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52 Articles

Mockup of a printed copy of the Little OS Book

One Book To Boot Them All

April 2, 2025 by 19 Comments

Somewhere in the universe, there’s a place that lists every x86 operating system from scratch. Not just some bootloaders, or just a kernel stub, but documentation to build a fully functional, interrupt-handling, multitasking-capable OS. [Erik Helin and Adam Renberg] did just that by documenting every step in The Little Book About OS Development.

This is not your typical dry academic textbook. It’s a hands-on, step-by-step guide aimed at hackers, tinkerers, and developers who want to demystify kernel programming. The book walks you through setting up your environment, bootstrapping your OS, handling interrupts, implementing virtual memory, and even tackling system calls and multitasking. It provides just enough detail to get you started but leaves room for exploration – because, let’s be honest, half the fun is in figuring things out yourself.

Completeness and structure are two things that make this book stand out. Other OS dev guides may give you snippets and leave you to assemble the puzzle yourself. This book documents the entire process, including common pitfalls. If you’ve ever been lost in the weeds of segmentation, paging, or serial I/O, this is the map you need. You can read it online or fetch it as a single 75-page long PDF.

Mockup photo source: Matthieu Dixte

Multi-Divi book with hand thumbing through it

Math, Optimized: Sweden’s Maximal Multi-Divi

March 28, 2025 by 30 Comments

Back in the early 1900s, before calculators lived in our pockets, crunching numbers was painstaking work. Adding machines existed, but they weren’t exactly convenient nor cheap. Enter Wilken Wilkenson and his Maximal Multi-Divi, a massive multiplication and division table that turned math into an industrialized process. Originally published in Sweden in the 1910’s, and refined over decades, his book was more than a reference. It was a modular calculating instrument, optimized for speed and efficiency. In this video, [Chris Staecker] tells all about this fascinating relic.

What makes the Multi-Divi special isn’t just its sheer size – handling up to 9995 × 995 multiplications – but its clever design. Wilkenson formatted the book like a machine, with modular sections that could be swapped out for different models. If you needed an expanded range, you could just swap in an extra 200 pages. To sell it internationally, just replace the insert – no translation needed. The book itself contains zero words, only numbers. Even the marketing pushed this as a serious calculating device, rather than just another dusty math bible.

While pinwheel machines and comptometers were available at the time, they required training and upkeep. The Multi-Divi, in contrast, required zero learning curve – just look up the numbers for instant result. And it wasn’t just multiplication: the book also handled division in reverse, plus compound interest, square roots, and even amortizations. Wilkenson effectively created a pre-digital computing tool, a kind of pocket calculator on steroids (if pockets were the size of briefcases).

Of course, no self-respecting hacker would take claims of ‘the greatest invention ever’ at face value. Wilkenson’s marketing, while grandiose, wasn’t entirely wrong – the Multi-Divi outpaced mechanical calculators in speed tests. And if you’re feeling adventurous, [Chris] has scanned the entire book, so you can try it yourself.

Continue reading “Math, Optimized: Sweden’s Maximal Multi-Divi” →

A light grey background with white and black line drawings of three different bicycles on one page and three different tire levers and three different valve covers for bikes on the other.

A Beautifully Illustrated Guide To Making

November 10, 2024 by 13 Comments

If you’ve ever been wondering what you should make next, it can be a daunting task to decide with the firehose of inspiration coming straight from the series of tubes that makeup the World Wide Web. Perhaps a more curated digital catalog of projects would help?

Featuring “1000 Useful Things to Make,” [NODE]’s Make it Yourself is a beautifully-illustrated catalog of open source and DIY projects spanning a number of domains including camping gear, furniture, music, and maker tools. Each image is a link to the original project and there’s a handy icon by each denoting what skills are needed, such as sewing or 3D printing.

If you haven’t seen [NODE]’s work before, he uses line art to illustrate his projects and has given all of these projects the same treatment on the (virtual) page with credits to the original creators in the footnotes. We hope a future edition will include tractors and houses to truly rival the Sears catalog of yore, but it’s hard to complain when we already have so many projects we could choose to build.

Many of the projects may seem familiar, if slightly fancier when illustrated in line art, like the Ploopy headphones, this retro audio player, or the Keybon adaptive macro pad.

Continue reading “A Beautifully Illustrated Guide To Making” →

Obsolete E-Reader Gets New Life

November 13, 2023 by 6 Comments

For those who read often, e-readers are a great niche device that can help prevent eye fatigue with their e-ink displays especially when compared to a backlit display like a tablet or smartphone, all while taking up minimal space unlike a stack of real books. But for all their perks, there are still plenty of reasons to maintain a library of bound paper volumes. For those who have turned back to books or whose e-readers aren’t getting the attention they once did, there are plenty of things to do with them like this e-book picture frame.

The device started life as a PocketBook Basic Touch, or PocketBook 624, a fairly basic e-reader from 2014, but at its core is a decent ARM chip that can do many more things than display text. It also shipped running a version of Linux, which made it fairly easy to get a shell and start probing around. Unlike modern smart phones this e-reader seems to be fairly open and able to run some custom software, and as a result there are already some C++ programs available for these devices. Armed with some example programs, [Peter] was able to write a piece of custom software that displays images from an on-board directory and mounted the new picture display using an old book.

There were a number of options for this specific device that [Peter] explored that didn’t pan out well, like downloading images from the internet to display instead of images on the device, but in the end he went with a simpler setup to avoid feature creep and get his project up and running for “#inktober”, a fediverse-oriented drawing challenge that happened last month. While not strictly in line with a daily piece of hand-drawn artwork, the project still follows the spirit of the event. And, for those with more locked-down e-readers there’s some hope of unlocking the full functionality of older models with this FOSS operating system.

Books You Should Read: Prototype Nation

June 7, 2023 by 24 Comments

Over the years, I’ve been curious to dig deeper into the world of the manufacturing in China. But what I’ve found is that Western anecdotes often felt surface-level, distanced, literally and figuratively from the people living there. Like many hackers in the west, the allure of low-volume custom PCBs and mechanical prototypes has me enchanted. But the appeal of these places for their low costs and quick turnarounds makes me wonder: how is this possible? So I’m left wondering: who are the people and the forces at play that, combined, make the gears turn?

Enter Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation, by Silvia Lindtner. Published in 2020, this book is the hallmark of ten years of research, five of which the author spent in Shenzhen recording field notes, conducting interviews, and participating in the startup and prototyping scene that the city offers.

This book digs deep into the forces at play, unraveling threads between politics, culture, and ripe circumstances to position China as a rising figure in global manufacturing. This book is a must-read for the manufacturing history we just lived through in the last decade and the intermingling relationship of the maker movement between the west and east.

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Hackaday Links: September 25, 2022

September 25, 2022 by 15 Comments

Looks like there’s trouble out at L2, where the James Webb Space Telescope suffered a mechanical anomaly back in August. The issue, which was just announced this week, involves only one of the six imaging instruments at the heart of the space observatory, known as MIRI, the Mid-Infrared Instrument. MIRI is the instrument on Webb that needs the coldest temperatures to work correctly, down to six Kelvins — we’ve talked about the cryocooler needed to do this in some detail. The problem has to do with unexpectedly high friction during the rotation of a wheel holding different diffraction gratings. These gratings are rotated into the optical path for different measurements, but apparently the motor started drawing excessive current during its move, and was shut down. NASA says that this only affects one of the four observation modes of MIRI, and the rest of the instruments are just fine at this time. So they’ve got some troubleshooting to do before Webb returns to a full program of scientific observations.

There’s an old saying that, “To err is human, but to really screw things up takes a computer.” But in Russia, to really screw things up it takes a computer and a human with a really poor grasp on just how delicately balanced most infrastructure systems are. The story comes from Moscow, where someone allegedly spoofed a massive number of fake orders for taxi rides (story in Russian, Google Translate works pretty well) through the aggregator Yandex.Taxi on the morning of September 1. The taxi drivers all dutifully converged on the designated spot, but instead of finding their fares, they just found a bunch of other taxis milling about and mucking up traffic. Yandex reports it has already added protection against such attacks to its algorithm, so there’s that at least. It’s all fun and games until someone causes a traffic jam.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: September 25, 2022” →

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Hackaday Links: July 10, 2022

July 10, 2022 by 9 Comments

We always like to call out a commercial success stemming from projects that got their start on Hackaday.io, and so we’re proud to announce the release of MAKE: Calculus by Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron, a book that takes a decidedly different approach to teaching calculus than traditional courses. Geared to makers and hackers, who generally tend to have a visual style of learning, the book makes heavy use of 3D-printed models to illustrate the relationships between functions. The project started five years ago as a 2017 Hackaday Prize entry, and resulted in a talk at the 2019 Supercon. Their book is now available for preorder, and might be a great way to reacquaint themselves with calc, or perhaps even to learn it for the first time. Continue reading “Hackaday Links: July 10, 2022” →