Software Development

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Audio field emission map

Audio Sound Capture Project Needs Help

November 5, 2025 by 20 Comments

When you are capturing audio from a speaker, you are rarely capturing the actual direct output of such a system. There are reflections and artifacts caused by anything and everything in the environment that make it to whatever detector you might be using. With the modern computation age, you would think there would be a way to compensate for such artifacts, and this is what [d.fapinov] set out to do.

[d.fapinov] has put together a code base for simulating and reversing environmental audio artifacts made to rival systems, entirely orders of magnitude higher in cost. The system relies on similar principles used in radio wave antenna transmission to calculate the audio output map, called spherical harmonic expansion. Once this map is calculated and separated from outside influence, you can truly measure the output of an audio device.

The only problem is that the project needs to be tested in the real world. [d.fapinov] has gotten this far but is unable to continue with the project. A way to measure audio from precise locations around the output is required, as well as the appropriate control for such a device.

Audio enthusiasts go deep into this tech, and if you want to become one of them, check out this article on audio compression and distortion.

Hello World In C Without Linking In Libraries

October 29, 2025 by 27 Comments

If there’s one constant with software developers, it is that sometimes they get bored. At these times, they tend to think dangerous thoughts, usually starting with ‘What if…’. Next you know, they have gone down a dark and winding rabbit hole and found themselves staring at something so amazing that the only natural conclusion that comes to mind is that while educational, it serves no immediate purpose.

The idea of applying this to snipping out the <stdio.h> header in C and the printf() function that it provides definitely is a good example here. Starting from the typical Hello World example in C, [Old Man Yells at Code] over at YouTube first takes us from the standard dynamically linked binary at a bloated 16 kB, to the statically linked version at an eyepopping 767 kB.

To remove any such dynamic linkages, and to keep file sizes somewhat sane, he then proceeds to first use the write()function from the <unistd.h> header, which does indeed cut out the <stdio.h> include, before doing the reasonable thing and removing all includes by rewriting the code in x86 assembly.

While this gets the final binary size down to 9 kB and needs no libraries to link with, it still performs a syscall, after setting appropriate register values, to hand control back to the kernel for doing the actual printing. If you try doing something similar with syscall(), you have to link in libc, so it might very well be that this is the real way to do Hello World without includes or linking in libraries. Plus the asm keyword is part of C, although one could argue that at this point you could just as well write everything in x86 ASM.

Of course, one cannot argue that this experience isn’t incredibly educational, and decidedly answers the original ‘What if…’ question.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 853: Hardware Addiction; Don’t Send Help

October 29, 2025 by No comments

This week Jonathan and Rob chat with Cody Zuschlag about the Xen project! It’s the hypervisor that runs almost everywhere. Why is it showing up in IoT devices and automotive? And what’s coming next for the project? Watch to find out!

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Web Development In… Pascal?

October 28, 2025 by 28 Comments

If you were asked to make an e-commerce website in 2025, what language would you reach for? Show of hands: JavaScript? Go? Pascal? Well, there was at least one taker for that last one: [jns], and he has an hour-long tutorial video showing you how he made it happen. 

The site in question is the web store for his personal business, Photronic Arts, so you cannot say [jns] does not have skin in the game. From the front end, this is HTML and could be anything upto and including Shopify under the hood. It’s not, though: it’s a wholly custom backend [jns] put together in FreePascal, using the Lazarus IDE.

There’s a case to be made for Pascal in the modern day, but when we wrote that we weren’t expecting to get tips about web development.  Ironically enough [jns] spends so much time giving the technical details in this video he doesn’t delve that deeply into why he chose FreePascal, especially when it’s clear he’s very familiar with C and C++. In his associated writeup on his Gopher page (link though Floodgap) [jns] simply declares it’s a language he’s quite fond of, which is reason enough of us. The source code is available, though on request, to avoid AI scraping. It’s a sad but understandable response to these modern times.

If you’re not into web development and want to see a deep-dive into how the backend works, this video is worth watching even if you don’t particularly care for Pascal. It’s also worth watching if you do know backend development, and are Pascal-curious. If neither of those things interest you, what about this Pascal Library for Arduino?

Thanks to [jns] for the tip! If you’re doing modern work with questionably-modern tools, we call that a hack and would love to hear from you.

 

A New Golden Age Of Browser Games

October 17, 2025 by 20 Comments

Arguably, the golden age of browser gaming occurred in the 00s mostly revolving around Adobe Flash. This was an era with high creativity and a low barrier of entry, and also decentralized from gatekeeping app stores. Sadly, these times have passed us by as the security concerns around Flash led to its discontinuation and most casual gamers have migrated to the app store for their fix. But that doesn’t stop some from continuing to bring gaming to the browser, even if those games were never intended for it in the first place like this browser port of Celeste.

Celeste is an indie platformer where the player climbs a mysterious mountain while confronting her inner struggles. Originally meant for consoles and PC, a group of friends including [velzie], [bomberfish], and [Toshit] aka [r58Playz] took this as a challenge especially after seeing someone else’s half finished web port of this game. Most of the build revolves around WebAssembly (wasm) and around “cursed” .NET runtime hacks which also allow the port to run the community-made Everest mod loader. It uses a multithreaded and JIT compiling version of mono-wasm backported from .NET 10 to .NET 9 to maximize performance. The team actually first started by porting Terraria to the browser, and then moved on to this Celeste port from there.

The port of Celeste can be played here, and their port of Terraria is also available, although may not support a ton of Hackaday traffic so some patience is advised. There are also GitHub repositories for Celeste and Terraria as well.  With impressive ports of relatively modern games moving into the browser, perhaps we’re entering a new golden age of browser gaming; we’ve also seen things like Minecraft implemented in only HTML and CSS lately as well.

Could This Be The Year Of Algol?

October 15, 2025 by 23 Comments

Ok, you caught us. It certainly isn’t going to be the year of Algol. When you think of “old” programming languages, you usually think of FORTRAN and COBOL. You should also think of LISP. But only a few people will come up with Algol. While not a household name, it was highly influential, and now, GCC is on the verge of supporting it just like it supports other languages besides C and C++ these days.

Why bring an old language up to the forefront? We don’t know, but we still find it interesting. We doubt there’s a bunch of Algol code waiting to be ported, but you never know.

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