Rants

458 Articles

Build A Better Mousetrap… But It Better Be Better!

December 8, 2022 by 22 Comments

As creative problem solvers, we like to “think outside the box,” and we should strive for that. But what happens if your strange idea isn’t kept in check by cooler heads? There is a real danger — especially if you work alone — to falling so in love with your idea, that you lose sight of what it really means to be better.

Case in point. The self-parking car. Well, not the modern variant, which seems to work pretty well. But did you know that the self-parking car was invented in the 1930s and used an extra fifth wheel? Hard to imagine? See the video below. History tells us that the idea didn’t catch on.

Continue reading “Build A Better Mousetrap… But It Better Be Better!” →

Love AI, But Don’t Love It Too Much

December 7, 2022 by 51 Comments

The up-and-coming Wonder of the World in software and  information circles , and particularly in those circles who talk about them, is AI. Give a magic machine a lot of stuff, ask it a question, and it will give you a meaningful and useful answer. It will create art, write books, compose music, and generally Change The World As We Know It. All this is genuinely impressive stuff, as anyone who has played with DALL-E will tell you. But it’s important to think about what the technology can and can’t do that’s new so as to not become caught up in the hype, and in doing that I’m immediately drawn to a previous career of mine. Continue reading “Love AI, But Don’t Love It Too Much” →

Perhaps It’s Time To Talk About All Those Fakes And Clones

December 5, 2022 by 84 Comments

A while back, I bought a cheap spectrum analyser via AliExpress. I come from the age when a spectrum analyser was an extremely expensive item with a built-in CRT display, so there’s still a minor thrill to buying one for a few tens of dollars even if it’s obvious to all and sundry that the march of technology has brought within reach the previously unattainable. My AliExpress spectrum analyser is a clone of a design that first appeared in a German amateur radio magazine, and in my review at the time I found it to be worth the small outlay but a bit deaf and wide compared to its more expensive brethren. Continue reading “Perhaps It’s Time To Talk About All Those Fakes And Clones” →

Cargo Culting And Buried Treasure

December 3, 2022 by 55 Comments

I have no idea how true the stories are, but legend has it that when supplies were dropped on some Melanesian islands during WWII, some locals took to replicating runway signs in order to further please the “gods” that were dropping them. They reportedly thought that making landing strips caused laden airplanes to visit. Richard Feynman later turned this into a metaphor about scientific theory – that if you don’t understand what you’re doing deeply, you may be fooling yourself.

I’d like to be a little bit more forgiving of adherents of technological cargo cults. Because the world around us is very complicated, we often just take things as they are rather than understanding them deeply, because there’s simply only so deep you can go into so many fields.

Is someone who doesn’t know the i386 machine language cargo-culting their way through a job as a web backend developer? Probably not. But from the perspective of an assembly-language programmer, any of us who write in compiled or interpreted programming languages are cargo-culting coding. You don’t need to understand a cell phone to dial home, but can you really say that you understand everything about how one works?  Or are you just going through the motions?

So while some reliance on metaphor and “well, it worked last time” is perfectly normal, I think noticing when you cargo-cult is also healthy. It should also be a warning sign, or at least a flag to remind yourself that there may be dragons here. Or maybe just a buried learning opportunity, the X that marks the spot where digging deeper might be productive.

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

I Need A Hackation

November 27, 2022 by 45 Comments

In recent times, the “staycation” became a popular alternative to forays far afield: you could take time off and enjoy your local surroundings without having to get stamps in your passport. But I don’t need to go to a museum or visit an amusement park, much less catch up on Stranger Things. I’ve got a project burning in my brain, and what I need is a few days of good solid time in the basement workshop to make some headway. What I need is a Hackation.

Some projects make great after-work distractions, but this one is hard and requires my full brainpower. It’s just not a beer-and-a-project project. So during the week is out. That leaves weekends, but that’s prime time for hanging out with the family. Sure, I can get work in a few hours of good mid-day think/work time in on a Saturday or Sunday when my son is out playing with friends, but there’s something about devoting a whole day or more to cracking a tough nut.

Of course, I’m fully aware that I’ll probably not get it finished in just a day, and that I’ll want another day, or yet another. So be it. Isn’t that the way it is when you’re at the beach in the summer as well? Shouldn’t hacking be at least as high on the priority list as a trip to Disneyland?

Have you ever taken a Hackation? Because that’s what I need. And please tell me there’s a better name for it.

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

Don’t Believe Everything You Read: The Great Electric Toaster Hoax

November 23, 2022 by 63 Comments

We’ve all looked up things on Wikipedia and, generally, it is usually correct information. However, the fact that anyone can edit it leads to abuse and makes it somewhat unreliable. Case in point? The BBC’s [Marco Silva] has the story of the great online toaster hoax which erroneously identified the inventor of the toaster with great impact.

You should read the original story, but in case you want a synopsis, here goes: Until recently, the Wikipedia entry for toasters stated that a Scottish man named Alan MacMasters invented the electric toaster in the 1800s. Sounds plausible. Even more so because several books had picked it up along with the Scottish government’s Brand Scottland website. At least one school had a day memorializing the inventor and a TV show also honored him with a special dessert named for Alan MacMasters, the supposed inventor. Continue reading “Don’t Believe Everything You Read: The Great Electric Toaster Hoax” →

How To Repair? The Death Of Schematics

November 21, 2022 by 97 Comments

There was a time when, if you were handy with a soldering iron, you could pretty easily open up a radio or TV repair business. You might not get rich, but you could make a good living. And if you had enough business savvy to do sales too, you could do well. These days there aren’t many repair shops and it isn’t any wonder. The price of labor is up and the price of things like TVs drops every day. What’s worse is today’s TV is not only cheaper than last year’s model, but probably also better. Besides that, TVs are full of custom parts you can’t get and jam-packed into smaller and smaller cases.

Case in point, I saw a “black Friday” ad for a 40-inch 1080p flatscreen with a streaming controller for $98. Granted, that’s not huge by today’s standards and I’m sure it isn’t a perfect picture. But for $98? Even a giant high-quality TV these days might cost a bit more than $1,000 and you can get something pretty great for well under $500.

Looking back, a Sears ad showed a great deal on a 19″ color TV in 1980. The price? $399. That doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that today that would be about $1,400. So with a ratio of about 3.5 to 1, a $30/hour service call would be, today, $105. So for an hour’s service call with no parts, I could just buy that 40″ TV. Add even one simple part or another hour and I’m getting close to the big league TVs.

Did you ever wonder how TV repair technicians knew what to do? Well, for one thing, most of the time you didn’t have to. A surprising number of calls would be something simple like a frayed line cord or a dirty tuner. Antenna wires destroyed by critters was common enough. In the tube days, you could pretty easily swap tubes to fix the bulk of actual problems.

Continue reading “How To Repair? The Death Of Schematics” →