Sweet Hacks

July 15, 2023 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

While talking about a solar powered portable Bluetooth speaker project on the podcast, I realized that I have a new category of favorite hacks: daily-use hacks.

If you read Hackaday long enough, you’ll start to categorize everything. There are the purely technical hacks, beautiful hacks, minimalist hacks, maximalist hacks, and then the straight-up oddball hacks. Sometimes what strikes us is the beauty of the execution. Sometimes it’s clever choice of parts that were designed to do exactly the right thing, and simply watching them do their job well is satisfying, and other times we like to see parts fooled into doing something they have no right to.

While I really like the above speaker build because it’s beautiful, and because it uses a clever choice of audio amplifier to work with the supercapacitors’ wild voltage swings, what really struck me about the project is that [Jamie Matthews] has been using it every day for the last nine months. It’s on his desk and he uses it to listen to music.

That’s a simple feat in a way, but it’s a powerful one. Some of my absolutely favorite projects of my own are similar – they are ones that I use all the time. Not the cliche “life hack”, which are usually like a clever way to peel a grapefruit, but rather hacks that become part of daily life. So look around you, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll find a number of these “daily driver” hacks. And if you do, celebrate them.

(And maybe even send ’em in to the tips line to share!)

Ask Hackaday: Learn Assembly First, Last, Or Never?

July 14, 2023 by Al Williams 153 Comments

A few days ago, I ran into an online post where someone pointed out the book “Learn to Program with Assembly” and asked if anyone had ever learned assembly language as a first programming language. I had to smile because, if you are a certain age, your first language may well have been assembly, even if it was assembly for machines that never existed.

Of course, that was a long time ago. It is more likely, these days, if you are over 40, you might have learned BASIC first. Go younger, and you start skewing towards Java, Javascript, or even C. It got me thinking, though: should people learn assembly, and if so, when?

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Learn Assembly First, Last, Or Never?” →

ITER Dreams And The Practical Reality Of Making Nuclear Fusion Work On Earth

July 6, 2023 by Maya Posch 52 Comments

Doing something for the first time is tough. Yet to replicate the nuclear fusion process that powers the very stars, and do it right here on Earth in a controlled and sustained fashion is decidedly at the top of the list of ‘tough’ first times. What further complicates matters is when in order to even get to this ‘first’ you also add in a massive, international construction project and a heaping of geopolitics, all of which is a far cry from past nuclear fusion experiments.

With the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) as the most visible part of nuclear fusion research, it is perhaps little wonder that the recent string of delays and budget increases is leading some to proclaim doom and gloom over the entire sector. This ironically in contrast with the recent news from the US’s NIF and its laser-based inertial confinement fusion, which is both state-funded and will never produce commercial power.

In light of this, it feels pertinent to ask the question of whether ITER is the proverbial white elephant, or even the mausoleum of international science that a recent article in Scientific American makes it out to be. Is fusion research truly doomed to peter out amidst the seemingly never-ending work on ITER?

Continue reading “ITER Dreams And The Practical Reality Of Making Nuclear Fusion Work On Earth” →

Podcast Feedback: Be Careful What You Ask For

June 27, 2023 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

I had one of those experiences yesterday that seem so common these days: the arrival of a mystery Amazon package. You know the kind — you get a shipping notice from UPS with the faux-excited “Your package is arriving today!” message, but you’re sure you haven’t ordered anything in a while. You check your Amazon order history, find nothing pending, and puzzle over who could be sending you a package. What could it be? A gift from a secret admirer, perhaps?

And so it was with me as I waited for the UPS driver to make her rounds of our neighborhood and drop the package off on our front steps. Surprised at its size, I hurriedly brought it inside, zipped open the box, and pulled away the packing to reveal…

Continue reading “Podcast Feedback: Be Careful What You Ask For” →

Open Source And Giving Back

June 24, 2023 by Elliot Williams 41 Comments

3D printing YouTuber [Thomas Sanladerer] made a fairly contentious claim in a video about the state of open source hardware and software: namely that it’s not viable “anymore”. You can watch his video for more nuance, but the basic claim is that there are so many firms who are reaping the benefits of open designs and code that the people who are actually doing the work can’t afford to make a living anymore.

[Thomas] then goes on to mention a few companies that are patenting their 3DP innovations, and presumably doing well by it, and he then claims that patenting is probably the right way forward from a business standpoint.

The irony that he says this with a Voron 3D printer sitting behind him was not lost on us. The Voron is, after all, a very successful open-source 3D printer design. It’s just rock solid, has lots of innovative touches, and an extensive bill of materials. They don’t sell anything, but instead rely on donations from their large community to keep afloat and keep designing.

At the same time, a whole bunch of companies are offering Voron kits – all of the parts that you’d have to source yourself otherwise. While not mass-market, these kit sales presumably also help keep some of the 3D printer enthusiast stores that sell them afloat. Which is all to say: the Voron community is thriving, and a number of folks are earning their livings off of it. And it’s completely open.

When [Thomas] complains that some players in the 3DP business landscape aren’t giving back to the open-source community effort, he’s actually calling out a few large-scale Chinese manufacturers making mass-market machines. These companies aren’t interested in pushing the state of the art forward anyway, rather just selling what they’ve got. And sure, there are a million Creality Enders for every Voron 2 out there. And yes, they reap the benefits of open designs and code. But they’re competing in an entirely different market from the real innovators, and I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

Let us know what you think. (And if you’re reading this in the newsletter format, head on over to Hackaday on Saturday morning to leave us your comments.)

Ask Hackaday: The Turing Test Is Dead: Long Live The Turing Test!

June 22, 2023 by Al Williams 89 Comments

Alan Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence that no longer works. The idea was to have people communicate over a terminal, with another real person and with a computer. If the computer is intelligent, Turing mused, most people will incorrectly identify the computer as a human. Clearly, with the advent of modern chatbots, that test is now broken. Despite the “AI” moniker, chatbots aren’t sentient or even pre-sentient, but they certainly seem that way. An AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, is proposing a new test: The AI has to take a $100,000 budget and earn $1,000,000.

We were a little bemused at this. By that measure, most of us aren’t intelligent, either, and it seems like this is a particularly capitalistic idea. We could probably write an Excel script that studied mutual fund performance and pull off the same trick, given enough time for the investment to mature. Is it intelligent? No. Besides, even humans who have demonstrated they can make $1,000,000 often sell their companies and start new ones that fail. How often does the AI have to succeed before we grant it person status?

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: The Turing Test Is Dead: Long Live The Turing Test!” →

Get In Over Your Head!

June 17, 2023 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

When you talk to hackers who’ve just finished an epic project, they’ll often start off with a very familiar refrain: “I had no idea what I was getting into.” And maybe they’ll even follow up with the traditional second line “If I knew how hard this was going to be, I probably wouldn’t have tried.” And that’s from people who have just finished wiping the sweat from their brow.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes you do get in over your head and take on more than you can chew. But let’s be honest, how often does that really happen relative to how many projects end up looking easy at first, and then end up teaching you a lot along the way, often the hard way? If you’re like me, the latter happens more than the former, and I don’t think I’m particularly clever.

Instead, it’s just the nature of learning. In the beginning, you don’t know something, so you don’t realize how difficult it is, hence the first classic line. And of course it’s going to be hard, because learning is always hard. If you knew it already, it would be easier, but it wouldn’t be learning!

Whether you get through or not depends on your own stubbornness and of course the nature of the hurdles. But whether you learn or not depends entirely on you not knowing what you’re doing in the first place.

Pay good attention to the second line in the post-hack couplet, and heed its advice. Starting off on something that you don’t already know how to do provides you with a fearlessness, and the courage to try something that you might not have otherwise dared. It’s good to get in over your head sometimes. That’s where you learn, and those are the audacious projects that end up being the most successful.

Or they end up as horrendous failures, but we’re crossing our fingers for you. Be brave! And if you can’t be brave, be incompletely informed.