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Mating Cycles: Engineering Connectors To Last

November 20, 2025 by 52 Comments

If you take a look around you, chances are pretty good that within a few seconds, your eyes will fall on some kind of electrical connector. In this day and age, it’s as likely as not to be a USB connector, given their ubiquity as the charger of choice for everything from phones to flashlights. But there are plenty of other connectors, from mains outlets in the wall to Ethernet connectors, and if you’re anything like us, you’ve got a bench full of DuPonts, banana plugs, BNCs, SMAs, and all the rest of the alphabet soup of connectors.

Given their propensity for failure and their general reputation as a necessary evil in electrical designs, it may seem controversial to say that all connectors are engineered to last. But it’s true; they’re engineered to last, but only for as long as necessary. Some are built for only a few cycles of mating, while others are built for the long haul. Either way, connectors are a great case study in engineering compromise, one that loops physics, chemistry, and materials science into the process.

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Hackers Can’t Spend A Penny

November 19, 2025 by 85 Comments

We aren’t here to praise the penny, but rather, to bury it. The penny, and its counterparts, have been vanishing all around the world as the cost of minting one far outweighs its value. But hackers had already lost a big asset: real copper pennies, and now even the cheaply made ones are doomed to extinction.

If you check your pockets and find a pre-1982 penny, it’s almost all copper. Well, 95% of its slightly-more-than-3-gram heft is pure copper. Since then, the copper penny’s been a fraud, weighing 2.5 g and containing only a 2.5% copper plate over a zinc core. During WWII, they did make some oddball steel pennies, but that was just a temporary measure.

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Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia

November 19, 2025 by 56 Comments

We’re taught how to call emergency numbers from a young age; whether it be 911 in the US, 999 in the UK, or 000 in Australia. The concept is simple—if you need aid from police, fire, or ambulance, you pick up a phone and dial and help will be sent in short order.

It’s a service many of us have come to rely on; indeed, it’s function can swing the very balance between life or death. Sadly, in Australia, that has come to pass, with a person dying when their Samsung phone failed to reach the Triple Zero (000) emergency line. It has laid bare an obscure technical issue that potentially leaves thousands of lives at risk. Continue reading “Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia” →

Casting Metal Tools With Kitchen Appliances

November 18, 2025 by 22 Comments

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to starting a home blacksmithing operating is the forge. There’s really no way around having a forge; somehow the metal has to get hot enough to work. Although we might be imagining huge charcoal- or gas-fired monstrosities, [Shake the Future] has figured out how to use an unmodified, standard microwave oven to get iron hot enough to melt and is using it in his latest video to cast real, working tools with it.

In the past, [Shake the Future] has made a few other things with this setup like an aluminum pencil with a graphite core. This time, though, he’s stepping up the complexity a bit with a working tool. He’s decided to build a miniature bench vice, which uses a screw to move the jaws. He didn’t cast the screw, instead using a standard size screw and nut, but did cast the two other parts of the vice. He first 3D prints the parts in order to make a mold that will withstand the high temperatures of the molten metal. With the mold made he can heat up the iron in the microwave and then pour it, and then with some finish work he has a working tool on his hands.

A microwave isn’t the only kitchen appliance [Shake the Future] has repurposed for his small metalworking shop. He also uses a standard air fryer in order to dry parts quickly. He works almost entirely from the balcony of his apartment so he needs to keep his neighbors in mind while working, and occasionally goes to a nearby parking garage when he has to do something noisy. It’s impressive to see what can be built in such a small space, though. For some of his other work be sure to check out how he makes the crucibles meant for his microwave.

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Server racks branded with Internet Archive

Internet Archive Hits One Trillion Web Pages

November 18, 2025 by 14 Comments

In case you didn’t hear — on October 22, 2025, the Internet Archive, who host the Wayback Machine at archive.org, celebrated a milestone: one trillion web pages archived, for posterity.

Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle the organization and its facilities grew through the late nineties; in 2001 access to their archive was greatly improved by the introduction of the Wayback Machine. From their own website on Oct 21 2009 they explained their mission and purpose:

Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive’s mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.

We were curious about the Internet Archive technology. Storing a copy (in fact two copies!) of the internet is no mean feat, so we did some digging to find out how it’s done. The best information available is in this article from 2016: 20,000 Hard Drives on a Mission. They keep two copies of every “item”, which are stored in Linux directories. In 2016 they had over 30 petabytes of content and were ingesting at a rate of 13 to 15 terabytes per day, web, and television being the most voluminous.

In 2016 they had around 20,000 individual disk drives, each housed in specialized computers called “datanodes”. The datanodes have 36 data drives plus two operating system drives per machine. Datanodes are organized into racks of 10 machines, having 360 data drives per rack. These racks are interconnected via high-speed Ethernet to form a storage cluster.

Even though content storage tripled over 2012 to 2016, the count of disk drives stayed about the same; this is because of disk drive technology improvements. Datanodes that were once populated with 36 individual 2 terabyte drives are today filled with 8 terabyte drives, moving single node capacity from 72 terabytes (64.8 T formatted) to 288 terabytes (259.2 T formatted) in the same physical space. The evolution of disk density did not happen in a single step, so there are populations of 2, 3, 4, and 8 T drives in the storage clusters.

We will leave you with the visual styling of Hackaday Beta in 2004, and what an early google.com or amazon.com looked like back in the day. Super big shout out to the Internet Archive, thanks for providing such an invaluable service to our community, and congratulations on this excellent achievement.

A baby blue hatchback with red accents drives down a road with blurry trees and a blue sky in the background.

Hyundai Paywalls Brake Pad Changes

November 15, 2025 by 91 Comments

Changing the pads on your car’s brakes is a pretty straightforward and inexpensive process on most vehicles. However, many modern vehicles having electronic parking brakes giving manufacturers a new avenue to paywall simple DIY repairs.

Most EVs will rarely, if ever, need to replace their mechanical brake pads as in most driving situations the car will be predominantly relying on regenerative braking to slow down. A hot hatch like the Ioniq 5N, however, might go through brakes a lot faster if it spends a lot of time at the track, which is what happened with Reddit user [SoultronicPear].

Much to their chagrin, despite buying the required $60/wk subscription to the National Automotive Service Task Force (NASTF) and the $2,000 interface tool, [SoultronicPear]’s account was suspended because it was not intended for use for anyone but “service professionals.” Not exactly a Right-to-Repair friendly move on Hyundai’s part. After trying a number of different third party tools, they finally found a Harbor Freight T7 bidirectional scan tool was able to issue the parking brake retract command to perform the pad swap, albeit not without throwing some error codes in the process.

Electrification of vehicles should simplify repairs, but manufacturers are using it to do the opposite. Perhaps they should read our Minimal Motoring Manifesto? There is a glimmer of hope in the promises of Slate and Telo, but we’ll have to see if they make it to production first.

Android Developer Verification Starts As Google Partially Retreats On Measures

November 14, 2025 by 35 Comments

In a recent blog post Google announced that the early access phase of its Android Developer Verification program has commenced, as previously announced. In addition to this new announcement Google also claims to be taking note of the feedback it has been receiving, in particular pertaining to non-commercial developers for whom these new measures are incredibly inconvenient. Yet most notable is the ’empowering experienced users’ section, where Google admits that to developers and ‘power users’ the intensive handholding isn’t required and it’ll develop an ‘advanced flow’ where unverified apps can still be installed without jumping through (adb) hoops. Continue reading “Android Developer Verification Starts As Google Partially Retreats On Measures” →