Hackaday Podcast Episode 276: A Mac On A Pico, Ropes On The Test Stand, A Battleship Up On Blocks

June 21, 2024 by No comments

The week gone by was rich with fun hacks, and Elliot and Dan teamed up this time around to run them down for everyone. The focus this week seemed to trend to old hardware, from the recently revived Voyager 1 to a 1940s car radio, a homebrew instrument from 1979, a paper tape reader, and a 128k Mac emulator built from an RP2040.

Newer hacks include a 3D-printed bottle labeler, a very hackable smart ring, and lessons learned about programming robots. We also took a look at turning old cell phones into Linux machines, making sure climbing ropes don’t let you down, and snooping on orbital junk with a cool new satellite.

We wrapped things up with a discussion of just how weird our solar system is, and Dan getting really jealous about Tom Nardi’s recent trip to see the battleship New Jersey from an up close and personal perspective.

 

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 776: Dnsmasq, Making The Internet Work Since 1999

March 27, 2024 by 4 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Simon Phipps sit down with Simon Kelley to talk about Dnsmasq! That’s a piece of software that was first built to get a laptop online over LapLink, and now runs on most of the world’s routers and phones. How did we get here, and what does the future of Dnsmasq look like? For now, Dnsmasq has a bus factor of one, which is a bit alarming, given how important it is to keeping all of us online. But the beauty of the project being available under the GPL is that if Simon Kelley walks away, Google, OpenWRT, and other users can fork and continue maintenance as needed. Give the episode a listen to learn more about Dnsmasq, how it’s tied to the Human Genome Project, and more!

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 769: OpenCost — We Spent How Much?

February 7, 2024 by 2 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Katherine Druckman talk with Matt Ray about OpenCost. What exactly is Cloud Native? Why do we need a project just for tracking expenses? Doesn’t the cloud make everything cheaper? Is there a use case for the hobbyist?

The cloud is just a fancy way to talk about someone else’s servers — and what may surprise you is that they charge you money for the privilege of using those computers. But how much? And when you have multiple projects, which ones cost how much? That’s where OpenCost comes in. Not only does it help you track down costs in your cloud usage, it can also catch problems like compromised infrastructure sooner. Mining bitcoin in your Kubernetes Cluster makes a really noticeable spike in processor usage after all.
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FLOSS Weekly Episode 768: Open Source Radio

January 31, 2024 by 8 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls talk with Tony Zeoli about Netmix and the Radio Station WordPress plugin. The story starts with the Netmix startup, one of the first places doing Internet music in the 1990s. That business did well enough to get bought out just before the Dot Com bubble burst in 2000. Today, Tony runs the Radio Station plugin, which is all about putting a station’s show schedule on a WordPress site.

In the process, the trio covers Internet radio history, the licensing complications around radio and streaming, the state of local radio, and more. Is there a long term future for radio? Does Creative Commons solve the licensing mess? Is AI going to start eating radio, too? All this and more!

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 767: Owntracks, Are We There Yet?

January 24, 2024 by 2 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Jeff Massie talk with JP Mens about Owntracks, the collection of programs that lets you take back control of your own location data. It’s built around the simple idea of taking position data from a mobile phone or other data source, sending it over MQTT to a central server, and logging that data to a simple data store.

From there, you can share it as trips, mark points of interest, play back your movement in a web browser, and more. And because it’s just JSON inside MQTT, it’s pretty trivial to make a connector to interface with other projects, like Home Assistant. We’ve even covered the process!

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 766: WebRTC — The Hack That Connects Everyone To Everything

January 17, 2024 by 7 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch talk with Sean DuBois, WebRTC wizard, all about the crazy feats the Pion Go server is capable of, how WebRTC is about to change OBS, and what it looks like to build a successful Open Source Career.

WebRTC is for more than video. The TOR Snowflake project uses Pion to sneak TOR traffic through firewalls even with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) at play. Since nobody wants to block web conferencing, TOR and even Wireguard can use this to slip though.

Sean is also working on some game-changing patches for OBS Studio, including WHEP support to go along with the newly introduced WHIP feature. This enables direct connections to another OBS client, as well as connection to another WebRTC client like vdo.ninja without running an embedded browser to make it work.

And then there’s WebRTC For The Curious, a free CC0 e-book all about the nuts and bolts of WebRTC. And Broadcast Box, a ready-to-run WebRTC one-to-many broadcasting solution that lets you run your own streaming service. You can connect with Sean at the Real-time Broadcast Discord server for information about all of the projects listed here and more!

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 765: That Ship Sailed… And Sank

January 9, 2024 by 5 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Aaron Newcomb talk with Randal Schwartz, the longest running host of FLOSS Weekly, Perl’s biggest cheerleader, and now Dart and Flutter expert. What’s new with Randal since his last FLOSS Weekly episode in May 2020? Why should you look at Dart and Flutter? And how do you avoid becoming a security martyr?

Randal has been busy since handing over the reigns of FLOSS Weekly, adding to his Perl credentials a solid claim to being a Dart Flutter expert. The Dart language has some real appeal, taking the best features from JIT languages like JavaScript, and also offering binary compilation like a real systems language should. Then the Flutter framework lets you write your code once, and literally run it on any screen. Sure, there have been some growing pains along the way, and listen to the episode to hear Randal describe the “45-degree turns” the language/framework duo has taken through the years.

Then as almost a bonus at the end of the episode, Randal quickly covered his now-expunged conviction for “doing his job with too much enthusiasm”, and covered some basic pointers to keep other security researchers out of trouble. This week is a nostalgia trip for long-time listeners, as well as a real treat for everyone else.

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