For Americans Only: Estimating Celsius And Other Mental Metrics

August 14, 2025 by Al Williams 194 Comments

I know many computer languages, but I’ve struggled all my life to learn a second human language. One of my problems is that I can’t stop trying to translate in my head. Just like Morse code, you need to understand things directly, not translate. But you have to start somewhere. One of the reasons metric never caught on in the United States is that it is hard to do exact translations while you are developing intuition about just how hot is 35 °C or how long 8 cm is.

If you travel, temperature is especially annoying. When the local news tells you the temperature is going to be 28, it is hard to do the math in your head to decide if you need a coat or shorts.

Ok, you are a math whiz. And you have a phone with a calculator and, probably, a voice assistant. So you can do the right math, which is (9/5) x °C + 32. But for those of us who can’t do that in our heads, there is an easier way.

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A Love Letter To Prototype Zero

August 9, 2025 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

An old friend of mine at my hackerspace introduced me to the concept of Prototype Zero: The Version that Even Your Own Sweet Mother Isn’t Allowed to See. The idea is that when you’re building something truly new, or even just new to you, your first take will almost always be ugly, and nothing will work the way it will by the time you make your second one. But it’s also important to the exercise that you see it all the way through to the end if you can.

I’m reminded of this after seeing a marvelous video by [Japhy Riddle] where he discusses his Prototype Zero of the Tape-Speed Keyboard. About halfway through the video he says that he would have done it totally differently if he knew then what he knows now: the hallmark of Prototype Zero. Yet he finishes it up, warts and all, documents it, and plays around with all of its possibilities. (Documenting it publicly isn’t part of the Prototype Zero method.)

I don’t think that [Japhy] is going to make a Prototype 1.0 out of this project, but I could be wrong; he seems to be content with having scratched the variable-speed tape itch. But if he did want to, he’s learned all of the gotchas on the engineering side, and found out exactly what such an instrument is capable of. And this loops back to the importance of getting Prototype Zero finished. You may have learned all of the tricks necessary to build the thing even before you’ve put the last screw in, but it’s when you actually have the thing in your hands to explore that you get the ideas for refinement that you simply can’t think up when it’s still just a concept.

Don’t be afraid to make your prototype quick and dirty, because if it ends up too dirty, you can just call it Prototype Zero. But don’t be tempted by the siren’s song of the 80% finished prototype either. Exploring putting Prototype Zero into use is its real purpose.

Thanks, Tamiya-san

August 2, 2025 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

We’re saddened to report the passing of Shunsaku Tamiya, the man behind the Tamiya line of models. What was surprising about this, though, is how many of our readers and writers alike felt touched by the Tamiya model company. I mean, they made great models, and they’re definitely a quality outfit, but the outpouring of fond memories across a broad spectrum was striking.

For example, we originally ran the story as breaking news, but our art director Joe Kim spent a good part of his childhood putting together Tamiya kits, and felt like he absolutely had to do a portrait of Mr. Tamiya to pay his respects. I presume Joe is more on the painting-the-models end of the spectrum of Tamiya customers, given his artistic bent. Jenny’s writeup is absolutely touching, and her fond remembrances of the kits shines through her writing.

Myself, I’m on the making-small-robots end of the spectrum, and was equally well served. Back in the early ’90s, the “twin motor gearbox” was a moderately challenging and tremendously rewarding build for me, but it was also the only variable-ratio small motor gearbox that we had easy access to for making small bots to run around the living room.

Indeed, the Tamiya line included a whole series of educational models and components that were just perfect for the budding robot builder. I’m sure I have a set of their tank treads or a slip clutch in a box somewhere, even today.

It’s nice to think of how many people’s lives were touched by their kits, and to get even a small glimpse of that, you just need to read our comment section. We hope the company holds on to Mr. Tamiya’s love for quality kits that inspire future generations, whether they end up becoming artists, engineers, or simply hackers.

When Online Safety Means Surrendering Your ID, What Can You Do?

July 31, 2025 by Jenny List 108 Comments

A universal feature of traveling Europe as a Hackaday scribe is that when you sit in a hackerspace in another country and proclaim how nice a place it all is, the denizens will respond pessimistically with how dreadful their country really is. My stock response is to say “Hold my beer” and recount the antics of British politicians, but the truth is, the grass is always greener on the other side.

There’s one thing here in dear old Blighty that has me especially concerned at the moment though, and perhaps it’s time to talk about it here. The Online Safety Act has just come into force and is the UK government’s attempt to deal with what they perceive as the nasties on the Internet, and while some of its aspirations may be honourable, its effects are turning out to be a little chilling.

As might be expected, the Act requires providers to ensure their services are free of illegal material, and it creates some new offences surrounding sharing images without consent, and online stalking. Where the concern lies for me is in the requirement for age verification to ensure kids don’t see anything the government things they shouldn’t, which is being enforced through online ID verification. There are many reasons why this is of concern, but I’ll name the three at the top of my list.
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Personalization, Industrial Design, And Hacked Devices

July 26, 2025 by Elliot Williams 28 Comments

[Maya Posch] wrote up an insightful, and maybe a bit controversial, piece on the state of consumer goods design: The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics. Her basic thesis is that the “form follows function” aesthetic has gone too far, and all of the functionally equivalent devices in our life now all look exactly the same. Take the cellphone, for example. They are all slabs of screen, with a tiny bezel if any. They are non-objects, meant to disappear, instead of showcases for cool industrial design.

Of course this is an extreme example, and the comments section went wild on this one. Why? Because we all want the things we build to be beautiful and functional, and that has always been in conflict. So even if you agree with [Maya] on the suppression of designed form in consumer goods, you have to admit that it’s not universal. For instance, none of our houses look alike, even though the purpose is exactly the same. (Ironically, architecture is the source of the form follows function fetish.) Cars are somewhere in between, and maybe the cellphone is the other end of the spectrum from architecture. There is plenty of room for form and function in this world.

But consider the smartphone case – the thing you’ve got around your phone right now. In a world where people have the ultimate homogeneous device in their pocket, one for which slimness is a prime selling point, nearly everyone has added a few millimeters of thickness to theirs, aftermarket, in the form of a decorative case. It’s ironically this horrendous sameness of every cell phone that makes us want to ornament them, even if that means sacrificing on the thickness specs.

Is this the same impetus that gave us the cyberdeck movement? The custom mechanical keyboard? All kinds of sweet hacks on consumer goods? The need to make things your own and personal is pretty much universal, and maybe even a better example of what we want out of nice design: a device that speaks to you directly because it represents your work.

Granted, buying a phone case isn’t necessarily creative in the same way as hacking a phone is, but it at least lets you exercise a bit of your own design impulse. And it frees the designers from having to make a super-personal choice like this for you. How about a “nothing” design that affords easy personalized ornamentation? Has the slab smartphone solved the form-versus-function fight after all?

Trickle Down: When Doing Something Silly Actually Makes Sense

July 12, 2025 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

One of the tropes of the space race back in the 1960s, which helped justify the spending for the part of the public who thought it wasn’t worth it, was that the technology developed for use in space would help us out here back on earth. The same goes for the astronomical expenses in Formula 1, or even on more pedestrian tech like racing bikes or cinematography cameras. The idea is that the boundaries pushed out in the most extreme situations could nonetheless teach us something applicable to everyday life.

This week, we saw another update from the Minuteman project, which is by itself entirely ridiculous – a 3D printer that aims to print a 3D Benchy in a minute or less. Of course, the Minuteman isn’t alone in this absurd goal: there’s an entire 3D printer enthusiast community that is pushing the speed boundaries of this particular benchmark print, and times below five minutes are competitive these days, although with admittedly varying quality. (For reference, on my printer, a decent-looking Benchy takes about half an hour, but I’m after high quality rather than high speed.)

One could totally be forgiven for scoffing at the Speed Benchy goal in general, the Minuteman, or even The 100, another machine that trades off print volume for extreme speed. But there is definitely trickle-down for the normal printers among us. After all, pressure advance used to be an exotic feature that only people who were using high-end homemade rigs used to care about, and now it’s gone mainstream. Who knows if the Minuteman’s variable temperature or rate smoothing, or the rigid and damped frames of The 100, or its successor The 250, will make normal printers better.

So here’s to the oddball machines, that push boundaries in possibly ridiculous directions, but then share their learnings with those of us who only need to print kinda-fast, but who like to print other things than little plastic boats that don’t even really float. At least in the open-source hardware community, trickle-down is very real.

Dearest C++, Let Me Count The Ways I Love/Hate Thee

July 11, 2025 by Maya Posch 59 Comments

My first encounter with C++ was way back in the 1990s, when it was one of the Real Programming Languages™ that I sometimes heard about as I was still splashing about in the kiddie pool with Visual Basic, PHP and JavaScript. The first formally standardized version of C++ is the ISO 1998 standard, but it had been making headways as a ‘better C’ for decades at that point since Bjarne Stroustrup added that increment operator to C in 1979 and released C++ to the public in 1985.

Why did I pick C++ as my primary programming language? Mainly because it was well supported and with free tooling: a free Borland compiler or g++ on the GCC side. Alternatives like VB, Java, and D felt far too niche compared to established languages, while C++ gave you access to the lingua franca of C while adding many modern features like OOP and a more streamlined syntax in addition to the Standard Template Library (STL) with gobs of useful building blocks.

Years later, as a grizzled senior C++ developer, I have come to embrace the notion that being good at a programming language also means having strong opinions on all that is wrong with the language. True to form, while C++ has many good points, there are still major warts and many heavily neglected aspects that get me and other C++ developers riled up.

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