It’s Friday the 13th, and despite having to dodge black cats and poorly located ladders, Elliot and Dan were able to get together and run down the best hacks of the first week of September. Our luck was pretty good, too, seeing how we stumbled upon a coffee table that walks your drink over to you on Strandbeest legs, a potato that takes passable photographs, and a cool LED display three times better than a boring old seven-segment.

If you’ve never heard of the Voynich manuscript, you’re in luck too, because we got a chance to look inside this medieval comic book literally, with multispectral analysis. Is your cruise ship too short? No worries, just lop it in two and add a section. Speaking of cutting things up, that’s what you need to do to see how your plus-size DIY rocket engine performed after test firing.

And finally, it was a sweep for Jenny this week with our “Can’t Miss” articles, where she both pines for a simpler, smaller web experience and wonders what the future holds for biomass fuels.

Download the zero-calorie MP3.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 288: Cyanotypes, Antique 21-Segment Displays, And The Voynich Manuscript In A New Light” →

Even when the boss is away, the show must go on, so Dan slid back behind the guest mic and teamed up with Tom to hunt down the freshest of this week’s hacks. It was a bit of a chore, with a couple of computer crashes and some side-quests down a few weird rabbit holes, but we managed to get things together in the end.

Tune in and you’ll hear us bemoan HOAs and celebrate one ham’s endless battle to outwit them, no matter what the golf cart people say about his antennas. Are you ready to say goodbye to the magnetic stripe on your credit card? We sure are, but we’re not holding our breath yet. Would you 3D print a 55-gallon drum? Probably not, but you almost can with a unique Cartesian-polar hybrid printer. And, if you think running MS-DOS on a modern laptop is hard, guess again — or, maybe you just have to get really lucky.

We also took a look at a digital watch with a beautiful display, a hacked multimeter, modern wardriving tools, switchable magnets, and debate the eternal question of v-slot wheels versus linear bearings. And finally, you won’t want to miss our look at what’s new with 3D scanning, and the first installment of Kristina’s new “Boss Byproducts” series, which delves into the beauty of Fordite.

Download the DRM-free MP3.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 286: Showing Off SAOs, Hiding From HOAs, And Beautiful Byproducts” →

This week on the Podcast, we have something a little different for you. Elliot is on vacation, so Tom was in charge of running the show and he had Kristina in the hot seat.

First up in the news: the 2024 Tiny Games Challenge is still underway and has drawn an impressive 44 entries as of this writing. You have until 9AM PDT on September 10th to show us your best tiny game, whether that means tiny hardware, tiny code, or a tiny BOM.

Then it’s on to What’s That Sound, which Tom and Kristina came up with together, so there will be no pageantry about guessing. But can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what’s making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.

Now it’s on to the hacks, beginning with an open-source liquid-fueled rocket and a really cool retro trackball laptop. Then we’ll discuss screwdriver mange, the Wow! signal, and whether you’re using you’re calipers incorrectly. Finally, we look at a laptop that that isn’t really a laptop, and one simple trick to keep things aligned on your laser engraver.

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.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 285: Learning Laser Tricks, Rocket Science, And A Laptop That’s Not A Laptop” →

The summer doldrums are here, but that doesn’t mean that Elliot and Dan couldn’t sift through the week’s hack and find the real gems. It was an audio-rich week, with a nifty microsynth, music bounced off the moon, and everything you always wanted to know about Raspberry Pi audio but were afraid to ask. We looked into the mysteries of waveguides and found a math-free way to understand how they work, and looked at the way Mecanum wheels work in the most soothing way possible. We also each locked in on more classic hacks, Elliot with a look at a buffer overflow in Tony Hawks Pro Skater and Dan with fault injection user a low-(ish) cost laser setup. From Proxxon upgrades to an RC submarine to Arya’s portable router build, we’ve got plenty of material for your late summer listening pleasure.

Worried about attracting the Black Helicopters? Download the DRM-free MP3 and listen offline, just in case.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 284: Laser Fault Injection, Console Hacks, And Too Much Audio” →

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams reflect on the fact that, as humans, we have–at most–two eyes and no warp drives. While hacking might not be the world’s most dangerous hobby, you do get to work with dangerous voltages, temperatures, and frickin’ lasers. Light features prominently, as the guys talk about LED data interfaces, and detecting faster-than-light travel.

There’s also a USB sniffer, abusing hot glue, and some nostalgia topics ranging from CRT graphics to Apollo workstations (which have nothing directly to do with NASA). The can’t miss articles this week cover hacking you and how you make the red phone ring in the middle of a nuclear war.

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!

As always, please download the file to archive in your doomsday bunker.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 283: Blinding Lasers, LEDs, And ETs” →