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The Impending CRT Display Revival Will Be Televised

September 23, 2025 by 112 Comments

Until the 2000s vacuum tubes practically ruled the roost. Even if they had surrendered practically fully to semiconductor technology like integrated circuits, there was no escaping them in everything from displays to video cameras. Until CMOS sensor technology became practical, proper video cameras used video camera tubes and well into the 2000s you’d generally scoff at those newfangled LC displays as they couldn’t capture the image quality of a decent CRT TV or monitor.

For a while it seemed that LCDs might indeed be just a flash in the pan, as it saw itself competing not just with old-school CRTs, but also its purported successors in the form of SED and FED in particular, while plasma TVs  made home cinema go nuts for a long while with sizes, fast response times and black levels worth their high sale prices.

We all know now that LCDs survived, along with the newcomer in OLED displays, but despite this CRTs do not feel like something we truly left behind. Along with a retro computing revival, there’s an increasing level of interest in old-school CRTs to the point where people are actively prowling for used CRTs and the discontent with LCDs and OLED is clear with people longing for futuristic technologies like MicroLED and QD displays to fix all that’s wrong with today’s displays.

Could the return of CRTs be nigh in some kind of format?

Continue reading “The Impending CRT Display Revival Will Be Televised” →

Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses And The New Glassholes

September 22, 2025 by 133 Comments

It’s becoming somewhat of a running gag that any device or object will be made ‘smart’ these days, whether it’s a phone, TV, refrigerator, home thermostat, headphones or glasses. This generally means somehow cramming a computer, display, camera and other components into the unsuspecting device, with the overarching goal of somehow making it more useful to the user and not impacting its basic functionality.

Although smart phones and smart TVs have been readily embraced, smart glasses have always been a bit of a tough sell. Part of the problem here is of course that most people do not generally wear glasses, between people whose vision does not require correction and those who wear e.g. contact lenses. This means that the market for smart glasses isn’t immediately obvious. Does it target people who wear glasses anyway, people who wear sunglasses a lot, or will this basically move a smart phone’s functionality to your face?

Smart glasses also raise many privacy concerns, as their cameras and microphones may be recording at any given time, which can be unnerving to people. When Google launched their Google Glass smart glasses, this led to the coining of the term ‘glasshole‘ for people who refuse to follow perceived proper smart glasses etiquette.

Continue reading “Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses And The New Glassholes” →

This Week In Security: The Shai-Hulud Worm, ShadowLeak, And Inside The Great Firewall

September 19, 2025 by 7 Comments

Hardly a week goes by that there isn’t a story to cover about malware getting published to a repository. Last week it was millions of downloads on NPM, but this week it’s something much more concerning. Malware published on NPM is now looking for NPM tokens, and propagating to other NPM packages when found. Yes, it’s a worm, jumping from one NPM package to another, via installs on developer machines.

It does other things too, like grabbing all the secrets it can find when installed on a machine. If the compromised machine has access to a Github account, a new repo is created named Shai-Hulud, borrowed from the name of the sandworms from Dune. The collected secrets and machine info gets uploaded here, and a workflow also uploads any available GitHub secrets to the webhook.site domain.

How many packages are we talking about? At least 187, with some reports of over 500 packages compromised. The immediate attack has been contained, as NPM has worked to remove the compromised packages, and apparently has added filtering code that blocks the upload of compromised packages.

So far there hasn’t been an official statement on the worm from NPM or its parent companies, GitHub or Microsoft. Malicious packages uploaded to NPM is definitely nothing new. But this is the first time we’ve seen a worm that specializes in NPM packages. It’s not a good step for the trustworthiness of NPM or the direct package distribution model.

Continue reading “This Week In Security: The Shai-Hulud Worm, ShadowLeak, And Inside The Great Firewall” →

Radio Apocalypse: Clearing The Air With SCATANA

September 18, 2025 by 7 Comments

For the most part, the Radio Apocalypse series has focused on the radio systems developed during the early days of the atomic age to ensure that Armageddon would be as orderly an affair as possible. From systems that provided backup methods to ensure that launch orders would reach the bombers and missiles, to providing hardened communications systems to allow survivors to coordinate relief and start rebuilding civilization from the ashes, a lot of effort went into getting messages sent.

Strangely, though, the architects of the end of the world put just as much thought into making sure messages didn’t get sent. The electronic village of mid-century America was abuzz with signals, any of which could be abused by enemy forces. CONELRAD, which aimed to prevent enemy bombers from using civilian broadcast signals as navigation aids, is a perfect example of this. But the growth of civil aviation through the period presented a unique challenge, particularly with the radio navigation system built specifically to make air travel as safe and reliable as possible.

Balancing the needs of civil aviation against the possibility that the very infrastructure making it possible could be used as a weapon against the U.S. homeland is the purpose of a plan called Security Control of Air Traffic and Air Navigation Aids, or SCATANA. It’s a plan that cuts across jurisdictions, bringing military, aviation, and communications authorities into the loop for decisions regarding when and how to shut down the entire air traffic system, to sort friend from foe, to give the military room to work, and, perhaps most importantly, to keep enemy aircraft as blind as possible. Continue reading “Radio Apocalypse: Clearing The Air With SCATANA” →

A New Generation Of Spacecraft Head To The ISS

September 18, 2025 by 22 Comments

While many in the industry were at first skeptical of NASA’s goal to put resupply flights to the International Space Station in the hands of commercial operators, the results speak for themselves. Since 2012, the SpaceX Dragon family of spacecraft has been transporting crew and cargo from American soil to the orbiting laboratory, a capability that the space agency had lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle. Putting these relatively routine missions in the hands of a commercial provider like SpaceX takes some of the logistical and financial burden off of NASA, allowing them to focus on more forward-looking projects.

SpaceX Dragon arriving at the ISS for the first time in 2012.

But as the saying goes, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket. As successful as SpaceX has been, there’s always a chance that some issue could temporarily ground either the Falcon 9 or the Dragon.

While Russia’s Progress and Soyuz vehicles would still be available in an emergency situation, it’s in everyone’s best interest that there be multiple backup vehicles that can bring critical supplies to the Station.

Which is precisely why several new or upgraded spacecraft, designed specifically for performing resupply missions to the ISS and any potential commercial successor, are coming online over the next few years.

In fact, one of them is already flying its first mission, and will likely have arrived at the International Space Station by the time you read this article.

Continue reading “A New Generation Of Spacecraft Head To The ISS” →

Forgotten Internet: The Story Of Email

September 17, 2025 by 25 Comments

It is a common occurrence in old movies: Our hero checks in at a hotel in some exotic locale, and the desk clerk says, “Ah, Mr. Barker, there’s a letter for you.” Or maybe a telegram. Either way, since humans learned to write, they’ve been obsessed with getting their writing in the hands of someone else. Back when we were wondering what people would do if they had a computer in their homes, most of us never guessed it would be: write to each other. Yet that turned out to be the killer app, or, at least, one of them.

What’s interesting about the hotel mail was that you had to plan ahead and know when your recipient would be there. Otherwise, you had to send your note to their home address, and it would have to wait. Telegrams were a little better because they were fast, but you still had to know where to send the message.

Early Days

An ad from the 1970s with a prominent Telex number

In addition to visiting a telegraph office, or post office, to send a note somewhere, commercial users started wanting something better at the early part of the twentieth century. This led to dedicated teletype lines. By 1933, though, a network of Teletype machines — Telex — arose. Before the Internet, it was very common for a company to advertise its Telex number — or TWX number, a competing network from the phone company and, later, Western Union — if they dealt with business accounts.

Fax machines came later, and the hardware was cheap enough that the average person was slightly more likely to have a fax machine or the use of one than a Telex.

Continue reading “Forgotten Internet: The Story Of Email” →

2025 Hackaday Component Abuse Challenge: Let The Games Begin!

September 16, 2025 by 48 Comments

In theory, all parts are ideal and do just exactly what they say on the box. In practice, everything has its limits, most components have non-ideal characteristics, and you can even turn most parts’ functionality upside down.

The Component Abuse Challenge celebrates the use of LEDs as photosensors, capacitors as microphones, and resistors as heat sources. If you’re using parts for purposes that simply aren’t on the label, or getting away with pushing them to their absolute maximum ratings or beyond, this is the contest for you.

If you committed these sins against engineering out of need, DigiKey wants to help you out. They’ve probably got the right part, and they’re providing us with three $150 gift certificates to give out to the top projects. (If you’re hacking just for fun, well, you’re still in the running.)

This is the contest where the number one rule is that you must break the rules, and the project has to work anyway. You’ve got eight weeks, until Nov 11th. Open up a project over at Hackaday.io, pull down the menu to enter in the contest, and let the parts know no mercy!

Honorable Mention Categories:

We’ve come up with a few honorable mention categories to get your ideas flowing. You don’t have to fit into one of these boxes to enter, but we’ll be picking our favorites in these four categories for a shout-out when we reveal the winners.

  • Bizarro World: There is a duality in almost every component out there. Speakers are microphones, LEDs are light sensors, and peltier coolers generate electricity. Turn the parts upside down and show us what they can do.
  • Side Effects: Most of the time, you’re sad when a part’s spec varies with temperature. Turn those lemons into lemonade, or better yet, thermometers.
  • Out of Spec: How hard can you push that MOSFET before it lets go of the magic smoke? Show us your project dancing on the edge of the abyss and surviving.
  • Junk Box Substitutions: What you really needed was an igniter coil. You used an eighth-watt resistor, and got it hot enough to catch the rocket motor on fire. Share your parts-swapping exploits with us.

Inspiration

Diodes can do nearly anything.  Their forward voltage varies with temperature, making them excellent thermometers. Even the humble LED can both glow and tell you how hot it is. And don’t get us started on the photo-diode. They are not just photocells, but radiation detectors.

Here’s a trick to double the current that a 555 timer can sink. We’d love to see other cases of 555 abuse, of course, but any other IC is fair game.

Resistors get hot. Thermochromic paint changes color with temperature. Every five years or so, we see an awesome new design. This ancient clock of [Sprite_tm]’s lays the foundation, [Daniel Valuch] takes it into the matrix, and [anneosaur] uses the effect to brighten our days.

Of course, thin traces can also be resistors, and resistors can get really hot. Check out [Carl Bujega]’s self-soldering four-layer PCB. And while magnetism is nearly magic, a broken inductor can still be put to good use as a bike chain sensor.

Or maybe you have a new twist on the absolutely classic LEDs-as-light-sensors? Just because it’s been done since the early says of [Forrest Mims] doesn’t mean we don’t want to see your take.

Get out there and show us how you can do it wrong too.

2025 Hackaday Component Abuse Challenge