American Science And Surplus Ends Online Sales

September 17, 2025 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

For nearly 90 years, American Science and Surplus has been shipping out weird and wonderful stuff to customers far and wide. In the pre-Internet days, getting their latest catalog in the mail — notable for its hand-drawn illustrations and whimsical style — was always exciting. From Romanian gas masks to odd-ball components, there was no telling what new wonders each issue would bring. In time, the printed catalog gave way to a website, but the eclectic offerings and hand-drawn images remained.

Unfortunately, those days are officially no more. Earlier this week, American Science and Surplus had to make the difficult decision to shutter their entire mail order division. It’s no secret that the company as a whole had been struggling over the last few years. Like many small businesses they were hit hard during the COVID-19 years, and while they made it through that particular storm, they faced skyrocketing operational costs.

Earlier this year, the company turned to crowd funding to help stay afloat. That they were able to raise almost $200,000 speaks to how much support they had from their community of customers, but while it put the company in a better position, the writing was on the wall. The warehouse space required to support their mail order operations was simply too expensive to remain viable.

But it’s not all bad news. At least two of the company’s physical storefronts, located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Geneva, Illinois will remain open and operate under the ownership of the employees themselves. The fate of the third store in Park Ridge, Illinois is less clear. They currently don’t have a buyer, but it sounds like they haven’t given up hope of selling it yet.

Anyone in the Illinois area feel like getting some buddies together and buying a turn-key surplus business?

Reviewing Deluxe Paint, 40 Years On

September 16, 2025 by Tyler August 14 Comments

When Deluxe Paint came out with the original Amiga in 1985, it was the killer app for the platform. [Christopher Drum] starts his recent article on just that note, remembering the day he and his mother walked into a computer store, and walked out with a brand new Amiga… thanks entirely to Deluxe Paint. Forty years on, how well can this killer app compete?

[Christopher] isn’t putting Deluxe Paint head-to-head with modern Photoshop; they’re hardly in the same class. Not Photoshop, no, but modern applications that do what Deluxe Paint did so well: pixel art. There was no need to call it pixel art back then, no, but with the resolutions on hand, all digital art was pixel art in 1985.

Or 1989, which is when Deluxe Paint III came out– that’s the last version written by Dan Silva and coincidentally the last version [Christopher] owned, and the one he focuses in on his tests. It has held up amazingly well.

Sure, you don’t get a full 24-bit colour palette, but most pixel artists stick to limited palettes still anyway. You don’t quite get a modern UI, but presence of useful keyboard shortcuts allows a Hands-On-Keybord-And-Mouse (We’ll call it HOKAM, in honour of HOTAS in aerospace) workflow that is incredibly efficient.

About the only things [Christopher] found Deluxe Paint III lacked compared to its successors were a proper layering system, and of course the infinite undo we’ve all gotten so used to. (DPIII has an undo button, but it could only store one operation.) He also complained about cursor latency for some brushes, but we wonder if that might have had something to do with Windows and the emulation layer adding a delay. One thing Amiga was always known for back in the day was the snappy cursor movement, even when the processor was loaded.

There were just as many features he found had been forgotten in the new generation — like palatte swapping animations, or flood-filling line gradients.

It’s a small detail, but that’s a nice gradient tool.

Anyone who owned an Amgia probably has fond memories of it, but alas, in spite of Commodore’s recent resurrection, we’re not likely to see a new one soon. On the other hand, at least when it comes to pixel art, there’s apparently no need to upgrade.

via reddit.

(Thumbnail and header image by Avril Harrison, distributed by Electronic Arts with Deluxe Paint.)

Perovskite Solar Cell Crystals See The Invisible

September 16, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 13 Comments

A new kind of ‘camera’ is poking at the invisible world of the human body – and it’s made from the same weird crystals that once shook up solar energy. Researchers at Northwestern University and Soochow University have built the first perovskite-based gamma-ray detector that actually works for nuclear medicine imaging, like SPECT scans. This hack is unusual because it takes a once-experimental lab material and shows it can replace multimillion-dollar detectors in real-world hospitals.

Current medical scanners rely on CZT or NaI detectors. CZT is pricey and cracks like ice on a frozen lake. NaI is cheaper, but fuzzy – like photographing a cat through steamed-up glass. Perovskites, however, are easier to grow, cheaper to process, and now proven to detect single photons with record-breaking precision. The team pixelated their crystal like a smartphone camera sensor and pulled crisp 3D images out of faint radiation traces. The payoff: sharper scans, lower radiation doses, and tech that could spread beyond rich clinics.

Perovskite was once typecast as a ‘solar cell wonder,’ but now it’s mutating into a disruptive medical eye. A hack in the truest sense: re-purposing physics for life-saving clarity.

Neural network shown on original mac screen, handwritten 2 on left and predictions on right

Original Mac Limitations Can’t Stop You From Running AI Models

September 15, 2025 by Ian Bos 14 Comments

Modern retrocomputing tricks often push old hardware and systems further than any of the back-in-the-day developers could have ever dreamed. How about a neural network on an original Mac? [KenDesigns] does just this with a classic handwritten digit identification network running with an entire custom SDK!

Getting such a piece of hardware running what is effectively multiple decades of machine learning is as hard as most could imagine. (The MNIST dataset used wasn’t even put together until the 90s.) Due to floating-point limitations on the original Mac, there are a variety of issues with attempting to run machine learning models. One of the several hoops to jump through required quantization of the model. This also allows the model to be squeezed into the limited RAM of the Mac.

Impressively, one of the most important features of [KenDesigns] setup is the custom SDK, allowing for the lack of macOS. This allows for incredibly nitty-gritty adjustments, but also requires an entire custom installation. Not all for nothing, though, as after some training manipulation, the model runs with some clear proficiency.

If you want to see it go, check out the video embedded below. Or if you just want to run it on your ancient Mac, you’ll find a disk image here. Emulators have even been tested to work for those without the original hardware. Newer hardware traditionally proves to be easier and more compact to use than these older toys; however, it doesn’t make it any less impressive to run a neural network on a calculator!

Continue reading “Original Mac Limitations Can’t Stop You From Running AI Models” →

E-Waste And Waste Oil Combine To Make Silver

September 14, 2025 by Tyler August 12 Comments

As the saying goes, “if it can’t be grown, it has to be mined”– but what about all the metals that have already been wrested from the bosom of the Earth? Once used, they can be recycled– or as this paper charmingly puts it, become ore for “urban mining” techniques. The technique under discussion in the Chemical Engineering Journal is one that extracts metallic silver from e-waste using fatty acids and hydrogen peroxide.

This “graphical abstract” gives the rough idea.

Right now, recycling makes up about 17% of the global silver supply. As rich sources of ore dry up, and the world moves to more sustainable footing, that number can only go up. Recycling e-waste already happens, of course, but in messy, dangerous processes that are generally banned in the developed world. (Like open burning, of plastic, gross.)

This paper describes a “green” process that even the most fervant granola-munching NIMBY wouldn’t mind have in their neighborhood: hot fatty acids (AKA oil) are used as an organic solvent to dissolve metals from PCB and wire. The paper mentions sourcing the solvent from waste sunflower, safflower or canola oil. As you might imagine, most metals, silver included, are not terribly soluble in sunflower oil, but a little refining and the addition of 30% hydrogen peroxide changes that equation.

More than just Ag is picked up in this process, but the oils do select for silver over other metals. The paper presents a way to then selectively precipitate out the silver as silver oleate using ethanol and flourescent light. The oleate compound can then be easily washed and burnt to produce pure silver.

The authors of the paper take the time to demonstrate the process on a silver-plated keyboard connector, so there is proof of concept on real e-waste. Selecting for silver means leaving behind gold, however, so we’re not sure how the economics of this method will stack up.

Of course, when Hackaday talks about recycling e-waste, it’s usually more on the “reuse” part of “reduce, reuse, recycle”. After all, one man’s e-waste is another man’s parts bin–or priceless historical artifact.

Thanks to [Brian] for the tip.Your tips can be easily recycled into Hackaday posts through an environmentally-friendly process via our tipsline.

A worker inspects JUNO's acrylic sphere under the watching eye of PMTs

Worlds Largest Neutrino Detector Is Collecting Data In China

September 1, 2025 by Tyler August 16 Comments

To say that neutrinos aren’t the easiest particles to study would be a bit of an understatement. Outside of dark matter, there’s not much in particle physics that is as slippery as the elusive “ghost particles” that are endlessly streaming through you and everything you own. That’s why its exciting news that JUNO is now taking data as the world’s largest detector.

First, in case you’re not a physics geek, let’s go back to basics. Neutrinos are neutral particles (the name was coined by Fermi as “little neutral one”) with very, very little mass and a propensity for slipping in between the more-common particles that make up everyday matter. The fact that neutrinos have mass is kind of weird, in that it’s not part of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Since the Standard Model gets just about everything else right (except for dark matter) down to quite a few decimal points, well… that’s a very interesting kind of weird, hence the worldwide race to unravel the mysteries of the so-called “ghost particle”. We have an explainer article here for anyone who wants more background.

Continue reading “Worlds Largest Neutrino Detector Is Collecting Data In China” →

Google Will Require Developer Verification Even For Sideloading

August 26, 2025 by Maya Posch 115 Comments

Do you like writing software for Android, perhaps even sideload the occasional APK onto your Android device? In that case some big changes are heading your way, with Google announcing that they will soon require developer verification for all applications installed on certified Android devices – meaning basically every mainstream device. Those of us who have distributed Android apps via the Google app store will have noticed this change already, with developer verification in the form of sending in a scan of your government ID now mandatory, along with providing your contact information.

What this latest change thus effectively seems to imply is that workarounds like sideloading or using alternative app stores, like F-Droid, will no longer suffice to escape these verification demands. According to the Google blog post, these changes will be trialed starting in October of 2025, with developer verification becoming ‘available’ to all developers in March of 2026, followed by Google-blessed Android devices in Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore becoming the first to require this verification starting in September of 2026.

Google expects that this system will be rolled out globally starting in 2027, meaning that every Google-blessed Android device will maintain a whitelist of ‘verified developers’, not unlike the locked-down Apple mobile ecosystem. Although Google’s claim is that this is for ‘security’, it does not prevent the regular practice of scammers buying up existing – verified – developer accounts, nor does it harden Android against unscrupulous apps. More likely is that this will wipe out Android as an actual alternative to Apple’s mobile OS offerings, especially for the hobbyist and open source developer.