Casting Metal Tools With Kitchen Appliances

November 18, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 13 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 John Elliot V 12 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 Navarre Bartz 86 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 Maya Posch 34 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” →

If IRobot Falls, Hackers Are Ready To Wrangle Roombas

November 13, 2025 by Tom Nardi 44 Comments

Things are not looking good for iRobot. Although their robotic Roomba vacuums are basically a household name, the company has been faltering financially for some time now. In 2024 there was hope of a buyout by Amazon, who were presumably keen to pull the bots into their Alexa ecosystem, but that has since fallen through. Now, by the company’s own estimates, bankruptcy is a very real possibility by the end of the year.

Hackaday isn’t a financial blog, so we won’t get into how and why iRobot has ended up here, although we can guess that intense competition in the market probably had something to do with it. We’re far more interested in what happens when those millions of domesticated robots start getting an error message when they try to call home to the mothership.

We’ve seen this scenario play out many times before — a startup goes belly up, and all the sudden you can’t upload new songs to some weirdo kid’s media player, or the gadget in your fridge stops telling you how old your eggs are. (No, seriously.) But the scale here is unprecedented. If iRobot collapses, we may be looking at one of the largest and most impactful smart-gadget screw overs of all time.

Luckily, we aren’t quite there yet. There’s still time to weigh options, and critically, perform the kind of research and reverse engineering necessary to make sure the community can keep the world’s Roombas chugging along even if the worst happens.

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Radio Apocalypse: Survivable Low-Frequency Communication System

November 12, 2025 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

In the global game of nuclear brinksmanship, secrets are the coin of the realm. This was especially true during the Cold War, when each side fielded armies of spies to ferret out what the other guy was up to, what their capabilities were, and how they planned to put them into action should the time come. Vast amounts of blood and treasure were expended, and as distasteful as the whole thing may be, at least it kept armageddon at bay.

But secrets sometimes work at cross-purposes to one’s goals, especially when one of those goals is deterrence. The whole idea behind mutually assured destruction, or MAD, was the certain knowledge that swift retaliation would follow any attempt at a nuclear first strike. That meant each side had to have confidence in the deadliness of the other’s capabilities, not only in terms of their warheads and their delivery platforms, but also in the systems that controlled and directed their use. One tiny gap in the systems used to transmit launch orders could spell the difference between atomic annihilation and at least the semblance of peace.

During the height of the Cold War, the aptly named Survivable Low-Frequency Communication System was a key part of the United States’ nuclear deterrence. Along with GWEN, HFGCS, and ERCS, SLFCS was part of the alphabet soup of radio systems designed to make sure the bombs got dropped, one way or another.

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