Maker Media Reboots Itself As Make Community

July 10, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 55 Comments

At a community meeting this week, Dale Dougherty, former CEO of Maker Media announced the relaunch of the Make brand. Maker Media is dead, but the brand may live on as Make Community, LLC. Dougherty will remain the CEO of Make Community, and Todd Sotkicwicz, former CFO of Maker Media, was identified as the current CFO of Make Community. This is the same organization that brought you Make Magazine and the Maker Faires gearing up to give you even more Make Magazines and more Maker Faires.

Early this year, we heard rumors about the future of Maker Media and its flagship Maker Faires. Then in May, just before the Bay Area Maker Faire, Dougherty told the San Francisco Chronicle that it was ‘quite possible this could be the last Bay Area Maker Faire’. The Bay Area Faire came and went, and early last month we received news that employees were let go and Maker Media had ceased operations.

Now, according to Dougherty’s summary at the meeting, what remained has now been reformed into a new LLC, Make Community, and he was holding this meeting to gauge how much the community would be willing to contribute. The official launch of Make Community will supposedly be next week, but you can check out the future home of the Make Community at make.co.
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Ask Hackaday: What Are Your Apollo Memories?

July 10, 2019 by Dan Maloney 62 Comments

This month will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that brought to a successful conclusion the challenge laid down by President Kennedy only eight years earlier. Three men went to the Moon, two walked on it, and they all came back safely, in a dramatic eight-day display of engineering and scientific prowess that was televised live to the world.

If you’ve made more than 50 trips around the sun, chances are good that you have some kind of memories of the first Moon landing. An anniversary like this is a good time to take stock of those memories, especially for something like Apollo, which very likely struck a chord in many of those that witnessed it and launched them on careers in science and engineering. We suspect that a fair number of Hackaday readers are in that group, and so we want to ask you: What are your memories of Apollo?

A Real American Hero

My memory of the Moon landing is admittedly vague. I had just turned five the month before, hadn’t even started kindergarten yet, but I had already caught the space bug in a big way. I lived and breathed the space program, and I knew everything about the Mercury missions that were over by the time I was born, and the Gemini missions that had just wrapped up. Apollo was incredibly exciting to me, and I was pumped to witness the landing in the way that only a five-year-old can be.
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Raspberry Pi 4 Benchmarks: Processor And Network Performance Makes It A Real Desktop Contender

July 10, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 87 Comments

The new Raspberry Pi 4 is out, and slowly they’re working their way from Microcenters and Amazon distribution sites to desktops and workbenches around the world. Before you whip out a fancy new USB C cable and plug those Pis in, it’s worthwhile to know what you’re getting into. The newest Raspberry Pi is blazing fast. Not only that, but because of the new System on Chip, it’s now a viable platform for a cheap homebrew NAS, a streaming server, or anything else that requires a massive amount of bandwidth. This is the Pi of the future.

The Raspberry Pi 4 features a BCM2711B0 System on Chip, a quad-core Cortex-A72 processor clocked at up to 1.5GHz, with up to 4GB of RAM (with hints about an upcoming 8GB version). The previous incarnation of the Pi, the Model 3 B+, used a BCM2837B0 SoC, a quad-core Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.4GHz. Compared to the 3 B+, the Pi 4 isn’t using an ‘efficient’ core, we’re deep into ‘performance’ territory with a larger cache. But what do these figures mean in real-world terms? That’s what we’re here to find out.

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The Saga Of 32-Bit Linux: Why Going 64-Bit Raises Concerns Over Multilib

July 9, 2019 by Tom Nardi 137 Comments

The story of Linux so far, as short as it may be in the grand scheme of things, is one of constant forward momentum. There’s always another feature to implement, an optimization to make, and of course, another device to support. With developer’s eyes always on the horizon ahead of them, it should come as no surprise to find that support for older hardware or protocols occasionally falls to the wayside. When maintaining antiquated code monopolizes developer time, or even directly conflicts with new code, a difficult decision needs to be made.

Of course, some decisions are easier to make than others. Back in 2012 when Linus Torvalds officially ended kernel support for legacy 386 processors, he famously closed the commit message with “Good riddance.” Maintaining support for such old hardware had been complicating things behind the scenes for years while offering very little practical benefit, so removing all that legacy code was like taking a weight off the developer’s shoulders.

The rationale was the same a few years ago when distributions like Arch Linux decided to drop support for 32-bit hardware entirely. Maintainers had noticed the drop-off in downloads for the 32-bit versions of their distributions and decided it didn’t make sense to keep producing them. In an era where even budget smartphones are shipping with 64-bit processors, many Linux distributions have at this point decided 32-bit CPUs weren’t worth their time.

Given this trend, you’d think Ubuntu announcing last month that they’d no longer be providing 32-bit versions of packages in their repository would hardly be newsworthy. But as it turns out, the threat of ending 32-bit packages caused the sort of uproar that we don’t traditionally see in the Linux community. But why?

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Teardown: VeriFone MX 925CTLS Payment Terminal

July 8, 2019 by Tom Nardi 53 Comments

Regular Hackaday readers may recall that a little less than a year ago, I had the opportunity to explore a shuttered Toys “R” Us before the new owners gutted the building. Despite playing host to the customary fixture liquidation sale that takes place during the last death throes of such an establishment, this particular location was notable because of how much stuff was left behind. It was now the responsibility of the new owners to deal with all the detritus of a failed retail giant, from the security camera DVRs and point of sale systems to the boxes of employee medical records tucked away in a back office.

Clipping from New York Post. September 24th, 2018.

The resulting article and accompanying YouTube video were quite popular, and the revelation that employee information including copies of social security cards and driver’s licenses were left behind even secured Hackaday and yours truly a mention in the New York Post. As a result of the media attention, it was revealed that the management teams of several other stores were similarly derelict in their duty to properly dispose of Toys “R” Us equipment and documents.

Ironically, I too have been somewhat derelict in my duty to the good readers of Hackaday. I liberated several carloads worth of equipment from Geoffrey’s fallen castle with every intention of doing a series of teardowns on them, but it’s been nine months and I’ve got nothing to show for it. You could have a baby in that amount of time. Which, incidentally, I did. Perhaps that accounts for the reshuffling of priorities, but I don’t want to make excuses. You deserve better than that.

So without further ado, I present the first piece of hardware from my Toys “R” Us expedition: the VeriFone MX 925CTLS. This is a fairly modern payment terminal with all the bells and whistles you’d expect, such as support for NFC and EMV chip cards. There’s a good chance that you’ve seen one of these, or at least something very similar, while checking out at a retail chain. So if you’ve ever wondered what’s inside that machine that was swallowing up your debit card, let’s find out.

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Five Years Of The Raspberry Pi Model B+ Form Factor, What Has It Taught Us?

July 8, 2019 by Jenny List 84 Comments

With all the hoopla surrounding the recent launch of the new Raspberry Pi 4, it’s easy to overlook another event in the Pi calendar. July will see the fifth anniversary of the launch of the Raspberry Pi Model B+ that ushered in a revised form factor. It’s familiar to us now, but at the time it was a huge change to a 40-pin expansion connector, four mounting holes, no composite video socket, and more carefully arranged interface connectors.

As the Pi 4 with its dual mini-HDMI connectors and reversed Ethernet and USB positions marks the first significant deviation from the standard set by the B+ and its successors, it’s worth taking a look at the success of the form factor and its wider impact. Is it still something that the Raspberry Pi designers can take in a new direction, or like so many standards before it has it passed from its originator to the collective ownership of the community of manufacturers that support it?

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Mary Sherman Morgan, Rocket Fuel Mixologist

July 2, 2019 by Kristina Panos 54 Comments

In the fall of 1957, it seemed as though the United States’ space program would never get off the ground. The USSR had launched Sputnik in October, and this cemented their place in history as the first nation in space. If that weren’t bad enough, they put Sputnik 2 into orbit a month later.

By Christmas, things looked even worse. The US had twice tried to launch Navy-designed Vanguard rockets, and both were spectacular failures. It was time to use their ace in the hole: the Redstone rocket, a direct descendant of the V-2s designed during WWII. The only problem was the propellant. It would never get the payload into orbit as-is.

The US Army awarded a contract to North American Aviation (NAA) to find a propellant that would do the job. But there was a catch: it was too late to make any changes to the engine’s design, so they had to work with big limitations. Oh, and the Army needed it two days before yesterday.

The Army sent a Colonel to NAA to deliver the contract, and to personally insist that they put their very best man on the job. And they did. What the Army didn’t count on was that NAA’s best man was actually a woman with no college degree.

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