When Online Safety Means Surrendering Your ID, What Can You Do?

July 31, 2025 by Jenny List 108 Comments

A universal feature of traveling Europe as a Hackaday scribe is that when you sit in a hackerspace in another country and proclaim how nice a place it all is, the denizens will respond pessimistically with how dreadful their country really is. My stock response is to say “Hold my beer” and recount the antics of British politicians, but the truth is, the grass is always greener on the other side.

There’s one thing here in dear old Blighty that has me especially concerned at the moment though, and perhaps it’s time to talk about it here. The Online Safety Act has just come into force and is the UK government’s attempt to deal with what they perceive as the nasties on the Internet, and while some of its aspirations may be honourable, its effects are turning out to be a little chilling.

As might be expected, the Act requires providers to ensure their services are free of illegal material, and it creates some new offences surrounding sharing images without consent, and online stalking. Where the concern lies for me is in the requirement for age verification to ensure kids don’t see anything the government things they shouldn’t, which is being enforced through online ID verification. There are many reasons why this is of concern, but I’ll name the three at the top of my list.
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Farewell Shunsaku Tamiya: The Man Who Gave Us The Best Things To Build

July 31, 2025 by Jenny List 36 Comments

In the formative experiences of most Hackaday readers there will almost certainly be a number of common threads, for example the ownership of a particular game console, or being inspired into engineering curiosity by the same TV shows. A home computer of a TV show may mark you as coming from a particular generation, but there are some touchstones which cross the decades.

Of those, we are guessing that few readers will not at some point have either built, owned, or lusted after a Tamiya model kit at some point over the last many decades, so it’s with some sadness that we note the passing of Mr. Tamiya himself, Shunsaku Tamiya, who has died at the age of 90.

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Linux Fu: The Cheap Macropad Conundrum

July 30, 2025 by Al Williams 9 Comments

You can get cheap no-brand macropads for almost nothing now. Some of them have just a couple of keys. Others have lots of keys, knobs, and LEDs. You can spring for a name brand, and it’ll be a good bet that it runs QMK. But the cheap ones? Get ready to download Windows-only software from suspicious Google Drive accounts. Will they work with Linux? Maybe.

Of course, if you don’t mind the keypad doing whatever it normally does, that’s fine. These are little more than HID devices with USB or Bluetooth. But what do those keys send by default? You will really want a way to remap them, especially since they may just send normal characters. So now you want to reverse engineer it. That’s a lot of work. Luckily, someone already has, at least for many of the common pads based around the CH57x chips.

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Be More Axolotl: How Humans May One Day Regrow Limbs And Organs

July 28, 2025 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

Although often glossed over, the human liver is a pretty amazing organ. Not just because it’s pretty much the sole thing that prevents our food from killing us, but also because it’s the only organ in our body that is capable of significant regeneration. This is a major boon in medicine, as you can remove most of a person’s liver and it’ll happily regrow back to its original volume. Obviously this is very convenient in the case of disease or when performing a liver transplant.

Despite tissue regeneration being very common among animals, most mammalian species have only limited regenerative ability. This means that while some species can easily regrow entire limbs and organs including eyes as well as parts of their brain, us humans and our primate cousins are lucky if we can even count on our liver to do that thing, while limbs and eyes are lost forever.

This raises many questions, including whether the deactivation of regenerative capabilities is just an evolutionary glitch, and how easily we might be able to turn it back on.

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Hackaday Links: July 27, 2025

July 27, 2025 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

Sad breaking news late this Sunday afternoon of the passing of nerd icon Tom Lehrer at 97. Coming up through the culture, knowing at least a few of Tom’s ditties, preferably “The Elements” or “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” was as essential to proving one’s bona fides as committing most Monty Python bits to memory. Tom had a way with words that belied his background as a mathematician, spicing his sarcastic lyrics with unusual rhymes and topical references that captured the turbulence of the late 50s and early 60s, which is when he wrote most of his well-known stuff. First Ozzy, then Chuck Mangione, now Tom Lehrer — it’s been a rough week for musicians.

Here we go again. It looks like hams have another spectrum grab on their hands, but this time it’s the popular 70-cm band that’s in the crosshairs. Starlink wannabe AST SpaceMobile, which seeks to build a constellation of 248 ridiculously large communication satellites to offer direct-to-device service across the globe, seeks a substantial chunk of the 70-cm band, from 430 to 440 MHz, to control the satellites. This is smack in the middle of the 70-cm amateur radio band allocation here in the US, but covers the entire band for unlucky hams in Europe and the UK. The band is frequently used for repeaters, which newbie hams can easily access using a cheap hand-held radio to start learning the ropes.

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Personalization, Industrial Design, And Hacked Devices

July 26, 2025 by Elliot Williams 29 Comments

[Maya Posch] wrote up an insightful, and maybe a bit controversial, piece on the state of consumer goods design: The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics. Her basic thesis is that the “form follows function” aesthetic has gone too far, and all of the functionally equivalent devices in our life now all look exactly the same. Take the cellphone, for example. They are all slabs of screen, with a tiny bezel if any. They are non-objects, meant to disappear, instead of showcases for cool industrial design.

Of course this is an extreme example, and the comments section went wild on this one. Why? Because we all want the things we build to be beautiful and functional, and that has always been in conflict. So even if you agree with [Maya] on the suppression of designed form in consumer goods, you have to admit that it’s not universal. For instance, none of our houses look alike, even though the purpose is exactly the same. (Ironically, architecture is the source of the form follows function fetish.) Cars are somewhere in between, and maybe the cellphone is the other end of the spectrum from architecture. There is plenty of room for form and function in this world.

But consider the smartphone case – the thing you’ve got around your phone right now. In a world where people have the ultimate homogeneous device in their pocket, one for which slimness is a prime selling point, nearly everyone has added a few millimeters of thickness to theirs, aftermarket, in the form of a decorative case. It’s ironically this horrendous sameness of every cell phone that makes us want to ornament them, even if that means sacrificing on the thickness specs.

Is this the same impetus that gave us the cyberdeck movement? The custom mechanical keyboard? All kinds of sweet hacks on consumer goods? The need to make things your own and personal is pretty much universal, and maybe even a better example of what we want out of nice design: a device that speaks to you directly because it represents your work.

Granted, buying a phone case isn’t necessarily creative in the same way as hacking a phone is, but it at least lets you exercise a bit of your own design impulse. And it frees the designers from having to make a super-personal choice like this for you. How about a “nothing” design that affords easy personalized ornamentation? Has the slab smartphone solved the form-versus-function fight after all?

Hackaday Podcast Episode 330: Hover Turtles, Dull Designs, And K’nex Computers

July 25, 2025 by Al Williams 1 Comment

What did you miss on Hackaday last week? Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Al Williams are ready to catch you up on this week’s podcast. First, though, the guys go off on vibe coding and talk about a daring space repair around Jupiter.

Then it is off to the hacks, including paste extruding egg shells, bespoke multimeters, and an 8-bit mechanical computer made from a construction toy set.

For can’t miss articles, you’ll hear about boring industrial design in modern cell phones and a deep dive into how fresh fruit makes it to your table in the middle of the winter.

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!

The DRM-free MP3 was stored in a public refrigerated warehouse to ensure freshness. Why not download it and add it to your collection?