Retrotechtacular: How Not To Use Hand Tools

May 6, 2024 by Dan Maloney 48 Comments

Whatever you’re doing with your hand tools, by the US Army’s lights, you’re probably doing it wrong. That seems to be the “Green Machine’s” attitude on pliers and screwdrivers, at least, the main stars of this 1943 War Department training film on the horrors of tool abuse.

As kitschy as the film might be, they weren’t wrong. That’s especially true about the dreaded slip-joint pliers, which seem to find their way onto everyone’s list of unloved tools and are shown being used for their true purpose — turning nuts and bolt heads from hexagons into circles. Once that gore is wrapped up, we’re treated to the proper uses of pliers, including the fascinating Bernard-style parallel jaw pliers. We can recall these beauties kicking around the bottom of Dad’s tool kit and being entranced by the mechanism used to keep the jaws parallel and amplify the force applied. Sadly, those pliers are long gone now; Tubalcain did a great review of these pliers a few years back if you need a refresher.

A selection of screwdrivers gets the same treatment, complete with dire warnings against using them as prybars and chisels. Also against the Army Way is using the wrong size screwdriver for the job, lest you strip the head of the screw or break the tool itself. It has to be said that the Plomb Tool Company of Los Angeles, which produced the film, made some fantastic-looking screwdrivers back in the day. The square shanks on some of those straight screwdrivers are enormous, and the wooden handles look so much more comfortable than the greebled-up plastic nonsense manufacturers seem to favor these days. Also interesting is the reference to the new-fangled Phillips screw, not to mention the appearance of a Yankee-style spiral ratcheting screwdriver, another of Dad’s prized acquisitions that thankfully is still around to this day.

What strikes us about these military training films is how many of them were produced. No subject seemed too mundane to get a training film made about it, and so many were made that one is left wondering how there was any time left for soldiering after watching all these films. But really, it’s not much different today, when we routinely pull up a random YouTube video to get a quick visual demo of how to do something we’ve never tried before. The medium may have changed, but visual learning is still a thing.

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Retrogadgets: The Ageia PhysX Card

May 6, 2024 by Al Williams 27 Comments

Old computers meant for big jobs often had an external unit to crunch data in specific ways. A computer doing weather prediction, for example, might have an SIMD (single instruction multiple data) vector unit that could multiply a bunch of numbers by a constant in one swoop. These days, there are many computers crunching physics equations so you can play your favorite high-end computer game. Instead of vector processors, we have video cards. These cards have many processing units that can execute “kernels” or small programs on large groups of data at once.

Awkward Years

However, there was that awkward in-between stage when personal computers needed fast physics simulation, but it wasn’t feasible to put array processing and video graphics on the same board. Around 2006, a company called Ageia produced the PhysX card, which promised to give PCs the ability to do sophisticated physics simulations without relying on a video card.

Keep in mind that when this was built, multi-core CPUs were an expensive oddity and games were struggling to manage everything they needed to with limited memory and compute resources. The PhysX card was a “PPU” or Physics Processor Unit and used the PCI bus. Like many companies, Ageia made the chips and expected other companies — notably Asus — to make the actual board you’d plug into your computer.

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Hackaday Links: May 5, 2024

May 5, 2024 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

It may be hard to believe, but BASIC turned 60 this week. Opinions about the computer language vary, of course, but one thing everyone can agree on is that Professors Kemeny and Kurtz really stretched things with the acronym: “Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code” is pretty tortured, after all. BASIC seems to be the one language it’s universally cool to hate, at least in its current incarnations like Visual Basic and VBA. But back in 1964, the idea that you could plunk someone down in front of a terminal, or more likely a teletype, and have them bang out a working “Hello, world!” program with just a few minutes of instruction was pretty revolutionary. Yeah, line numbers and GOTO statements encouraged spaghetti code and engrained bad programming habits, but at least it got people coding. And perhaps most importantly, it served as a “gateway drug” into the culture for a lot of us. Many of us would have chosen other paths in life had it not been for those dopamine hits provided by getting that first BASIC program working. So happy birthday BASIC!

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Tool-Building Mammals

May 4, 2024 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

It’s often said of us humans that we’re the only “tool-using mammals”. While not exclusive to the hacker community, a bunch of us are also “tool-building mammals” when we have the need or get the free time. I initially wanted to try to draw some distinction between the two modes, but honestly I think all good hackers do both, all the time.

We were talking about the cool variety of test probes on the podcast, inspired by Al Williams’ piece on back probes. Sometimes you need something that’s needle-thin and can sneak into a crimp socket, and other times you need something that can hold on like alligator clips. The infinite variety of jigs and holders that make it easier to probe tiny pins is nothing short of amazing. Some of these are made, and others bought. You do what you can, and you do what you need to.

You can learn a lot from looking at the professional gear, but you can learn just as much from looking at other hackers’ bodge jobs. In the podcast, I mentioned one of my favorite super-low-tech hacks: making a probe holder out of a pair of pliers and a rubber band to hold them closed. Lean this contraption onto the test point in question and gravity does the rest. I can’t even remember where I learned this trick from, but I honestly use it more than the nice indicator-arm contraptions that I built for the same purpose. It’s the immediacy and lack of fuss, I think.

So what’s your favorite way of putting the probe on the point? Home-made and improvised, or purpose-built and professional? Or both? Let us know!

Hackaday Podcast Episode 269: 3D Printed Flexure Whegs, El Cheapo Bullet Time, And A DIY Cell Phone Sniffer

May 3, 2024 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

This week, it was Kristina’s turn in the hot seat with Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams. First up in the news — the results are in for the 2024 Home Sweet Home Automation contest! First and second place went to some really gnarly, well-documented hacks, and third went to the cutest pill-dispensing robot you’ll probably see before you hit the retirement home. Which was your favorite? Let us know in the comments.

A collection of multimeter probe extenders from Radio Shack. — Kristina’s lil’ wallet of extender probes, courtesy of Radio Shack.

Then it’s on to What’s That Sound. Kristina failed once again, but you will probably fare differently. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what’s making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.

Then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with a DIY cell phone sniffer and a pen that changed the world. Then we talk bullet time on a budget, the beautiful marriage of 3D printing and LEGO, and, oh yes, flexure whegs. Finally, we get the lowdown on extender probes, and posit why it’s hard to set up time zones on the Moon, relatively speaking.

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!

Download and savor at your leisure.

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This Week In Security: Default Passwords, Lock Slapping, And Mastodown

May 3, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 8 Comments

The UK has the answer to all our IoT problems: banning bad default passwords. Additionally, the new UK law requires device makers to provide contact info for vulnerability disclosures, as well as a requirement to advertise vulnerability fix schedules. Is this going to help the security of routers, cameras, and other devices? Maybe a bit.

I would argue that default passwords are in themselves the problem, and complexity requirements only nominally help security. Why? Because a good default password becomes worthless once the password, or algorithm leaks. Let’s lay out some scenarios here. First is the static default password. Manufacturer X makes device Y, and sets the devices to username/password admin/new_Complex_P@ssword1!. Those credentials make it onto a default password list, and any extra security is lost.

What about those devices that have a different, random-looking password for each device? Those use an algorithm to derive that password from the MAC address and/or serial number. That may help the situation, but the algorithm can be retrieved from the firmware, and most serial numbers are predictable in one way or another. This approach is better, but not a silver bullet.

So what would a real solution to the password problem look like? How about no default password at all, but no device functionality until the new password passes a cracklib complexity and uniqueness check. I have seen a few devices that do exactly this. The requirement for a disclosure address is a great idea, which we’ve talked about before regarding the similar EU legislation.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 781: Resistant To The Wrath Of God

May 1, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 9 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls sit down with Mathias Buus Madsen and Paolo Ardoino of Holepunch, to talk about the Pear Runtime and the Keet serverless peer-to-peer platform. What happens when you take the technology built for BitTorrent, and apply it to a messaging app? What else does that allow you to do? And what’s the secret to keeping the service running even after the servers go down?

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