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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Pickle Pi

March 25, 2024 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

The unstoppable [jefmer] wrote in to alert me to Pickle Pi, their latest Keebin’-friendly creation. Why “Pickle Pi”? Well, the Pi part should be obvious, but the rest comes from the Gherkin 30% ortholinear keyboard [jefmer] built with Gateron Yellows and, unfortunately, second-choice XDA keycaps, as the first batch were stolen off of the porch.

If you’re wondering where the rest of the keys are, they are accessible by holding various keys rather than tapping them. Shift is Shift when ~~tapped~~ held, but becomes Enter when tapped. [jefmer] wrote out their entire project description on the thing in order to break in the Gherkin.

The brains of this acrylic sandwich tablet is a Pi Zero 2, with a Pro Micro for the keyboard controller. Although programs like Ghostwriter and Thonny work fine, Chromium is “painfully slow” due to the RAM limitations of the Pi Zero 2. On the upside, battery life is 7-8 hours depending on usage. Even so, [jefmer] might replace it with a Pi 4 — the current battery pack won’t support a Pi 5.
Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Pickle Pi” →

Retrotechtacular: Right To Repair 1987

March 24, 2024 by Al Williams 26 Comments

In 1987, your portable Osborne computer had a problem. Who you gonna call? Well, maybe the company that made “The Osborne Survival Kit,” a video from Witt Services acquired by the Computer History Museum. The narrator, [Mark Witt], tells us that they’ve been fixing these computers for more than three years, and they want to help you fix it yourself. Those days seem long gone, don’t they?

Of course, one thing you need to know is how to clean your floppy drives. The procedure is easy; even a 10-year-old can do it. At least, we think [William Witt] is about 10 in the video. He did a fine job, and we wonder what he’s up to these days.

The next step was taking the machine apart, but that required adult supervision. In some cases, it also took a soldering iron. As a byproduct, the video inadvertently is a nice tear-down video, too.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: Right To Repair 1987” →

Hackaday Links: March 24, 2024

March 24, 2024 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Way to rub it in, guys. As it turns out, due to family and work obligations we won’t be able to see the next Great American Eclipse, at least not from anywhere near the path of totality, when it sweeps from Mexico into Canada on April 8. And that’s too bad, because compared to the eclipse back in 2017, “Eclipse 2: Solar Boogaloo” is occurring during a much more active phase in the solar cycle, with the potential for some pretty exciting viewing. The sun regularly belches out gigatons of plasma during coronal mass ejections (CMEs), most of which we can’t see with the naked eye because not only is staring at the sun not a great idea, but most of that activity occurs across the disk of the sun, obscuring the view in the background light. But during the eclipse, we — oops, you — might just get lucky enough to have a solar prominence erupt along the limb of the sun that will be visible during totality. The sun has been quite active lately, as reflected by the relatively high sunspot number, so even though it’s an outside chance, it’s certainly more likely than it was in 2017. Good luck out there. Continue reading “Hackaday Links: March 24, 2024” →

Fail Of The Week: A Potentially Lethal Tattoo Removal Laser Power Supply

March 24, 2024 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Caveat emptor is good advice in general, but in the wilds of eBay, being careful with what you buy could be life-saving. To wit, we present [Les Wright]’s teardown and very ginger power-up of an eBay tattoo-removal laser power supply.

Given that [Les] spent all of around $100 on this widowmaker, we’re pretty sure he knew what he was getting himself into. But he likely wasn’t quite prepared for the scale of the sketchiness this thing would exhibit. The deficiencies are almost too many to number, starting with the enclosure, which is not only made completely of plastic but assembled from individual sheets of flat plastic stock that show signs of being glued together by hand. Even the cooling water tank inside the case is pieced together this way, which probably led to the leaks that corroded the PCBs. Another assembly gem is the pair of screws the big energy storage capacitor is jammed under, presumably to hold it in place — because nothing says quality like a BOM that can’t spring for a couple of cable ties. Click through the break to read more and see the video.

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: A Potentially Lethal Tattoo Removal Laser Power Supply” →

It’s About Time

March 23, 2024 by Elliot Williams 52 Comments

I’m pretty good with time zones. After all, I live in Germany, Hackaday’s server is in Los Angeles, and our writers are scattered all over the globe. I’m always translating one time into another, and practice makes (nearly) perfect. But still, it got me.

I was in the states visiting my parents, when Daylight Saving Time struck, but only in the USA. Now all my time conversions were off by an hour, and once I’d worked through the way the sun travels around the globe, I thought I had it made. And then my cell phone started reporting a time that was neither CEST nor EDT, but a third time zone that was an hour off. Apparently some cell towers don’t transmit time zone information, and my phone defaults to UTC. Who knew? For a short while, my phone lied to me, the microwave oven clock in the hotel lied to me, and I felt like I was going nuts.

But this all got me thinking about clocks and human time, and possibly the best advice I’ve ever heard for handling it in your own programs. Always keep time in something sensible like UNIX time – seconds elapsed since an epoch – because you don’t have to worry about anything more than adding one to a counter every second. When and if you need to convert to or from human times, you can write the function to do that simply enough, if you don’t already have a library function to do so.

Want to set an alarm for 2 hours from now? That’s easy, because you only need to add 7,200 seconds, and you don’t need to worry about 59 wrapping around to 0 or 23:59 to 0:00. Time math is easy in seconds. February 29th? That’s just another 86,400 seconds. It’s only us humans who make it complicated.

Hackaday Podcast Episode 263: Better DMCA, AI Spreadsheet Play, And Home Assistants Your Way

March 22, 2024 by Al Williams 4 Comments

No need to wonder what stories Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams were reading this week. They’ll tell you about them in this week’s podcast. The guys revisit the McDonald’s ice cream machine issue to start. This week, DIY voice assistants and home automation took center stage. But you’ll also hear about AI chat models implemented as a spreadsheet, an old-school RC controller, and more.

How many parts does it take to make a radio? Not a crystal radio, a software-defined one. Less than you might think. Of course, you’ll also need an antenna, and you can make one from lawn chair webbing.

In the can’t miss articles, you’ll hear about the problems with the x86 architecture and how they tried to find Martian radio broadcasts in the 1920s.

Miss any this week? Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, leave your comments!

Direct download in DRM-free MP3.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 263: Better DMCA, AI Spreadsheet Play, And Home Assistants Your Way” →

This Week In Security: Loop DOS, Flipper Responds, And More!

March 22, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 8 Comments

Here’s a fun thought experiment. UDP packets can be sent with an arbitrary source IP and port, so you can send a packet to one server, and could aim the response at another server. What happens if that response triggers another response? What if you could craft a packet that continues that cycle endlessly? That is essentially the idea behind Loop DoS (Denial of Service).

This unique avalanche of packets has been managed using specific implementations of several different network services, like TFTP, DNS, and NTP. There are several CVEs being used to track the issue, but CVE-2024-2169 is particularly odd, with the description that “Implementations of UDP application protocol are vulnerable to network loops.” This seems to be a blanket CVE for UDP, which is particularly inappropriate given that the first DoS of this sort was first reported in 2009 at the latest.

More details are available in a Google Doc. There some interesting tidbits there, like the existence of cross-protocol loops, and several legacy protocols that are vulnerable by design. The important thing to remember here is you have to have an accessible UDP port for this sort of attack to take place, so if you’re not using it, firewall it.

Flipper Flips Back

We’ve covered the saga of the Flipper Zero vs the Canadian government, in the context of car theft. The short version is that Canada has seen an uptick of car thefts from organized crime. Rather than meaningfully dealing with this problem, the Canadian government went looking for scapegoats, and found the Flipper Zero.

Well now, Flipper has responded, and put simply, the message is “stop the madness”. There has never been a confirmed case of using a flipper to steal a car, and it’s very unlikely it’s ever happened. On a modern car with proper rolling-code security, it’s not meaningfully possible to use the Flipper Zero for the theft. The two primary ways criminals actually steal cars are with dedicated keyfob repeaters and CAN bus hackers.

There is a petition to sign, and for Canadians, Flipper suggests contacting your local member of parliament. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Loop DOS, Flipper Responds, And More!” →