Hackaday Links: February 15, 2026

February 15, 2026 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

It probably won’t come as much of a surprise to find that most of the Hackaday staff aren’t exactly what you’d call sports fanatics, so we won’t judge if you didn’t tune in for the Super Bowl last week. But if you did, perhaps you noticed Ring’s Orwellian “Search Party” spot — the company was hoping to get customers excited about a new feature that allows them to upload a picture of their missing pet and have Ring cameras all over the neighborhood search for a visual match. Unfortunately for Ring, the response on social media wasn’t quite what they expected.

One commenter on YouTube summed it up nicely: “This is like the commercial they show at the beginning of a dystopian sci-fi film to quickly show people how bad things have gotten.” You don’t have to be some privacy expert to see how this sort of mass surveillance is a slippery slope. Many were left wondering just who or what the new system would be searching for when it wasn’t busy sniffing out lost pups.

The folks at Wyze were quick to capitalize on the misstep, releasing their own parody ad a few days later that showed various three-letter agencies leaving rave reviews for the new feature. By Thursday, Ring announced they would be canceling a planned expansion that would have given the divisive Flock Safety access to their network of cameras. We’re sure it was just a coincidence.

Speaking of three-letter agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced this week that they will no longer incentivize the inclusion of stop-start systems on new automobiles. The feature, which shuts off the engine when the vehicle comes to a stop, was never actually required by federal law; rather, the EPA previously awarded credits to automakers that added the feature, which would help them meet overall emission standards. Manufacturers are free to continue offering stop-start systems on their cars if they wish, but without the EPA credits, there’s little benefit in doing so. Especially since, as Car and Driver notes, it seems like most manufacturers are happy to be rid of it. The feature has long been controversial with drivers as well, to the point that we’ve seen DIY methods to shut it off.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 864: Work Hard, Save Money, Retire Early

February 11, 2026 by Jonathan Bennett 3 Comments

This week Jonathan chats with Bill Shotts about The Linux Command Line! That’s Bill’s book published by No Starch Press, all about how to make your way around the Linux command line! Bill has had quite a career doing Unix administration, and has thoughts on the current state of technology. Watch to find out more!

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Hackaday Links: February 8, 2026

February 8, 2026 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

We start this week with a bit of a good news/bad news situation. On February 6th, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was shut down after 25 years of operation. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the RHIC was the only operating particle collider in the United States, and along with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was one of only two heavy-ion colliders in existence.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that the RHIC is going dark so that the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) can take its place. Planned for activation in the mid-2030s, the EIC will occupy the same tunnel as the RHIC and reuse much of the same hardware. As the name implies, it will be used to collide electrons.

Switching gears (no pun intended) to the world of self-driving cars, Waymo’s chief safety officer, Dr. Mauricio Peña, made a surprising admission this week during a U.S. Senate hearing. When asked what his company’s vehicles do when they are presented with a situation that their on-board systems can’t resolve, Dr. Peña explained that they would contact a human “remote assistance operator.” He further clarified that these individuals, located both in the US and the Philippines, don’t literally drive the car remotely. Still, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts questioned not only the company’s transparency on the issue of remote assistance, but the idea that individuals overseas could be making decisions on how vehicles should operate on US roadways.

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Wooden Case Makes A 2026 TV Stylish

February 8, 2026 by Jenny List 17 Comments

The middle of the 20th century produced a revolution in understated stylish consumer design, some of which lives on today. The reality of living in a 1950s or ’60s house was probably to be surrounded by the usual mess of possessions from many past decades, but the promise was of a beautiful sleek and futuristic living space. Central to this in most homes would have been the TV set, and manufacturers followed the trends of the age with cases that are now iconic. Here in 2026 we put up with black rectangles, but fortunately there’s Cordova Woodworking with a modern take on a retro TV cabinet.

We’ve put the build video below, and it’s a wonderfully watchable piece of workshop titillation in a fully-equipped modern shop. While we appreciate they’ve put the design up for sale, we think many Hackaday readers could come up with their own having already been inspired. One thing we notice over the originals is that they use “proper” wood for their case, when we know the ’60s version would have had veneer-faced ply or chipboard.

The result is a piece of furniture which nicely contains the modern TV and accessories, but doesn’t weigh a ton or dominate the room in the way one of the originals would have, much less emit that evocative phenolic hot-electronics smell. We’d have one in our living room right now. Meanwhile if you’d like a wallow in mid-century TV, we have you covered.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 356: Nanoprinting, Vibe Coding, And Keebin’ With Kristina, IN HELL!

February 6, 2026 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.

We found no news to speak of, except that Kristina has ditched Windows after roughly 38 years. What is she running now? What does she miss about Windows? Tune in to find out.

On What’s That Sound, Kristina thought it was a jackhammer, but [Statistically Unlikely] knew it was ground-tamper thingy, and won a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! Congratulations!

After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, beginning with 3D printing on the nano scale, and a couple of typewriter-based hacks. Then we take a look at the beauty of the math behind graph theory, especially when it comes to circuit sculptures and neckties.

We also talk display hacking, macro pads with haptic feedback knobs, and writing code in Welsh. Finally, we discuss the Virtual Boy, and ponder whether vibe coding is killing open source.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 863: Opencast: That Code Is There For A Reason

February 4, 2026 by Jonathan Bennett 1 Comment

This week Jonathan chats with Olaf Andreas Schulte and Lars Kiesow about Opencast, the video management system for education. What does Opencast let a school or university accomplish, how has that changed over the last decade, and what exciting new things are coming? Watch to find out!

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Symbian On Nokia Lives Again, In 2026

February 4, 2026 by Jenny List 52 Comments

Do you remember Nokia phones, with their Symbian OS? Dead and gone, you might think, but even they have dedicated enthusiasts here in 2026. Some of them have gone so far as to produce a new ROM for the daddy of Symbian phones, the Nokia N8, and [Janus Cycle] is giving it a spin.

For many people, the smartphone era began when the first Apple iPhones and Android devices reached the market, but the smartphone itself can be traced back almost two decades earlier to an IBM device. In the few years before the birth of today’s platforms many people even had smartphones without quite realizing what they had, because Nokia, the market leader in the 2000s, failed to make their Symbian platform user friendly in the way that Apple did. The N8 was their attempt to produce an iPhone competitor, but its lack of an on-device app store and that horrific Windows-based installation system meant it would be their last mass-market flagship before falling down the Microsoft Windows Phone rabbit hole.

In the video below the break he takes a pair of N8s and assembles one with that beautiful camera fully working, before installing the new ROM and giving it a spin. We get to see at last what the N8 could have been but wasn’t, as it gains the last Symbian release from Nokia, and the crucial missing app store. Even fifteen years later it’s a very slick device, enough to make us sorry that this ROM won’t be made for the earlier N-series sitting in a drawer where this is being written. We salute its developers for keeping the N8 alive.

Oddly, this isn’t the only Nokia from that era that’s received a little 2020s love.

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