Hackaday Columns

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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.

Hack On Self: Quest System Basics

February 7, 2025 by 7 Comments

Whenever I play an RPG, whether it’s Fallout or Cyberpunk 2077, I complete every single quest available to me. The quests grab my attention in an unprecedented way – doesn’t hurt that there’s rewards and progression markers attached. Of course, these systems are meticulously designed to grab attention, making sure you can enjoy the entirety of the game’s content.

Does quest progression in an RPG tangibly impact my life? No. Do they have control over my attention? Yes, for sure. My day-to-day existence is the opposite – my real-life decisions impact me significantly, and yet, keeping attention on them is a struggle. Puzzling, disturbing – and curious. I feel like I’ll never forgive myself if I ignore this problem any longer.

So, I wrote a simple quest system prototype. As usual, it worked, it failed, and it taught me things. Here’s how I did it.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 307: CNC Tattoos, The Big Chill In Space, And PCB Things

February 7, 2025 by 3 Comments

The answer is: Elliot Williams, Al Williams, and a dozen or so great hacks. The question?  What do you get this week on the Hackaday podcast? This week’s hacks ran from smart ring hacking, to computerized tattoos. Keyboards, PCBs, and bicycles all make appearances, too.

Be sure to try to guess the “What’s that sound?” You could score a cool Hackaday Podcast T.

For the can’t miss this week, Hackaday talks about how to dispose of the body in outer space and when setting your ship’s clock involved watching a ball drop.

 

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This Week In Security: Medical Backdoors, Strings, And Changes At Let’s Encrypt

February 7, 2025 by 12 Comments

There are some interesting questions afoot, with the news that the Contec CMS8000 medical monitoring system has a backdoor. And this isn’t the normal debug port accidentally left in the firmware. The CISA PDF has all the details, and it’s weird. The device firmware attempts to mount an NFS share from an IP address owned by an undisclosed university. If that mount command succeeds, binary files would be copied to the local filesystem and executed.

Additionally, the firmware sends patient and sensor data to this same hard-coded IP address. This backdoor also includes a system call to enable the eth0 network before attempting to access the hardcoded IP address, meaning that simply disabling the Ethernet connection in the device options is not sufficient to prevent the backdoor from triggering. This is a stark reminder that in the firmware world, workarounds and mitigations are often inadequate. For instance, you could set the gateway address to a bogus value, but a slightly more sophisticated firmware could trivially enable a bridge or alias approach, completely bypassing those settings. There is no fix at this time, and the guidance is pretty straightforward — unplug the affected devices.

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Sleeping arctic fox (Alopex lagopus). (Credit: Rama, Wikimedia)

Investigating Why Animals Sleep: From Memory Sorting To Waste Disposal

February 5, 2025 by 19 Comments

What has puzzled researchers and philosophers for many centuries is the ‘why’ of sleep, along with the ‘how’. We human animals know from experience that we need to sleep, and that the longer we go without it, the worse we feel. Chronic sleep-deprivation is known to be even fatal. Yet exactly why do we need sleep? To rest our bodies, and our brains? To sort through a day’s worth of memories? To cleanse our brain of waste products that collect as neurons and supporting cells busily do their thing?

Within the kingdom of Animalia one constant is that its brain-enabled species need to give these brains a regular break and have a good sleep. Although what ‘sleep’ entails here can differ significantly between species, generally it means a period of physical inactivity where the animal’s brain patterns change significantly with slower brainwaves. The occurrence of so-called rapid eye movement (REM) phases is also common, with dreaming quite possibly also being a feature among many animals, though obviously hard to ascertain.

Most recently strong evidence has arisen for sleep being essential to remove waste products, in the form of so-called glymphatic clearance. This is akin to lymphatic waste removal in other tissues, while our brains curiously enough lack a lymphatic system. So is sleeping just to a way to scrub our brains clean of waste?

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Telling Time Used To Be A Ball

February 4, 2025 by 14 Comments

If you watch the New Year’s festivities from New York, you know that they mark midnight with the dropping of a big, gaudy ball. You might assume this was just an arbitrary gimmick, but it turns out dropping balls has a place in the history of timekeeping, especially for ships at sea. The New York ball doesn’t work precisely the same, but it was clearly inspired by an ancient method of indicating the time.

Apparently, even the ancient Greeks used ball dropping to indicate time. But the modern ball got its start with [Captain Robert Wauchope], who installed one at Portsmouth, England, in 1829. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich got one in 1833, which you can see working in the video below.

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Keyboard Configurator

February 3, 2025 by 11 Comments

Have you ever wished you could experiment with different layouts super easily, just by adding or removing a few switches here and there and printing a new case? Well, [heyisjambo] says that it’s more than possible with menura, the modular keyboard system.

A collage of menura keyboards, which are modular via the VIK standard.
So many lovely options! Image by [heyisjambo] via GitHub
[heyisjambo] is happy with 36 keys, but is reduced-count-curious and wanted a way to explore without a lot of wasted time and PCBs.

At the same time, [heyisjambo] wanted to experiment with split vs. uni-body construction, and especially the different shapes that are possible when tweaking the angle and distance between them.

And as if that weren’t enough, there’s support for [Sadek Baroudi]’s VIK standard for interfacing data between PCBs, which calls for an FPC 12-pin, 0.5 mm pitch connector and allows for ultra-cool magnetic connectors. This way, you can easily add things like displays, trackpads, and trackballs in the between the halves.

Thanks for the tip, [calculus]!

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