Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Bobblehead

May 5, 2025 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

No, see, it’s what’s inside that counts. Believe it or not, [nobutternoparm] retrofitted this innocent, adorable little tikes® so-called “Kidboard” rubber-dome keyboard into a mechanical marvel. Yeah! No, it wasn’t exactly pure, unadulterated fun, nor was it easy to do. But then again nothing worth doing ever is.

A Little Tikes keyboard, retrofitted with a custom mechanical keyboard. — Image by [nobutternoparm] via reddit

For one thing, the PCB ended up being a bit too wide, so the bottom half of the case is a bit mangled. But that’s okay! Onward and upward.

Next problem: a real PCB and mechanical switches (Gateron Baby Kangaroos) are a lot taller than the previous arrangement. This required spacers, a mounting plate, and longer screws to hold it all together. Now imagine lining all that up and trying to keep it that way during assembly.

And then there’s the keycaps. Guess what? They’re non-standard because they’re for rubber domes. So this meant more adapters and spacers. You’ll see in the gallery.

So we know it looks great, but how does it type? Well… [nobutternoparm] gives the feel a 4/10. The keycaps now have too many points of contact, so they bind up and have to be mashed down. But it’s going to be a great conversation piece.

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What Happened To WWW.?

May 5, 2025 by Lewin Day 59 Comments

Once upon a time, typing “www” at the start of a URL was as automatic as breathing. And yet, these days, most of us go straight to “hackaday.com” without bothering with those three letters that once defined the internet.

Have you ever wondered why those letters were there in the first place, and when exactly they became optional? Let’s dig into the archaeology of the early web and trace how this ubiquitous prefix went from essential to obsolete.

Where Did You Go?

*The first website didn’t bother with any of that www. nonsense! Credit: author screenshot*

It may shock you to find out that the “www.” prefix was actually never really a key feature or necessity at all. To understand why, we need only contemplate the very first website, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1990. Running on a NeXT workstation employed as a server, the site could be accessed at a simple URL: “http//info.cern.ch/”—no WWW needed. Berners-Lee had invented the World Wide Web, and called it as such, but he hadn’t included the prefix in his URL at all. So where did it come from? Continue reading “What Happened To WWW.?” →

Hackaday Links: May 4, 2025

May 4, 2025 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

By now, you’ve probably heard about Kosmos 482, a Soviet probe destined for Venus in 1972 that fell a bit short of the mark and stayed in Earth orbit for the last 53 years. Soon enough, though, the lander will make its fiery return; exactly where and when remain a mystery, but it should be sometime in the coming week. We talked about the return of Kosmos briefly on this week’s podcast and even joked a bit about how cool it would be if the parachute that would have been used for the descent to Venus had somehow deployed over its half-century in space. We might have been onto something, as astrophotographer Ralf Vanderburgh has taken some pictures of the spacecraft that seem to show a structure connected to and trailing behind it. The chute is probably in pretty bad shape after 50 years of UV torture, but how cool is that?

Parachute or not, chances are good that the 495-kilogram spacecraft, built to not only land on Venus but to survive the heat, pressure, and corrosive effects of the hellish planet’s atmosphere, will at least partially survive reentry into Earth’s more welcoming environs. That’s a good news, bad news thing: good news that we might be able to recover a priceless artifact of late-Cold War space technology, bad news to anyone on the surface near where this thing lands. If Kosmos 482 does manage to do some damage, it won’t be the first time. Shortly after launch, pieces of titanium rained down on New Zealand after the probe’s booster failed to send it on its way to Venus, damaging crops and starting some fires. The Soviets, ever secretive about their space exploits until they could claim complete success, disavowed the debris and denied responsibility for it. That made the farmers whose fields they fell in the rightful owners, which is also pretty cool. We doubt that the long-lost Kosmos lander will get the same treatment, but it would be nice if it did.

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Knowing What’s Possible

May 3, 2025 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

Dan Maloney and I were talking on the podcast about his memories of the old electronics magazines, and how they had some gonzo projects in them. One, a DIY picture phone from the 1980s, was a monster build of a hundred ICs that also required you to own a TV camera. At that time, the idea of being able to see someone while talking to them on the phone was pure science fiction, and here was a version of that which you could build yourself.

Still, we have to wonder how many of these were ever built. The project itself was difficult and expensive, but you actually have to multiply that by two if you want to talk with someone else. And then you have to turn your respective living rooms into TV studios. It wasn’t the most practical of projects.

But amazing projects did something in the old magazines that we take a little bit for granted today: they showed what was possible. And if you want to create something new, you’re not necessarily going to know how to do it, but just the idea that it’s possible at all is often enough to give a motivated hacker the drive to make it real. As skateboard hero Rodney Mullen put it, “the biggest obstacle to creativity is breaking through the barrier of disbelief”.

In the skating world, it’s seeing someone else do a trick in a video that lets you know that it’s possible, and then you can make it your own. In our world, in prehistoric times, it was these electronics magazines that showed you what was possible. In the present, it’s all over the Internet, and all over Hackaday. So when you see someone’s amazing project, even if you aren’t necessarily into it, or maybe don’t even fully understand it, your horizons of what’s possible are nonetheless expanded, and that helps us all be more creative.

Keep on pushing!

Supercon 2024: Turning Talk Into Action

May 2, 2025 by Lewin Day No comments

Most of us have some dream project or three that we’d love to make a reality. We bring it up all the time with friends, muse on it at work, and research it during our downtime. But that’s just talk—and it doesn’t actually get the project done!

At the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, Sarah Vollmer made it clear—her presentation is about turning talk into action. It’s about how to overcome all the hurdles that get in the way of achieving your grand project, so you can actually make it a reality. It might sound like a self-help book—and it kind of is—but it’s rooted in the experience of a bonafide maker who’s been there and done that a few times over.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 319: Experimental Archaeology, Demoscene Oscilloscope Music, And Electronic Memories

May 2, 2025 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

It’s the podcast so nice we recorded it twice! Despite some technical difficulties (note to self: press the record button significantly before recording the outro), Elliot and Dan were able to soldier through our rundown of the week’s top hacks.

We kicked things off with a roundup of virtual keyboards for the alternate reality crowd, which begged the question of why you’d even need such a thing. We also looked at a couple of cool demoscene-adjacent projects, such as the ultimate in oscilloscope music and a hybrid knob/jack for eurorack synth modules.

We dialed the Wayback Machine into antiquity to take a look at Clickspring’s take on the origins of precision machining; spoiler alert — you can make gas-tight concentric brass tubing using a bow-driven lathe. There’s a squishy pneumatic robot gripper, an MQTT-enabled random number generator, a feline-friendly digital stethoscope, and a typewriter that’ll make you Dymo label maker jealous.

We’ll also mourn the demise of electronics magazines and ponder how your favorite website fills that gap, and learn why it’s really hard to keep open-source software lean and clean. Short answer: because it’s made by people.

Download the zero-calorie MP3.

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Libogc Allegations Rock Wii Homebrew Community

May 1, 2025 by Tom Nardi 59 Comments

Historically, efforts to create original games and tools, port over open source emulators, and explore a game console’s hardware and software have been generally lumped together under the banner of “homebrew.” While not the intended outcome, it’s often the case that exploring a console in this manner unlocks methods to run pirated games. For example, if a bug is found in the system’s firmware that enables a clever developer to run “Hello World”, you can bet that the next thing somebody tries to write is a loader that exploits that same bug to play a ripped commercial game.

But for those who are passionate about being able to develop software for their favorite game consoles, and the developers who create the libraries and toolchains that make that possible, the line between homebrew and piracy is a critical boundary. The general belief has always been that keeping piracy at arm’s length made it less likely that the homebrew community would draw the ire of the console manufacturers.

As such, homebrew libraries and tools are held to a particularly high standard. Homebrew can only thrive if developed transparently, and every effort must be taken to avoid tainting the code with proprietary information or code. Any deviation could be the justification a company like Nintendo or Sony needs to swoop in.

Unfortunately, there are fears that covenant has been broken in light of multiple allegations of impropriety against the developers of libogc, the C library used by nearly all homebrew software for the Wii and GameCube. From potential license violations to uncomfortable questions about the origins of the project, there’s mounting evidence that calls the viability of the library into question. Some of these allegations, if true, would effectively mean the distribution and use of the vast majority of community-developed software for both consoles is now illegal.

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