Software Hacks

864 Articles

BASIC Classroom Management

May 25, 2024 by 22 Comments

While we don’t see it used very often these days, BASIC was fairly revolutionary in bringing computers to the masses. It was one of the first high-level languages to catch on and make computers useful for those who didn’t want to (or have time) to program them in something more complex. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t capable of getting real work done — this classroom management software built in the language illustrates its capabilities.

Written by [Mike Knox], father of [Ethan Knox] aka [norton120], for his classroom in 1987, the programs were meant to automate away many of the drudgeries of classroom work. It includes tools for generating random seating arrangements, tracking attendance, and other direct management tasks as well as tools for the teacher more directly like curving test grades, tracking grades, and other tedious tasks that normally would have been done by hand at that time. With how prevalent BASIC was at the time, this would have been a powerful tool for any educator with a standard desktop computer and a floppy disk drive.

Since most people likely don’t have an 80s-era x86 machine on hand capable of running this code, [Ethan] has also included a docker container to virtualize the environment for anyone who wants to try out his father’s old code. We’ve often revisited some of our own BASIC programming from back in the day, as our own [Tom Nardi] explored a few years ago.

Regular Expressions Finally Come To Microsoft Excel

May 24, 2024 by 29 Comments

There are two types of people in the world: those who have no idea what a regular expression is, and those who not only know what they are but can compose them on the fly and tend to use them in situations where they’re clearly not called for. And it’s that latter camp, of which we consider ourself a proud member, that is rejoicing with the announcement that Microsoft is adding regular expression support to Excel.

Or perhaps not rejoicing so much as wondering what took so long. Yes, regular expressions have been part of VBA for a while now, but the new functions allow you to use regexes right in the spreadsheet grid. There are plenty of caveats, of course. The big one is that this is still in beta at this time, so you have to do some gymnastics to enable it, if you’re even allowed to in the first place. Second, support appears limited to three functions at the moment: REGEXTEST, which provides a logical test of pattern matching; REGEXEXTRACT, which returns a substring that matches a pattern; and REGEXREPLACE, which substitutes a string for a pattern. The video below walks through how to use these functions within spreadsheets.

What’s also unclear now is what flavor of regular expressions is supported. There are a bewildering number of entities in the regex bestiary — character classes, positional indicators, quantifiers, subexpressions, lazy and greedy matches, and a range of grouping constructs that perplex even regex pros. One hopes these new functions will support one of the existing regex standards, but Microsoft is famous for “extending and enhancing.” Then again, regex support has been in the .NET Framework for years and is pretty close to the Perl standard, so our guess is that it’ll be close to that.

If you fall into the “What’s a regex?” camp but want to change that, why not get your grep on?

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CADmium Moves CAD To The Browser

May 23, 2024 by 43 Comments

For plenty of computer users, the operating system of choice is largely a middleman on the way to the browser, which hosts the tools that are most important. There are even entire operating systems with little more than browser support, under the assumption that everything will be done in the browser eventually. We may be one step closer to that type of utopia as well with this software tool called CADmium which runs exclusively in a browser.

As the name implies, this is a computer-aided design (CAD) package which looks to build everything one would need for designing project models in a traditional CAD program like AutoCAD or FreeCAD, but without the burden of needing to carry local files around on a specific computer. [Matt], one of the creators of this ambitious project, lays out the basic structure of a CAD program from the constraint solver, boundary representation (in this case, a modern one built in Rust), the history tracker, and various other underpinnings of a program like this. The group hopes to standardize around JSON files as well, making it easy to make changes to designs on the fly in whatever browser the user happens to have on hand.

While this project is extremely early in the design stage, it looks like they have a fairly solid framework going to get this developed. That said, they are looking for some more help getting it off the ground. If you’ve ever wanted something like this in the browser, or maybe if you’ve ever contributed to the FreeCAD project and have some experience, this might be worth taking a look at.

Emulate A KIM-1 With A Commodore 64

May 12, 2024 by 1 Comment

When you think about virtualization, you usually think about making some CPU pretend to be another CPU. However, there are sometimes advantages to making a computer pretend to be the same computer.

That’s the case with [oldvcr]’s KIMplement, which emulates a KIM-1 with a 6502 using a Commodore 64, which also uses a 6502.The reason this makes sense is that you have total control over an emulated CPU. If a program, for example, writes to a critical memory location or tries to take over the screen or keyboard, you can easily make the emulator do something more appropriate. Things like breakpoints and single stepping also become trivial.

The virtual machine at the heart of it is 6o6 (6502 on 6502), and it seems to perform well. By virtualizing, you can easily protect the system from programs that try to, for example, take over an interrupt vector. This is similar to how x86 protected mode can run old real-mode code in a virtual environment and intervene for certain instructions. The emulation is good enough that the emulator can run the emulator, which then runs the emulator to actually run the real target. That’s wasteful, of course, but it does speak to the completeness of the pretend CPU.

If you want a KIM-1 (and an 1802 Elf) but only have an Arduino, you can emulate a different way. At least an emulated KIM-1 doesn’t develop bad memory chips.

AI Helps Make Web Scraping Faster And Easier

May 8, 2024 by 13 Comments

Web scraping is usually only a first step towards extracting meaningful data. Once you’ve got everything pulled down, you’ve still got to process it into something useful. Here to assist with that is Scrapegraph-ai, a Python tool that promises to automate the process using a selection of large language models (LLMs).

Scrapegraph-ai is able to accept a URL as well as a prompt, which is a plain-English instruction on what to do with the data. Examples include summarizing, describing images, and more. In other words, gathering the data and analyzing or formatting it can now be done as one.

The project is actually pretty flexible in terms of the AI back-end. It’s able to work with locally-installed AI tools (via ollama) or with API keys for services like OpenAI and more. If you have an OpenAI API key, there’s an online demo that will show you the capabilities pretty effectively. Otherwise, local installation is only a few operations away.

This isn’t the first time we have seen the flexibility of AI tools like large language models leveraged to ease the notoriously-fiddly task of web scraping, and it’s great to see the results have only gotten better.

A diagram from the article, showing the router being used in a car for streaming media to multiple portable devices at once

A Portable DLNA Server Hack Helps You Tame OpenWRT

May 5, 2024 by 12 Comments

A good amount of hacks can be done with off-the-shelf hardware – what’s more, it’s usually available all over the world, which means your hacks are easier to build for others, too. Say, you’ve built something around a commonly available portable router, through the magic of open-source software. How do you make the fruits of your labour easy to install for your friends and blog readers? Well, you might want to learn a thing or two from [Albert], who shows us a portable DLNA server built around a GL-MT300N-V2 pocket router.

[Albert]’s blog post is a tutorial on setting it up, with a pre-compiled binary image you can flash onto your router. Flash it, prepare a flash drive with your media files, connect to the WiFi network created by the router, run the VLC player app, and your media library is with you wherever you go.

Now, a binary image is good, but are you wondering how it was made, and how you could achieve similar levels of user-friendliness in your project? Of course, here’s the GitHub repository with OpenWRT configuration files used to build this image, and build instructions are right there in the README. If you ever needed a reference on how to make commonly available OpenWRT devices do your bidding automagically, this is it.

This is an elegant solution to build an portable DLNA server that’s always with you on long rides, and, think of it, it handily beats a typical commercialized alternative, at a lower cost. Want software upgrades? Minor improvements and fixes? Security patches? Everything is under your control, and thanks to the open-source nature of this project, you have a template to follow. There won’t always be a perfectly suited piece of hardware on the market, of course, as this elegant dual-drive Pi-based NAS build will attest.

This Windows Installer Installs Linux

May 5, 2024 by 15 Comments

It may be a very long time since some readers have installed a copy of Windows, but it appears at one point during the installation there’s a step that asks you which OS version you would like to install. Normally this is populated by whichever Windows flavours come on the install medium, but [Naman Sood] has other ideas. How about a Windows installer with Alpine Linux as one of the choices? Sounds good to us.

You can see it in action in the video below the break. Indeed Alpine Linux appears as one of the choices, followed by the normal Windows licence accept screen featuring the GPL instead of any MS text. The rest of the installer talks about installing Windows, but we can forgive it not expecting a Linux install instead.

So, the question we’re all asking is: how is it done? The answer lies in a WIM file, a stock Windows image which the installer unpacks onto your hard drive. The Linux distro needs to be installable onto an NTFS root partition, and to make it installable there’s a trick involving the Windows pre-installation environment.

This is an amusing hack, but the guide admits it’s fragile and perhaps not the most useful. Even so, the sight of Linux in a Windows installer has to be worth it.

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