2025 Hackaday Speakers, Round One! And Spoilers

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! Just check out this roster of talks that will be going down. We’ve got something for everyone out there in the Hackday universe, from poking at pins, to making things beautiful, to robots, radios, and FPGAs. And this isn’t even half of the list yet.

We’ve got a great mix of old favorites and new faces this year, and as good as they are, honestly the talks are only half of the fun. The badge hacking, the food, the brainstorming, and just the socializing with the geekiest of the geeky, make it an event you won’t want to miss. If you don’t have tickets yet, you can still get them here.

Plus, this year, because Friday night is Halloween, we’ll be hosting a Sci-Fi-themed costume party for those who want to show off their best props or most elaborate spacesuits. And if that is the sort of thing that you’re into, you will absolutely want to stay tuned to our Keynote Speaker(s) announcement in a little while. (Spoiler number one.) Continue reading “2025 Hackaday Speakers, Round One! And Spoilers”

Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop?

If you read “Jenny’s Daily Drivers” or “Linux Fu” here on Hackaday, you know we like Linux. Jenny’s series, especially, always points out things I want to try on different distributions. However, I have a real tendency not to change my distro, especially on my main computer. Yet I know people “distro hop” all the time. My question to you? How do you do it?

The Easy but Often Wrong Answer

Sure, there’s an easy answer. Keep your /home directory on a separate disk and just use it with a new boot image. Sounds easy. But the truth is, it isn’t that easy. I suppose if you don’t do much with your system, that might work. But even if you don’t customize things at the root level, you still have problems if you change desktop environments or even versions of desktop environments. Configuration files change over time. Good luck if you want to switch to and from distros that are philosophically different, like systemd vs old-school init; apparmor vs SELinux. So it isn’t always as simple as just pointing a new distro at your home directory.

One thing I’ve done to try out new things is to use a virtual machine. That’s easy these days. But it isn’t satisfying if your goal is to really switch to a new distro as your daily driver. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: How Do You Distro Hop?”

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Hackaday Links: September 28, 2025

In today’s “News from the Dystopia” segment, we have a story about fighting retail theft with drones. It centers on Flock Safety, a company that provides surveillance technologies, including UAVs, license plate readers, and gunshot location systems, to law enforcement agencies. Their flagship Aerodome product is a rooftop-mounted dock for a UAV that gets dispatched to a call for service and acts as an eye-in-the-sky until units can arrive on scene. Neat idea and all, and while we can see the utility of such a system in a first responder situation, the company is starting to market a similar system to retailers and other private sector industries as a way to contain costs. The retail use case, which the story stresses has not been deployed yet, would be to launch a drone upon a store’s Asset Protection team noticing someone shoplifting. Flock would then remotely pilot the drone, following the alleged thief back to their lair or hideout and coordinating with law enforcement, who then sweep in to make an arrest.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: September 28, 2025”

Whither The Chip Shortage?

Do you remember the global chip shortage? Somehow it seems so long ago, but it’s not even really been three years yet. Somehow, I had entirely forgotten about it, until two random mentions about it popped up in short succession, and brought it all flooding back like a repressed bad dream.

Playing the role of the ghost-of-chip-shortage-past was a module for a pair of FPV goggles. There are three versions of the firmware available for download at the manufacturer’s website, and I had to figure out which I needed. I knew it wasn’t V1, because that was the buggy receiver PCB that I had just ordered the replacement for. So it was V2 or V3, but which?

Digging into it, V2 was the version that fixed the bug, and V3 was the redesign around a different microcontroller chip, because they couldn’t get the V2 one during the chip shortage.

I saw visions of desperate hackers learning new toolchains, searching for alternative parts, finding that they could get that one chip, but that there were only 20 of them left and they were selling for $30 instead of $1.30. I know a lot of you out there were designing through these tough couple years, and you’ve all probably got war stories.

And yet here we are, definitively post-chip-shortage. How can you be sure? A $30 vape pen includes a processor that we would have killed for just three years ago. The vape includes a touchscreen, just because. And it even has a Bluetooth LE chip that it’s not even using. My guess is that the hardware designers just put it in there hoping that the firmware team would get around to using it for something.

This vape has 16 MB of external SPI Flash! During the chip shortage, we couldn’t even get 4 MB SPI flash.

It’s nice to be on the other side of the chip shortage. Just order whatever parts you want and you get them, but don’t take for granted how luxurious that feels. Breathe easy, and design confidently. You can finally use that last genuine STM32F103 blue pill board without fear of it being the last one on earth.

(Featured image is not an actual photo of the author, although he does sometimes have that energy.)

Hackaday Podcast Episode 339: The Vape Episode, A Flying DeLorean, And DIY Science

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this week’s episode off with an update on the rapidly approaching 2025 Supercon in Pasadena, California. From there they’ll talk about the surprisingly high-tech world of vapes, a flying DeLorean several years in the making, non-contact pulse monitoring, and the potential of backyard radio telescopes to do real astronomy. You’ll hear about a dodecahedron speaker, a page turning peripheral, and 3D printed tools for unfolding boxes. They’ll wrap things up by taking a look at the latest generation of wearable smart glasses, and wonder if putting a bank of batteries in your home is really with the hassle.

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!

Direct download in DRM-free MP3.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 339: The Vape Episode, A Flying DeLorean, And DIY Science”

This Week In Security: Randomness Is Hard, SNMP Shouldn’t Be Public, And GitHub Malware Delivery

Randomness is hard. To be precise, without dedicated hardware, randomness is impossible for a computer. This is actually important to keep in mind when writing software. When there’s not hardware providing true randomness, most rnd implementations use a seed value and a pseudo random number generator (PRNG). A PRNG is a function that takes a seed value, and turns it into a seemingly random value, and also produces a new seed for the next time a random value is needed. This could be as simple as a SHA256 sum, where the hash output is split to become the next seed and the random value.

The PRNG approach does still have a challenge. Where does the initial seed come from? There are a few common, if flawed, approaches, and one of the most common is to use the system clock. It’s not a bulletproof solution, but using the microsecond counter since the last system boot is often good enough, because there are a lot of them to choose from — the entropy is high. With that brief background in mind, let’s talk about what happens in VBScript. The Randomize call is used to seed that initial value, but Randomize has some quirks.

The first is a great feature: calling Randomize a second time with the same seed doesn’t reset the PRNG engine back to the same initial state. And second, when called without a value, Randomize uses the number of system ticks since midnight as the PRNG seed. There are 64 ticks per second, giving five-and-a-half million possible seeds, or 22 bits of entropy. This isn’t great on its own, but Randomize internally typecasts that number of ticks into a narrower value, with a maximum possible of time-based seeds set at 65,536, which is a lot easier to brute-force.

We don’t know the exact application where the researchers at Doyensec found VBScript generating secure tokens, but in their Proof of Concept (PoC) test run, the generated token could be found in four guesses. It’s a terrible security fail for basically any use, and it’s a deceptively easy mistake to make.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: Randomness Is Hard, SNMP Shouldn’t Be Public, And GitHub Malware Delivery”

How Water Vapor Makes Smartphones Faster

Once upon a time, home computers were low-powered enough that they barely needed any cooling at all. An Amiga 500 didn’t even have a heatsink on the CPU, while the early Macintosh got by with a single teeny little fan.

Modern smartphones are far more powerful than these ancient machines, packed with multi-core processors running at speeds of many gigahertz. Even still, they’ve generally been able to get by without any active cooling devices. However, as manufacturers continue to push the envelope of performance, they’ve had to scramble for ways to suck heat out of these handheld computers. Vapor chamber cooling has risen as a solution to this problem, using simple physics to keep your handset humming along at maximum speed for longer.

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