There are many ways to detect stress in an individual. You can use self-reporting checklists, you could try and measure various vital signs like respiratory rate and pulse and infer things, or you could observe the levels of hormones like cortisol in the blood.
Or… you could pull some parts out of a Playstation 4, and get hacking. Edwin Hwu did precisely that, creating a device that can image the skin down to the nanometer and potentially even determine fine details about an individual’s health status. He came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to tell us all about it.
The completed Lego DVD screensaver. (Credit: Grant Davis, YouTube)
There’s something extremely calming and pleasing about watching a screensaver that merely bounces some kind of image around, with the DVD logo screensaver of a DVD player being a good example. The logical conclusion is thus that it would be great to replicate this screensaver in Lego, because it’d be fun and easy. That’s where [Grant Davis]’s life got flipped upside-down, as this turned out to be anything but an easy task in his chosen medium.
Things got off on a rocky start with figuring out how to make the logo bounce against the side of the ‘screen’, instead of having it merely approach before backing off. The right approach here seemed to be Lego treads as used on e.g. excavators, which give the motion that nice pause before ‘bouncing’ back in the other direction.
With that seemingly solved, most of the effort went into assembling a functional yet sturdy frame, all driven by a single Lego Technic electromotor. Along the way there were many cases of rapid self-disassembly, ultimately leading to a complete redesign using worm gears, thus requiring running the gears both ways with help from a gearbox.
Since the screensaver is supposed to run unattended, many end-stop and toggle mechanisms were tried and discarded before settling on the design that would be used for the full-sized build. Naturally, scaling up always goes smoothly, so everything got redesigned and beefed up once again, with more motors added and multiple gearbox design changes attempted after some unfortunate shredded gears.
Ultimately [Grant] got what he set out to do: the DVD logo bouncing around on a Lego ‘TV’ in a very realistic fashion, set to the noise of Lego Technic gears and motors whirring away in the background.
In the 2000s, the DVD industry was concerned about piracy, in particular the threat to their business model presented by counterfeit DVDs and downloadable movies. Their response was a campaign which could be found embedded into the intro sequences of many DVDs of the era, in which an edgy font on a black background began with “You wouldn’t steal a car.. “. It was enough of a part of the background noise of popular culture that it has become a meme in the 2020s, reaching many people with no idea of its origins. Now in a delicious twist of fate, it has been found that the font used in the campaign was itself pirated. Someone should report them.
The font in question is FF Confidential, designed by [Just van Rossum], whose brother [Guido] you may incidentally know as the originator of the Python programming language. The font in the campaign isn’t FF Confidential though, as it turns out it’s XBAND Rough, a pirated copy of the original. What a shame nobody noticed this two decades ago.
It’s a bit of fun to delight in an anti-piracy campaign being caught using a dodgy font, but if this story serves to tell us anything it’s that the web of modern intellectual property is so labyrinthine as to be almost impossible to navigate without coming a cropper somewhere. Sadly the people caught out in this case would be the last to call for reform of the intellectual property environment, but as any sane heads would surely agree, such reform is overdue.
It’s been a busy week in space news, and very little of it was good. We’ll start with the one winner of the week, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed successfully on the Moon’s surface on March 2. The lander is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and carries ten scientific payloads, including a GPS/GNSS receiver that successfully tracked signals from Earth-orbiting satellites. All of the scientific payloads have completed their missions, which is good because the lander isn’t designed to withstand the long, cold lunar night only a few days away. The landing makes Firefly the first commercial outfit to successfully soft-land something on the Moon, and being the first at anything is always a big deal.
With the rapidly evolving situation surrounding the Redbox vending machines still out in the wild, it’s about time somebody put together a Wiki to keep it all straight.
The unredbox wiki has information on the various different hardware revisions that Redbox put out into the wild, from the regular outdoor machines to the weird indoor blue variant. The site also has breakdowns on individual components. For example, it covers the computers inside the machines, built by Dell, Lenovo, and Premio, and bits and pieces like the DVD carousel and the modems used inside.
Basically, if you’re working with these machines and you don’t have a manual, this resource could help you out. As could the neat video below that shows the internals of a Redbox machine during the reloading process.
Remember Redbox? Those bright red DVD vending machines that dotted every strip mall and supermarket in America, offering cheap rentals when Netflix was still stuffing discs into paper envelopes? After streaming finally delivered the killing blow to physical rentals, Redbox threw in the towel in June 2024, leaving around 34,000 kiosks standing as silent monuments to yet another dead media format.
Last month, we reported that these machines were still out there, barely functional and clinging to life. Now, a company called The Junkluggers has been tasked with the massive undertaking of clearing these mechanical movie dispensers from the American retail landscape, and they’re doing it in a surprisingly thoughtful way. I chatted to them to find out how it’s going.
The 1990s saw a revolution occur, launched by the CD burner. As prices of writeable media and drives dropped, consumers rushed to duplicate games, create their own mix CDs, and backup their data on optical disc. It was a halcyon time.
Fast forward to today, and we’re very much on downward curve when it comes to optical media use. Amidst ever-declining consumer interest, Sony has announced it will cut production of writeable optical media. Let’s examine what’s going on, and explore the near future for writable optical discs.
