Handy Online Metric Screw, Nut, And Washer Generator

January 31, 2025 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

For those times when you could really use a quick 3D model, this metric screw generator will do the trick for screws between M2 and M16 with matching nuts and washers. Fastener hardware is pretty accessible, but one never knows when a 3D printed piece will hit the spot. One might even be surprised what can be usefully printed on a decent 3D printer at something like 0.08 mm layer height.

Behind the scenes, [Jason]’s tool is an OpenSCAD script with a very slick web-based interface that allows easy customization of just about any element one might need to adjust, including fine-tuning the thread sizing. We’re fans of OpenSCAD here and appreciate what’s going on behind the scenes, but one doesn’t need to know anything about it to use the online tool.

Generated models can be downloaded as .3mf or .stl, but if you really need a CAD model you’re probably best off looking up a part and downloading the matching 3D model from a supplier like McMaster-Carr.

Prefer to just use the OpenSCAD script yourself, instead of the web interface? Select “Download STL/CAD Files” from the dropdown of the project page to download ScrewGenerator.scad for local use, and you’re off to the races.

Taylorator Makes Mischief On The Airwaves

January 29, 2025 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

[Stephen] recently wrote in to share his experiments with using the LimeSDR mini to conduct a bit of piracy on the airwaves, and though we can’t immediately think of a legitimate application for spamming the full FM broadcast band simultaneously, we can’t help but be fascinated by the technique. Called the Taylorator, as it was originally intended to carpet bomb the dial with the collected works of Taylor Swift on every channel, the code makes for some interesting reading if you’re interested in the transmission-side of software defined radio (SDR).

The write-up talks about the logistics of FM modulation, and how quickly the computational demands stack up when you’re trying to push out 100 different audio streams at once. It takes a desktop-class CPU to pull it off in real-time, and eats up nearly 4 GB of RAM.

You could use this project to play a different episode of the Hackaday Podcast on every FM channel at once, but we wouldn’t recommend it. As [Stephen] touches on at the end of the post, this is almost certainly illegal no matter where you happen to live. That said, if you keep the power low enough so as not to broadcast anything beyond your home lab, it’s unlikely anyone will ever find out.

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Prompt Injection Tricks AI Into Downloading And Executing Malware

January 26, 2025 by Donald Papp 8 Comments

[wunderwuzzi] demonstrates a proof of concept in which a service that enables an AI to control a virtual computer (in this case, Anthropic’s Claude Computer Use) is made to download and execute a piece of malware that successfully connects to a command and control (C2) server. [wonderwuzzi] makes the reasonable case that such a system has therefore become a “ZombAI”. Here’s how it worked.

Referring to the malware as a “support tool” and embedding instructions into the body of the web page is what got the binary downloaded and executed, compromising the system.

After setting up a web page with a download link to the malicious binary, [wunderwuzzi] attempts to get Claude to download and run the malware. At first, Claude doesn’t bite. But that all changes when the content of the HTML page gets rewritten with instructions to download and execute the “Support Tool”. That new content gets interpreted as orders to follow; being essentially a form of prompt injection.

Claude dutifully downloads the malicious binary, then autonomously (and cleverly) locates the downloaded file and even uses chmod to make it executable before running it. The result? A compromised machine.

Now, just to be clear, Claude Computer Use is experimental and this sort of risk is absolutely and explicitly called out in Anthropic’s documentation. But what’s interesting here is that the methods used to convince Claude to compromise the system it’s using are essentially the same one might take to convince a person. Make something nefarious look innocent, and obfuscate the true source (and intent) of the directions. Watch it in action from beginning to end in a video, embedded just under the page break.

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Brick Layer Post-Processor, Promising Stronger 3D Prints, Now Available

January 23, 2025 by Tom Nardi 45 Comments

Back in November we first brought you word of a slicing technique by which the final strength of 3D printed parts could be considerably improved by adjusting the first layer height of each wall so that subsequent layers would interlock like bricks. It was relatively easy to implement, didn’t require anything special on the printer to accomplish, and testing showed it was effective enough to pursue further. Unfortunately, there was some patent concerns, and it seemed like nobody wanted to be the first to step up and actually implement the feature.

Well, as of today, [Roman Tenger] has decided to answer the call. As explained in the announcement video below, the company that currently holds the US patent for this tech hasn’t filed a European counterpart, so he feels he’s in a fairly safe spot compared to other creators in the community. We salute his bravery, and wish him nothing but the best of luck should any lawyer come knocking.

So how does it work? Right now the script supports PrusaSlicer and OrcaSlicer, and the installation is the same in both cases — just download the Python file, and go into your slicer’s settings under “Post-Processing Scripts” and enter in its path. As of right now you’ll have to provide the target layer height as an option to the script, but we’re willing to bet that’s going to be one of the first things that gets improved as the community starts sending in pull requests for the GPL v3 licensed script.

There was a lot of interest in this technique when we covered it last, and we’re very excited to see an open source implementation break cover. Now that it’s out in the wild, we’d love to hear about it in the comments if you try it out.

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It’s Never Too Late For A Fixed SimCity 2000

January 23, 2025 by Donald Papp 32 Comments

Some retro games need a little help running on modern systems, and it’s not always straightforward. SimCity 2000 Special Edition is one such game and [araxestroy]’s sc2kfix bugfix DLL shows that the process can require a nontrivial amount of skill and finesse. The result? A SimCity 2000 Special Edition that can run without crash or compromise on modern Windows machines, surpassing previous fixes.

SimCity 2000 Special Edition was a release for Windows 95 that allowed the game to work in windowed glory. The executable is capable of running under modern Windows systems (and at high resolutions!) but it’s got a few problems lurking under the hood.

There are crash issues during save/load dialog boxes, and a big visual problem. Animations rely on palette swapping for the game’s animations, and the technique originally used simply does not work right on modern displays. A fellow named [Guspaz] created SC2KRepainter to partially deal with this by forcing window redraws, but it’s an imperfect fix with a few side effects of it’s own.

[araxestroy]’s new solution eliminates dialog crashes and restores the animations, letting them look exactly as they should even on modern systems. It does this elegantly not by patching the executable or running a separate process, but by making the changes in memory at runtime with the help of a specially-crafted .dll file. Just grab winmm.dll from the latest release and put it into the same folder as simcity.exe, then launch the game to enjoy it as the designers intended!

Patching old games is a scene that helps ensure not only that classics never die, but also helps them be appreciated in new ways. Heck, even E.T. for the Atari 2600 has gotten tweaked, highlighting the misunderstood nature of the game in the process.

Dillo Turns 25, And Releases A New Version

January 19, 2025 by Jenny List 13 Comments

The chances are overwhelming, that you are reading this article on a web browser powered by some form of the Blink or WebKit browser engines as used by Google, Apple, and many open source projects, or perhaps the Gecko engine as used by Firefox. At the top end of the web browser world there are now depressingly few maintained browser engines — we think to the detriment of web standards evolution.

Moving away from the big players though, there are several small browser projects which eschew bells and whistles for speed and compactness, and we’re pleased to see that one of the perennial players has released a new version as it passes its quarter century.

Dillo describes itself as ” a fast and small graphical web browser”, and it provides a basic window on the web with a tiny download and the ability to run on very low-end hardware. Without JavaScript and other luxuries it sometimes doesn’t render a site as you’d see it in Chrome or Firefox, but we’re guessing many users would relish some escape from the web’s cycle-sucking garbage. The new version 3.2.0 brings bug fixes, as well as math formula rendering, and navigation improvements.

The special thing about Dillo is that this is a project which came back from the dead. We reported last year how a developer resurrected it after a previous release back in 2015, and it seems that for now at least it has a healthy future. So put it on your retro PC, your original Raspberry Pi, or your Atari if you have one, and try it on your modern desktop if you need reminding just how fast web browsing can be.

This isn’t the only interesting browser project on the block, we’re also keeping an eye on Ladybird, which is aiming for those big players rather than simplicity like Dillo.

Thanks [Feinfinger] for the tip.

Building A Raycaster Within Bash

January 16, 2025 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

Wolfenstein 3D was a paradigm-shifting piece of software, using raycasting techniques to create a game with pseudo-3D graphics. Now, [izabera] has done something very similar, creating a raycasting display engine that runs entirely within bash.

The work was developed with an eye cast over an existing raycasting tutorial online. As you might imagine, implementing these graphical techniques in a text console proved difficult. The biggest problem [izabera] encountered was that bash is slow. It’s not supposed to display full frames of moving content at 25+ fps. It’s supposed to display text. Making it display graphics by using tons of colorful characters is really pushing the limits. Bash also doesn’t have any ability to work with floating points, so all the calculations are done with massive integers. Other problems involved the limited ways to read the keyboard in bash, and keeping track of the display as a whole.

It’s neat reading about how this was pulled off—specifically because it was hard. It might not be the kind of project you’d ever implement for serious work, but there are learnings to be had here that you won’t get anywhere else. Code is on Github, while there’s a visual storytelling of how it came together on imgur.

We’ve seen similar work before—with magical 3D graphics generated in Microsoft Excel. Will wonders never cease? We hope not, because we always like to see new ones on the tipsline. Keep us busy!