable mustache — on the glassblower at the 12:00 mark. And it wasn’t just the gents who had mad skills — the fine motor control needed for the delicate assembly of the innards of the tubes, which seems to be mostly staffed by women, is just as impressive. We were also surprised by the amount these manual crafts were assisted by automated systems.

Especially interesting is the section where they build the luidspreker. Without narration or captions, it’s a little hard to tell what’s going on, but it appears that they used an enormous press to form chips of Bakelite into sleek covers for the speakers, which themselves are super-chunky affairs made from scratch in the factory. We’re also treated to assembly of the radios, packaging of finished products, and a group of dockworkers who clearly didn’t read the “Fragile” labels pasted on the boxes.

One can’t help but wonder if these people had the slightest inkling of what was about to sweep over them and the rest of the world. And if they did, would they even begin to comprehend how much the very products that they were making would contribute to both the slaughter of the coming war as well as to the sparing of so many lives? Likely not, but the film is still an interesting glimpse into the creation of an industry, one that relied very much on craftsmanship to get it started.

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Rube Goldberg’s Least Complicated Invention Was His Cartooning Career

March 2, 2021 by Kristina Panos 27 Comments

The name Rube Goldberg has long been synonymous with any overly-built contraption played for laughs that solves a simple problem through complicated means. But it might surprise you to learn that the man himself was not an engineer or inventor by trade — at least, not for long. Rube’s father was adamant that he become an engineer and so he got himself an engineering degree and a job with the city. Rube lasted six months engineering San Francisco’s sewer systems before quitting to pursue his true passion: cartooning.

Rube’s most famous cartoons — the contraptions that quickly became his legacy — were a tongue-in-cheek critique meant to satirize the tendency of technology to complicate our lives in its quest to simplify them. Interestingly, a few other countries have their own version of Rube Goldberg. In the UK it’s Heath Robinson, and in Denmark it’s Robert Storm Petersen, aka Storm P.

Rube Goldberg was a living legend who loved to poke fun at everything happening in the world around him. He became a household name early in his cartooning career, and was soon famous enough to endorse everything from cough drops to cigarettes. By 1931, Rube’s name was in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, his legacy forever cemented as the inventor of complicated machinery designed to perform simple tasks. As one historian put it, Rube’s influence on culture is hard to overstate.

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