Ask Hackaday: Is Shortwave On Life Support?

July 26, 2024 by Al Williams 123 Comments

Between World War II and Y2K, shortwave listening was quite an education. With a simple receiver, you could listen to the world. Some of it, of course, was entertainment, and much of it was propaganda of one sort or another. But you could learn a lot. Kids with shortwave radios always did great in geography. Getting the news from a different perspective is often illuminating, too. Learning about other cultures and people in such a direct way is priceless. Getting a QSL card in the mail from a faraway land seemed very exciting back then.

Today, the shortwave landscape is a mere shadow of itself. According to a Wikipedia page, there are 235 active shortwave broadcasters from a list of 414, so nearly half are defunct. Not only are there many “dead” shortwave outlets, but many of the ones that are left are either not aimed at the world market or serve a niche group of listeners.

You can argue that with the Internet, you don’t need radio, and that’s probably correct in some ways but misses a few important points. Indeed, many broadcasters still exist as streaming stations or a mix of radio and streaming. I have to admit I listen to the BBC often but rarely on the air. My computer or phone plays it in crystal clarity 24 hours a day.

A future Hackaday author in front of an Eico shortwave radio

So, while a 14-year-old in 1975 might be hunched over a radio wearing headphones, straining to hear NHK World Radio, these days, they are likely surfing the popular social media site of the week. You could easily argue that content on YouTube, Instagram, and the like can come from all over the world, so what’s the problem?

The problem is information overload. Faced with a shortwave radio, there were a limited number of options available. What’s more, only a small part of the band might be “open” at any given time. It isn’t like the radio could play games or — unless you were a ham — allow you to chat with your friends. So you found radio stations from Germany to South Africa. From China and Russia, to Canada and Mexico. You knew the capital of Albania. You learned a little Dutch from Radio Nederlands.

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Is Shortwave On Life Support?” →

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Key Cap Map

July 23, 2024 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

So, [zyumbik]’s trademark seems to be sexing things up, and the Artsey layout did not escape their gaze. This is the Sexy Artsey. Let’s back up a bit.

A pink and purple 10-key keyboard with a rotary encoder, spikes, and a custom area with LEGO attached. — Image by [zyumbik] via reddit

Artsey is a keyboard layout for chording, and this keyboard is built for it. It’s a one-handed keyboard meant for pressing multiple keys at a time to produce each character. With some use, [zyumbik] discovered that the Taipo layout might be a better fit, so there are currently some elements of both.

If you’d like to make this adorable keyboard, everything is waiting for you to download, including files for various thingamabobs you can stick on the side there where the rainbow is now. There’s also a groovy flower version of the knob.

Controller-wise, you can use a Seeed Studio Xiao in either BLE or RP2040 format, or the Waveshare RP2040 Zero. The firmware is written in ZMK.

Remember the death metal macropad? (Who could forget that tentacled nightmare?) This is the same creator. Kind of hard to believe, innit? Well, except for the spikes. Apparently they’re for thumb discipline.

Via reddit

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Key Cap Map” →

Small Mammals Appear To Have A Secret Infrared Sense

July 22, 2024 by Lewin Day 23 Comments

If you’ve ever watched Predator, you’ve noted the tactical advantage granted to the alien warrior by its heat vision. Indeed, even with otherwise solid camoflauge, Dutch and his squad ended up very much the hunted.

And yet, back in reality, it seems the prey might be the one with the ability to sense in the infrared spectrum. Research has now revealed this unique ability may all be down to the hairs on the back of some of the smallest mammals.

Continue reading “Small Mammals Appear To Have A Secret Infrared Sense” →

Reviewing Nuclear Accidents: Separating Fact From Fiction

July 22, 2024 by Maya Posch 94 Comments

Few types of accidents speak as much to the imagination as those involving nuclear fission. From the unimaginable horrors of the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, to the fever-pitch reporting about the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, all of these have resulted in many descriptions and visualizations which are merely imaginative flights of fancy, with no connection to physical reality. Due to radiation being invisible with the naked eye and the interpretation of radiation measurements in popular media generally restricted to the harrowing noise from a Geiger counter, the reality of nuclear power accidents in said media has become diluted and often replaced with half-truths and outright lies that feed strongly into fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Why is it that people are drawn more to nuclear accidents than a disaster like that at Bhopal? What is it that makes the one nuclear bomb on Hiroshima so much more interesting than the firebombing of Tokyo or the flattening of Dresden? Why do we fear nuclear power more than dam failures and the heavy toll of air pollution? If we honestly look at nuclear accidents, it’s clear that invariably the panic afterwards did more damage than the event itself. One might postulate that this is partially due to the sensationalist vibe created around these events, and largely due to a poorly informed public when it comes to topics like nuclear fission and radiation. A situation which is worsened by harmful government policies pertaining to things like disaster response, often inspired by scientifically discredited theories like the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model which killed so many in the USSR and Japan.

In light of a likely restart of Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the near future, it might behoove us to wonder what we might learn from the world’s worst commercial nuclear power disasters. All from the difficult perspective of a world where ideology and hidden agendas do not play a role, as we ask ourselves whether we really should fear the atom.

Continue reading “Reviewing Nuclear Accidents: Separating Fact From Fiction” →

Hackaday Links: July 21, 2024

July 21, 2024 by Dan Maloney 20 Comments

When monitors around the world display a “Blue Screen of Death” and you know it’s probably your fault, it’s got to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at work. That’s likely the situation inside CrowdStrike this weekend, as engineers at the cybersecurity provider struggle to recover from an update rollout that went very, very badly indeed. The rollout, which affected enterprise-level Windows 10 and 11 hosts running their flagship Falcon Sensor product, resulted in machines going into a boot loop or just dropping into restore mode, leaving hapless millions to stare at the dreaded BSOD screen on everything from POS terminals to transit ticketing systems.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: July 21, 2024” →

Do Your Research

July 20, 2024 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

We were talking about a sweet hack this week, wherein [Alex] busts the encryption for his IP web cam firmware so that he can modify it later. He got a number of lucky breaks, including getting root on the device just by soldering on a serial terminal, but was faced with having to reverse-engineer a binary that implemented RSA encryption and decryption.

Especially when they’re done right, and written to avoid side-channel attacks, encryption routines aren’t intuitive, even when you’re looking at the C source. Reversing it from the binary would be a tremendous hurdle.

That’s when [Alex] started plugging in strings he found in the binary into a search engine. And that’s when he found exactly the open source project that the webcam used, which gave him the understanding he needed to crack the rest of the nut.

Never forget! When you’re doing some reverse engineering, whether hardware or software, do a search for every part number and every string you find in memory. If you’re like me, it might feel like cheating a little bit, but it’s just being efficient. It’s what all your hacker heroes say they do, and if you’re lucky, it might just be the break you need too.

An image of a man in glasses in a circle placed on a black background. The title "Pierce Nichols: Teaching Robots to Sail" is on white lettering in the bottom left corner.

Supercon 2023: [Pierce Nichols] Is Teaching Robots To Sail

July 19, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 12 Comments

Sailing the high seas with the wind conjures a romantic notion of grizzled sailors fending off pirates and sea monsters, but until the 1920s, wind-powered vessels were the primary way goods traveled the sea. The meager weather-prediction capabilities of the early 20th Century spelled the end of the sailing ship for most cargo, but cargo ships currently spend half of their operating budget on fuel. Between the costs and growing environmental concerns, [Pierce Nichols] thinks the time may be right for a return to sails.

[Nichols] grew up on a sailing vessel with his parents, and later worked in the aerospace industry designing rockets and aircraft control surfaces. Since sailing is predominantly an exercise in balancing the aerodynamic forces of the sails with the hydrodynamic forces acting on the keel, rudder, and hull of the boat, he’s the perfect man for the job.

While the first sails developed by humans were simple drag devices, sailors eventually developed airfoil sails that allow sailing in directions other than downwind. A polar diagram for a vessel gives you a useful chart of how fast it can go at a given angle to the wind. Sailing directly into the wind is also known as being “in irons” as it doesn’t get you anywhere, but most other angles are viable.

After a late night hackerspace conversation of how it would be cool to circumnavigate the globe with a robotic sailboat, [Nichols] assembled a team to move the project from “wouldn’t it be cool” to reality with the Pathfinder Prototype. Present at the talk, this small catamaran uses two wing sails to provide its primary propulsion. Wing sails, being a solid piece, are easier for computers to control since soft sails often exhibit strange boundary conditions where they stop responding to inputs as expected. Continue reading “Supercon 2023: [Pierce Nichols] Is Teaching Robots To Sail” →