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Get Bored!

January 17, 2026 by 40 Comments

My son went over to a friends house this afternoon, when my wife had been planning on helping him with his French homework. This meant she had an hour or so of unexpected free time. Momentarily at a loss, she asked me what she should do, and my reply was “slack off”, meaning do something fun and creative instead of doing housework or whatever. Take a break! She jokingly replied that slacking off wasn’t on her to-do list, so she wouldn’t even know how to start.

But as with every joke, there’s more than a kernel of truth to it. We often get so busy with stuff that we’ve got to do, that we don’t leave enough time to slack, to get bored, or to simply do nothing. And that’s a pity, because do-nothing time is often among the most creative times. It’s when your mind wanders aimlessly that you find inspiration for that upgrade to the z-stage on your laser cutter, or whatever the current back-burner project of the moment is.

You don’t get bored when you’re watching TV, playing video games, or scrolling around the interwebs on your phone, and it’s all too easy to fall into these traps. To get well and truly bored requires discipline these days, so maybe putting “slack” into your to-do list isn’t a bad idea after all. My wife was right! And that’s why I volunteered to take my son to parkour on Sundays – it’s and hour of guaranteed, 100% uninterruptible boredom. How do you make sure you get your weekly dose of slack?

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 353: Fantastic Peripherals, Fake Or Not Fake Picos, And Everything On The Steam Deck

January 16, 2026 by 2 Comments

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they swap their favorite hacks and stories from the week. In this episode, they’ll start off by marveling over the evolution of the “smart knob” and other open hardware input devices, then discuss a futuristic propulsion technology you can demo in your own kitchen sink, and a cheap handheld game system that get’s a new lease on life thanks to the latest version of the ESP32 microcontroller.

From there they’ll cover spinning CRTs, creating custom GUIs on Android, and yet another thing you can build of out that old Ender 3 collecting dust in the basement. The episode wraps up with a discussion about putting Valve’s Steam Deck to work and a look at the history-making medical evacuation of the International Space Station.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

As always, this episode is available in DRM-free MP3.

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Optimizing Software With Zero-Copy And Other Techniques

January 16, 2026 by 20 Comments

An important aspect in software engineering is the ability to distinguish between premature, unnecessary, and necessary optimizations. A strong case can be made that the initial design benefits massively from optimizations that prevent well-known issues later on, while unnecessary optimizations are those simply do not make any significant difference either way. Meanwhile ‘premature’ optimizations are harder to define, with Knuth’s often quoted-out-of-context statement about these being ‘the root of all evil’ causing significant confusion.

We can find Donald Knuth’s full quote deep in the 1974 article Structured Programming with go to Statements, which at the time was a contentious optimization topic. On page 268, along with the cited quote, we see that it’s a reference to making presumed optimizations without understanding their effect, and without a clear picture of which parts of the program really take up most processing time. Definitely sound advice.

And unlike back in the 1970s we have today many easy ways to analyze application performance and to quantize bottlenecks. This makes it rather inexcusable to spend more time today vilifying the goto statement than to optimize one’s code with simple techniques like zero-copy and binary message formats.

Continue reading “Optimizing Software With Zero-Copy And Other Techniques” →

The Random Laser

January 15, 2026 by 6 Comments

When we first heard the term “random laser,” we did a double-take. After all, most ordinary sources of light are random. One defining characteristic of a traditional laser is that it emits coherent light. By coherent, in this context, that usually includes temporal coherence and spatial coherence. It is anything but random. It turns out, though, that random laser is a bit of a misnomer. The random part of the name refers to how the device generates the laser emission. It is true that random lasers may produce output that is not coherent over long time scales or between different emission points, but individually, the outputs are coherent. In other words, locally coherent, but not always globally so.

That is to say that a random laser might emit light from four different areas for a few brief moments. A particular emission will be coherent. But not all the areas may be coherent with respect to each other. The same thing happens over time. The output now may not be coherent with the output in a few seconds.

Baseline

A conventional laser works by forming a mirrored cavity, including a mirror that is only partially reflective. Pumping energy into the gain medium — the gas, semiconductor, or whatever — produces more photons that further stimulate emission. Only cavity modes that satisfy the design resonance conditions and experience gain persist, allowing them to escape through the partially reflecting mirror.

The laser generates many photons, but the cavity and gain medium favor only a narrow set of modes. This results in a beam that is of a very narrow band of frequencies, and the photons are highly collimated. Sure, they can spread over a long distance, but they don’t spread out in all directions like an ordinary light source. Continue reading “The Random Laser” →

ISS Medical Emergency: An Orbital Ambulance Ride

January 15, 2026 by 49 Comments

Over the course of its nearly 30 years in orbit, the International Space Station has played host to more “firsts” than can possibly be counted. When you’re zipping around Earth at five miles per second, even the most mundane of events takes on a novel element. Arguably, that’s the point of a crewed orbital research complex in the first place — to study how humans can live and work in an environment that’s so unimaginably hostile that something as simple as eating lunch requires special equipment and training.

Today marks another unique milestone for the ISS program, albeit a bittersweet one. Just a few hours ago, NASA successfully completed the first medical evacuation from the Station, cutting the Crew-11 mission short by at least a month. By the time this article is released, the patient will be back on terra firma and having their condition assessed in California. This leaves just three crew members on the ISS until NASA’s Crew-12 mission can launch in early February, though it’s possible that mission’s timeline will be moved up.

Continue reading “ISS Medical Emergency: An Orbital Ambulance Ride” →

Genetic Therapy Aims To Bring Hearing To Those Born Deaf

January 14, 2026 by 10 Comments

For those born with certain types of congenital deafness, the cochlear implant has been a positive and enabling technology. It uses electronics to step in as a replacement for the biological ear that doesn’t quite function properly, and provides a useful, if imperfect, sense of hearing to its users.

New research has promised another potential solution for some sufferers of congenital deafness. Instead of a supportive device, a gene therapy is used to enable the biological ear to function more as it should. The result is that patients get their sense of hearing, not from a prosthetic, but from their own ears themselves.

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Clone Wars: IBM Edition

January 14, 2026 by 52 Comments

If you search the Internet for “Clone Wars,” you’ll get a lot of Star Wars-related pages. But the original Clone Wars took place a long time ago in a galaxy much nearer to ours, and it has a lot to do with the computer you are probably using right now to read this. (Well, unless it is a Mac, something ARM-based, or an old retro-rig. I did say probably!)

IBM is a name that, for many years, was synonymous with computers, especially big mainframe computers. However, it didn’t start out that way. IBM originally made mechanical calculators and tabulating machines. That changed in 1952 with the IBM 701, IBM’s first computer that you’d recognize as a computer.

If you weren’t there, it is hard to understand how IBM dominated the computer market in the 1960s and 1970s. Sure, there were others like Univac, Honeywell, and Burroughs. But especially in the United States, IBM was the biggest fish in the pond. At one point, the computer market’s estimated worth was a bit more than $11 billion, and IBM’s five biggest competitors accounted for about $2 billion, with almost all of the rest going to IBM.

So it was somewhat surprising that IBM didn’t roll out the personal computer first, or at least very early. Even companies that made “small” computers for the day, like Digital Equipment Corporation or Data General, weren’t really expecting the truly personal computer. That push came from companies no one had heard of at the time, like MITS, SWTP, IMSAI, and Commodore. Continue reading “Clone Wars: IBM Edition” →