Radio Shack Rebirth May Have Gone Awry In Alleged Ponzi-Like Scheme

September 25, 2025 by Lewin Day 32 Comments

Oh, Radio Shack. What a beautiful place you once were, a commercial haven for those seeking RC cars, resistors, and universal remotes. Then, the downfall, as you veered away from your origins, only to lead to an ultimate collapse. More recently, the brand was supposed to return to new heights online… only to fall afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission. (via Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg)

The Radio Shack brand was picked up a few years ago by a company known as Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV). The company’s modus operandi was to take well-known but beleaguered brands and relaunch them as online-only operations. Beyond Radio Shack, REV also owned a number of other notable brand names, like Pier 1, Modell’s Sporting Goods, and Dress Barn.

Unfortunately, the Radio Shack rebirth probably won’t reach the stellar heights of the past. Namely, because REV has been accused of operating a Ponzi-like scheme by the SEC. Despite huge boasts allegedly made to investors, none of REV’s portfolio of brands were actually making profits, and the SEC has charged that the company was paying investor returns with cash raised from other investors — unsustainable, and a major no-no, legally speaking. In any case, the SEC charges apply directly to REV. The RadioShack brand has since been acquired by Unicomer Group, which operates the current online business, and has no ties to REV or its former operators.

We were cautiously optimistic when we heard about the REV buyout back in 2020, but at this point, it’s probably best to come to terms with the fact that Radio Shack won’t be returning to its former glory. The name will linger in our hearts for some time to come, but the business we knew is long gone. Sometimes it’s better to look to the future than to try and recreate the magic of the past, especially if you’re doing inappropriate things with other people’s money in the process.

2025 Hackaday Superconference: Announcing Our Workshops And Tickets

September 23, 2025 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

Can you feel the nip of fall in the air? That can only mean one thing: Supercon is just around the corner. The next few weeks are going to bring a blitz of Supercon-related reveals, and we’re starting off with a big one: the workshops.

Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference, and you need to be there to attend a workshop. Both workshop and general admission tickets are on sale now! Don’t wait — they sell out fast.

Continue reading “2025 Hackaday Superconference: Announcing Our Workshops And Tickets” →

A New Generation Of Spacecraft Head To The ISS

September 18, 2025 by Tom Nardi 22 Comments

While many in the industry were at first skeptical of NASA’s goal to put resupply flights to the International Space Station in the hands of commercial operators, the results speak for themselves. Since 2012, the SpaceX Dragon family of spacecraft has been transporting crew and cargo from American soil to the orbiting laboratory, a capability that the space agency had lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle. Putting these relatively routine missions in the hands of a commercial provider like SpaceX takes some of the logistical and financial burden off of NASA, allowing them to focus on more forward-looking projects.

SpaceX Dragon arriving at the ISS for the first time in 2012.

But as the saying goes, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket. As successful as SpaceX has been, there’s always a chance that some issue could temporarily ground either the Falcon 9 or the Dragon.

While Russia’s Progress and Soyuz vehicles would still be available in an emergency situation, it’s in everyone’s best interest that there be multiple backup vehicles that can bring critical supplies to the Station.

Which is precisely why several new or upgraded spacecraft, designed specifically for performing resupply missions to the ISS and any potential commercial successor, are coming online over the next few years.

In fact, one of them is already flying its first mission, and will likely have arrived at the International Space Station by the time you read this article.

Continue reading “A New Generation Of Spacecraft Head To The ISS” →

American Science And Surplus Ends Online Sales

September 17, 2025 by Tom Nardi 29 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 25 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 14 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” →