In Praise Of Plasma TVs

November 18, 2025 by Tyler August 29 Comments

I’m sitting in front of an old Sayno Plasma TV as I write this on my media PC. It’s not a productivity machine, by any means, but the screen has the resolution to do it so I started this document to prove a point. That point? Plasma TVs are awesome.

Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Bride

An Egyptian god might see pixels on an 8K panel, but we puny mortals won’t. Image “Horus Eye 2” by [Jeff Dahl]

The full-colour plasma screens that were used as TVs in the 2000s are an awkward technological cul-de-sac. Everyone knows and loves CRTs for the obvious benefits they offer– bright colours, low latency, and scanlines to properly blur pixel art. Modern OLEDs have more resolution than the Eye of Horus, never mind your puny human orbs, and barely sip power compared to their forbearers. Plasma, though? Not old enough to be retro-cool, not new enough to be high-tech, plasma displays are sadly forgotten.

It’s funny, because I firmly believe that without plasma displays, CRTs would have never gone away. Perhaps for that I should hate them, but it’s for the very reasons that Plasma won out over HD-CRTs in the market place that I love them.

What You Get When You Get a Plasma TV

I didn’t used to love Plasma TVs. Until a few years ago, I thought of them like you probably do: clunky, heavy, power-hungry, first-gen flatscreens that were properly consigned to the dustbin of history. Then I bought a house.

The house came with a free TV– a big plasma display in the basement. It was left there for two reasons: it was worthless on the open market and it weighed a tonne. I could take it off the wall by myself, but I could feel the ghost of OSHA past frowning at me when I did. Hauling it up the stairs? Yeah, I’d need a buddy for that… and it was 2020. By the time I was organizing the basement, we’d just gone into lockdown, and buddies were hard to come by. So I put it back on the wall, plugged in my laptop, and turned it on.

I was gobsmacked. It looked exactly like a CRT– a giant, totally flat CRT in glorious 1080p. When I stepped to the side, it struck me again: like a CRT, the viewing angle is “yes”. Continue reading “In Praise Of Plasma TVs” →

“AI, Make Me A Degree Certificate”

November 10, 2025 by Jenny List 139 Comments

One of the fun things about writing for Hackaday is that it takes you to the places where our community hang out. I was in a hackerspace in a university town the other evening, busily chasing my end of month deadline as no doubt were my colleagues at the time too. In there were a couple of others, a member who’s an electronic engineering student at one of the local universities, and one of their friends from the same course. They were working on the hardware side of a group project, a web-connected device which with a team of several other students, and they were creating from sensor to server to screen.

I have a lot of respect for my friend’s engineering abilities, I won’t name them but they’ve done a bunch of really accomplished projects, and some of them have even been featured here by my colleagues. They are already a very competent engineer indeed, and when in time they receive the bit of paper to prove it, they will go far. The other student was immediately apparent as being cut from the same cloth, as people say in hackerspaces, “one of us”.

They were making great progress with the hardware and low-level software while they were there, but I was saddened at their lament over their colleagues. In particular it seemed they had a real problem with vibe coding: they estimated that only a small percentage of their classmates could code by hand as they did, and the result was a lot of impenetrable code that looked good, but often simply didn’t work.

I came away wondering not how AI could be used to generate such poor quality work, but how on earth this could be viewed as acceptable in a university.
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Share Your Projects: Imperfectionism

November 6, 2025 by Arya Voronova 37 Comments

Everyone has a standard for publishing projects, and they can get pretty controversial. We see a lot of people complain about hacks embedded in YouTube videos, social media threads, Discord servers, Facebook posts, IRC channels, different degrees of open-sourcing, licenses, searchability, and monetization. I personally have my own share of frustrations with a number of these factors.

It’s common to believe that hacking as a culture doesn’t thrive until a certain set of conditions is met, and everyone has their own set of conditions in mind. My own dealbreaker, as you might’ve seen, is open-sourcing of code and hardware alike – I think that’s a sufficiently large barrier for hacking being repeatable, and repeatability is a big part of how hacking culture spreads.

This kind of belief is often self-limiting. Many people believe that their code or PCB source file is not a good contribution to hacking culture unless it meets a certain cleanliness or completeness standard. This is understandable, and I do that, too.

Today, I’d like to argue against my own view, and show how imperfect publishing helps build hacking culture despite its imperfections. Let’s talk about open-source in context of 3D printing.

Continue reading “Share Your Projects: Imperfectionism” →

Exploding The Mystical Craftsman Myth

October 27, 2025 by Jenny List 85 Comments

As a Hackaday writer, I see a lot of web pages, social media posts, videos, and other tips as part of my feed. The best ones I try to bring you here, assuming of course that one of my ever-vigilant colleagues hasn’t beaten me to it. Along the way I see the tropes of changing content creator fashion; those ridiculous pea-sized hand held microphones, or how all of a sudden everything has to be found in the woods. Some of them make me laugh, but there’s one I see a lot which has made me increasingly annoyed over the years. I’m talking of course about the craftsman myth.

No. The Last True Nuts And Bolts Are Not Being Made In Japan

If you don’t recognise the craftsman myth immediately, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with it even if you don’t realise it yet. It goes something like this: somewhere in Japan (or somewhere else perceived as old-timey in online audience terms like Appalachia, but it’s usually Japan), there’s a bloke in a tin shed who makes nuts and bolts.

But he’s not just any bloke in a tin shed who makes nuts and bolts, he’s a special master craftsman who makes nuts and bolts like no other. He’s about 120 years old and the last of a long line of nut and bolt makers entrusted with the secrets of nut and bolt making, father to son, since the 8th century. His tools are also mystical, passed down through the generations since they were forged by other mystical craftsmen centuries ago, and his forge is like no other, its hand-cranked bellows bring to life a fire using only the finest cedar driftwood charcoal. The charcoal is also made by a 120 year old master charcoal maker Japanese bloke whose line stretches back to the n’th century, yadda yadda. And when Takahashi-san finally shuffles off this mortal coil, that’s it for nuts and bolts, because the other nuts and bolts simply can’t compare to these special ones. Continue reading “Exploding The Mystical Craftsman Myth” →

Precision, Imprecision, Intellectual Honesty, And Little Green Men

October 18, 2025 by Elliot Williams 36 Comments

If you’ve been following the hubbub about 3I/ATLAS, you’re probably either in the camp that thinks it’s just a comet from ridiculously far away that’s managed to find its way into our solar system, or you’re preparing for an alien invasion. (Lukewarm take: it’s just a fast moving comet.) But that doesn’t stop it from being interesting – its relatively fast speed and odd trajectory make astronomers wonder where it’s coming from, and give us clues about how old it is likely to be.

Astronomy is the odd-man-out in the natural sciences. In most branches of physics, chemistry, and even biology, you can run experiments. Even those non-experimental corners of the above fields, like botany, for instance, you can get your hands on the objects you’re talking about. Not so astronomy. When I was studying in college, one of my professors quipped that astronomers were pretty happy when they could hammer down a value within an order of magnitude, and ecstatic when they could get a factor of two or three. The deck is simply stacked against them.

With that background, I love two recent papers about 3I/ATLAS. The first tries to figure out why it’s moving so fast by figuring out if it’s been going that fast since its sun kicked it out, or if it has picked up a gravitational boost along the way. While they can’t go all the way back in time, they’ve worked out whether it has flown by anything close enough to get a significant boost over the last 10 million years. This is impressive that we can calculate the trajectory so far back, but at the same time, 10 million years is peanuts on the cosmic timescale.

According to another paper, there is a weak relationship between interstellar objects’ age and their velocity, with faster-moving rocks being older, they can estimate the age of 3I/ATLAS at between 7.6 and 14 billion years old, assuming no gravitational boosts along the way. While an age range of 7 billion years may seem like a lot, that’s only a factor of two. A winner for astronomy!

Snarkiness aside, its old age does make a testable prediction, namely that it should be relatively full of water ice. So as 3I/ATLAS comes closer to the sun in the next few weeks, we’ll either see it spitting off lots of water vapor, and the age prediction checks out, or we won’t, and they’ll need to figure out why.

Whatever happens, I appreciate how astronomers aren’t afraid to outline what they can’t know – orbital dynamics further back than a certain date, or the precise age of rocks based solely on their velocity. Most have also been cautious about calling the comet a spaceship. On the other hand, if it is, one thing’s for sure: after a longer-than-10-million-year road trip, whoever is on board that thing is going to be hungry.

A Tale Of Two Car Design Philosophies

October 16, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 123 Comments

As a classic car enthusiast, my passion revolves around cars with a Made in West Germany stamp somewhere on them, partially because that phrase generally implied a reputation for mechanical honesty and engineering sanity. Air-cooled Volkswagens are my favorites, and in fact I wrote about these, and my own ’72 Super Beetle, almost a decade ago. The platform is incredibly versatile and hackable, not to mention inexpensive and repairable thanks to its design as a practical, affordable car originally meant for German families in the post-war era and which eventually spread worldwide. My other soft-spot is a car that might seem almost diametrically opposed to early VWs in its design philosophy: the Mercedes 300D. While it was a luxury vehicle, expensive and overbuilt in comparison to classic Volkswagens, the engineers’ design choices ultimately earned it a reputation as one of the most reliable cars ever made.

As much as I appreciate these classics, though, there’s almost nothing that could compel me to purchase a modern vehicle from either of these brands. The core reason is that both have essentially abandoned the design philosophies that made them famous in the first place. And while it’s no longer possible to buy anything stamped Made in West Germany for obvious reasons, even a modern car with a VIN starting with a W doesn’t carry that same weight anymore. It more likely marks a vehicle destined for a lease term rather than one meant to be repaired and driven for decades, like my Beetle or my 300D.

Continue reading “A Tale Of Two Car Design Philosophies” →

Easy For The Masses

October 11, 2025 by Elliot Williams 93 Comments

Last week, we were talking about how glad we are to be the type who by-and-large understands technology, and how it’s becoming more and more difficult to simply get along otherwise. We thought we had a good handle on the topic.

Then, we were talking about Google’s plans to require an ID for Android developers, and whether or not this will shut down free and open software development on the Android platform. Would this be the end of the ability to run whatever software that you’d like on your phone? Google offered the figleaf that “sideloading” – installing software through methods other than Google’s official store, would still be be allowed. But there’s a catch – you have to use Android Debug Bridge (ADB).

Is that a relief? It surely means that I will be able to install anything I want: I use ADB all the time, because it’s one of the fastest and easiest ways to transfer files and update software on the device. But how many non-techies do you know who use ADB? We’d guess that requiring this step shuts out 99.9% of Android users. If you make software hard to install for the masses, even if you make it possible for the geeks, you’re effectively killing it.

I have long wondered why end-to-end encrypted e-mail isn’t the default. After all, getting a GPG signing key, distributing it to your friends, and then reading mail with supporting software shouldn’t be a big deal, right? If GPG signing were available by default in Outlook or GMail, everyone would sign their e-mail. But there is no dead-simple, non-techie friendly way to do so, and so nobody does it.

Requiring ADB to load Android software is going to have the same effect, and it’s poised to severely restrict the amount of good, open software we have on the platform unless we can figure out a way to make installing that software easy enough that even the naive users can do it.