Valentine’s Day…Hacks?

February 15, 2025 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

How do you reconcile your love for hacking projects together with your love for that someone special? By making him or her a DIY masterpiece of blinking red LEDs, but in heart shape. Maybe with some custom animations, and in a nice frame with a capacitive touch sensor to turn it on or off.

Or at least, that’s what I did. The good news is that my girlfriend, now wife, understands that this sort of present comes from a place of love. And it probably didn’t hurt that I also picked up some flowers to frame it with, and cooked her favorite lunch later that afternoon.

But if I’m 100% frank with myself, I’d have to admit that this was about 50% “present” and 50% “project”. Of course it also helps that she gets me, and that she knows that I put a bunch of effort into making it look as good as it did, and maybe because of that she forgives the 50% project.

Valentine’s day projects are a high-wire balancing act. If any other project fails, you can just try again. But here, the deadline is firm. Cosmetics matter a lot more on Valentine’s day than the other 364 days of the year, too. And finally, you really have to know the gift-receiver, and be sure that you’re not falling deeper into the excuse-for-a-cool-project trap than I did. And don’t forget the flowers.

I pulled it off with this one, at least, but I do feel like it was close, even today. Have you ever made a Valentine’s hacking project? How’d it go?

(Note: Featured image isn’t my project: It’s a lot more colorful!)

Hackaday Podcast Episode 308: The Worst 1 Ever, Google’s Find My Opened, And SAR On A Drone

February 14, 2025 by Jenny List 6 Comments

It’s Valentine’s Day today, and what better way to capture your beloved’s heart than by settling down together and listening to the Hackaday Podcast! Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for this week’s roundup of what’s cool in the world of hardware. We start by reminding listeners that Hackaday Europe is but a month away, and that a weekend immersed in both hardware hacking and the unique culture offered by the city of Berlin can be yours.

The stand-out hack of the week is introduced by Elliot, Henrik Forstén’s synthetic aperture radar system mounted on a cheap quadcopter, pushing the limits of construction, design, and computation to create landscape imagery of astounding detail. Most of us will never create our own SAR system, but we can all learn a lot about this field from his work. Meanwhile Jenny brings us Sylvain Munaut’s software defined radio made using different projects that are part of Tiny Tapeout ASICs. The SDR isn’t the best one ever, but for us it represents a major milestone in which Tiny Tapeout makes the jump from proof of concept to component. We look forward to more of this at more reasonable prices in the future. Beyond that we looked at the porting of Google Find My to the ESP32, how to repair broken zippers, and tuning in to ultrasonic sounds. Have fun listening, and come back next week for episode 309! Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 308: The Worst 1 Ever, Google’s Find My Opened, And SAR On A Drone” →

This Week In Security: The UK Wants Your ICloud, Libarchive Wasn’t Ready, And AWS

February 14, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 15 Comments

There’s a constant tension between governments looking for easier ways to catch criminals, companies looking to actually protect their users’ privacy, and individuals who just want their data to be truly private. The UK government has issued an order that threatens to drastically change this landscape, at least when it comes to Apple’s iCloud backups. The order was issued in secret, and instructed Apple to provide a capability for the UK officials to access iCloud backups that use the Advanced Data Protection (ADP) system. ADP is Apple’s relatively new end-to-end encryption scheme that users can opt-into to make their backups more secure. The key feature here is that with ADP turned on, Apple themselves don’t have access to decrypted user data.

If this order wasn’t onerous enough, it seems to explicitly include all ADP-protected data, regardless of the country of origin. This should ring alarm bells. The UK government is attempting to force a US company to add an encryption backdoor to give them access to US customer data. Cryptographer [Matthew Green] has thoughts on this situation. One of the slightly conspiratorial theories he entertains is that portions of the US government are quietly encouraging this new order because the UK has weaker protections against unreasonable search and seizure of data. The implication here is that those elements in the US would use this newfound UK data access capability to sidestep Fourth Amendment protections of citizens’ data. This doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.

[Matthew] does have a couple of suggestions. The first is passing laws that would make it illegal for a US company to add backdoors to their systems, specifically at the request of foreign nations. We’ve seen first-hand how such backdoors can backfire once accessed by less-friendly forces. In an ironic turn of fate, US agencies have even started recommending that users use end-to-end encrypted services to be safe against such backdoors. Technically, if this capability is added, the only recourse will be to disable iCloud backups altogether. Thankfully Apple has pushed back rather forcefully against this order, threatening to simply turn off ADP for UK users, rather than backdoor the rest of the world. Either way, it’s a scary bit of overreach.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: The UK Wants Your ICloud, Libarchive Wasn’t Ready, And AWS” →

Why AI Usage May Degrade Human Cognition And Blunt Critical Thinking Skills

February 13, 2025 by Maya Posch 98 Comments

Any statement regarding the potential benefits and/or hazards of AI tends to be automatically very divisive and controversial as the world tries to figure out what the technology means to them, and how to make the most money off it in the process. Either meaning Artificial Inference or Artificial Intelligence depending on who you ask, AI has seen itself used mostly as a way to ‘assist’ people. Whether in the form of a chat client to answer casual questions, or to generate articles, images and code, its proponents claim that it’ll make workers more efficient and remove tedium.

In a recent paper published by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) the findings from a survey are however that the effect is mostly negative. The general conclusion is that by forcing people to rely on external tools for basic tasks, they become less capable and prepared of doing such things themselves, should the need arise. A related example is provided by Emanuel Maiberg in his commentary on this study when he notes how simple things like memorizing phone numbers and routes within a city are deemed irrelevant, but what if you end up without a working smartphone?

Does so-called generative AI (GAI) turn workers into monkeys who mindlessly regurgitate whatever falls out of the Magic Machine, or is there true potential for removing tedium and increasing productivity?

Continue reading “Why AI Usage May Degrade Human Cognition And Blunt Critical Thinking Skills” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 820: Please Don’t Add AI Clippy To Thunderbird

February 12, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 3 Comments

This week, Jonathan Bennett talks Thunderbird with Ryan Sipes! What’s the story with almost becoming part of LibreOffice, How has Thunderbird collected so many donations, and more!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 820: Please Don’t Add AI Clippy To Thunderbird” →

PCB Design Review: M.2 SSD Splitter

February 12, 2025 by Arya Voronova 20 Comments

Today’s PCB design review is a board is from [Wificable]. iI’s a novel dual-SSD laptop adapter board! See, CPUs and chipsets often let you split wide PCIe links into multiple smaller width links. This board relies on a specific laptop with a specific CPU series, and a BIOS mod, to put two M.2 NVMe SSDs into a single SSD slot of a specific series’ laptop.

This board has two crucial factors – mechanical compatibility, and electrical function. Looking into mechanics, it’s a 0.8 mm thick PCB that plugs into a M.2 socket, and it has sockets for two SSDs on it – plenty of bending going on. For electronics, it has a PCIe REFCLK clock buffer, that [Wificable] found on Mouser – a must have for PCIe bifurcation, and a must-work for this board’s core! Apart from that, this is a 4-layer board, it basically has to be for diffpairs to work first-try.

Of course, the clock buffer chip is the main active component and the focus of the board, most likely mistakes will happen there – let’s look at the chip first.

Continue reading “PCB Design Review: M.2 SSD Splitter” →

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The SEGA Pico Keyboard

February 10, 2025 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

It’s been a minute since I featured a tiny keyboard, and that’s okay. But if you want to get your feet wet in the DIY keyboarding community, making a little macro pad like [Arnov Sharma]’s Paste Pal is a great place to start.

A macro pad with five switches and a small OLED display. — Image by [Arnov Sharma] via Hackaday.IO

This is a follow-up to his original Paste Pal, which only had two buttons for copy and paste plus an OLED display. This updated version does three more things thanks to a total of five blue (!) switches. The selected command shows up on the screen so you know what you’ve done.

Right now, [Arnov] has the Paste Pal set up to do Copy, Paste, Enter, Scroll Up, and Scroll Down, but changing the assignments is as easy as updating a few lines of code.

Paste Pal Mk. II is at heart a Seeed Xiao SAMD21, which in this case is programmed in Arduino. If you want to make things easier on yourself, you could program it in CircuitPython instead, although [Arnov] includes the Arduino code in his excellent build guide.

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The SEGA Pico Keyboard” →