Are Hackers The Future Of Amateur Radio?

If amateur radio has a problem, it’s that shaking off an image of being the exclusive preserve of old men with shiny radios talking about old times remains a challenge. Especially, considering that so many amateurs are old men who like to talk a lot about old times. It’s difficult to attract new radio amateurs in the age of the Internet, so some in the hobby are trying new avenues. [Dan, KB6NU] went to the recent HOPE conference to evangelise amateur radio, and came away having had some success. We agree with him, hackers can be the future of amateur radio.

He’s put up the slides from his talk, and in them he goes through all the crossovers between the two communities from Arduinos to GNU Radio. We don’t need persuading, in fact we’d have added UHF and microwave RF circuitry and pushing the limits of the atmosphere with digital modes such as WSPR to the list as our personal favourites. It seems he found willing converts, and it’s certainly a theme we’ve featured before here at Hackaday. After all, unless it retains its interest, amateur radio could just die away.

How Do They Do That?

Last week’s Chaos Communication Camp is kinda a big deal: 6,000 hackers all out in a field all need power, food, drink, networking, and of course, sewage in the middle of nowhere. Oh yeah, plus video services on multiple simultaneous stages, custom phone infrastructure, a postal service, and even a diesel train. How is that even possible to run with only volunteers? How do they even know how to run something this scale?

My wife asked me this question while we were driving up to Berlin, and the answer is of course the same as it is to “Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?” Practice.

But it’s not just practice. It’s also passing down the lessons learned to the next generation, making procedures that are not 100% dependent on the people doing the jobs, but can be passed on to the next volunteer willing to pick up the torch.

And then I was interviewing [Jens Ohlig] and [Mitch Altman] about the early days of the second wave hackerspaces in America for the podcast. (Some great interviews – go check it out!) The central story there is essentially the same: the critical missing ingredient that lead to the blossoming of US hackerspaces was simply a set of instructions and design principles – drawing on the experience of established hackerspaces.

Sharing information is a fundamental cornerstone of the hacker ethic, and it gives the next hacker a leg up. Contributes to the global hive mind. And it makes things possible that would otherwise seem impossible. Pushing the hacker state-of-the-art is what Hackaday is all about, and we’re used to thinking of it in terms of a particular microcontroller library, but seeing how the same sharing makes impossible logistics possible was inspirational. Don’t be afraid to start small and iterate – and take good notes.

Great Computer Hacks Make Hackers Hacker Computers

In the year 1995, computers were, well… boring. The future wasn’t here yet, and computers were drab, chunky beige boxes. Sure, there were some cool-ish computers being sold, but the landscape was still relatively barren. But as you’ll see in the video below the break, it doesn’t have to be that way, and the [Hackers Curator] shows us the way by recreating Johnny Lee Miller’s computer from the 1995 movie Hackers.

Hackers wasn’t popular when it came out, but over the years it has gained quite a following. It portrayed computers and the people who loved them in completely new ways, representing a culture that has never existed. Even so, it inspired so many young hacker types. Among those inspired is the crew over at [Hackers Curator] and they have taken it upon themselves to, uh… curate… the props, costumes, and stories surrounding the movie.

Recreating Dade’s iconic camo “luggable” computer came with quite a lot of difficulty. It turns out that the original movie props were working custom computers that used hacked together customized cases and Mac Powerbook 180c internals. Dade’s (aka Zer0 Cool and Crash Override) was mashup of the a Compaq Portable 486c and the aforementioned Mac. [HackersCurator] have lovingly recreated this prop from two broken computers, but chose to run the internals with a Raspberry Pi.

The techniques used in the creation of this beastly cyberdeck are ones that can be used in building so many other projects, even if you’re not a Hackers hacker. Customizing the plastics and placing a trackball in the most awkward of spots was expertly done, and we’ll be referring to it in the future for guidance when doing similar projects.

Are movie replica hacks your thing? You’re in luck! It turns out that this isn’t [Hackers Curator]’s first build. In 2019 they tackled Lord Nikon’s laptop, and of course, we covered that one too!

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Hackers, Fingerprints, Laptops, And Stickers

A discussion ensued about our crazy hacker ways the other night. I jokingly suggested that with as many stickers as we each had on our trusty companion machines, they might literally be as unique as a fingerprint. Cut straight to nerds talking too much math.

First off, you could wonder about the chances of two random hackers having the same sticker on their laptop. Say, for argument’s sake, that globally there are 2,000 stickers per year that are cool enough to put on a laptop. (None of us will see them all.) If a laptop lasts five years, that’s a pool of 10,000 stickers to draw from. If you’ve only got one sticker per laptop, that’s pretty slim odds, even when the laptops are of the same vintage.

Real hackers have 20-50 stickers per laptop — at least in our sample of “real hackers”. Here, the Birthday Paradox kicks in and helps us out. Each additional sticker provides another shot at matching, and an extra shot at being matched. So while you and I are unlikely to have the same birthday, in a room full of 42 people, it’s 90% likely that someone will have their birthday matched. With eight of us in the room, that’s 240 stickers that could match each other. (9999 / 10000) ^ (240 * 210 / 2) = about an eight percent chance of no match, so a better than 90% chance that we’d have at least one matching sticker.

But that doesn’t answer the original question: are our be-stickered laptops unique, like fingerprints or snowflakes? There, you have to match each and every sticker on the laptop — a virtually impossible task, and while there were eight of us in the room, that’s just not enough to get any real juice from the Birthday Paradox. (1/10,000) ^ 30 = something with -120 in the exponent. More than all the atoms in the universe, much less hackers in a room, whether you take things to the eighth power or not.

I hear you mumbling “network effects”. We’ve all gone to the same conferences, and we have similar taste in stickers, and maybe we even trade with each other. Think six degrees of separation type stuff. Indeed, this was true in our room. A few of us had the same stickers because we gave them to each other. We had a lot more matches than you’d expect, even though we were all unique.

So while the math for these network effects is over my head, I think it says something deeper about our trusty boxen, their stickers, and their hackers. Each sticker also comes with a memory, and our collected memories make us unique like our laptops. But matching stickers are also more than pure Birthday Paradoxes, they represent the shared history of friends.

Wear your laptop stickers with pride!

Hack The Cloud!

The obvious rants against software or services “in the cloud” are that you don’t own it, your data isn’t on your own hard drive, or that, when the interwebs are down, you just can’t get your work done. But the one that really grinds my gears is that, at least for many cloud services, you just can’t play around with them. Why does that matter? Well, as a hacker type, of course, I like to fool around, but more deeply, I feel that this invitation to play around is what’s going to grow up the next generation of hackers. Openness matters not just for now, but also for the future.

Of course, it’s unfair to pin all of this on the cloud. There are plenty of services with nice open APIs that let you play around with their systems as much as you want — witness the abundance of amusing things you can do with Twitter or Twitch. Still, every day seems to bring another formerly-open API that gets bought up by some wealthy company and shut down. I built a nice “is it going to rain today” display out of a meter-long WS2812 strip and an ESP8266, but Dark Sky API got bought up by Apple and is going dark soon (tee-hee!) leaving me thinking of how I’m going to get easy weather data in the next few months.

Whisper your tip in our earOr take my e-mail annunciator. I wrote a little script that, when I have new mail that’s work related or from my wife (read: important), it displays the subject line on a VFD that I have perched on my monitor. This works with Gmail, which I have to use for work, because they support IMAP so at least I can do cool things with the mail once it reaches my server. But can I do anything with Google Groups, which we use for the Hackaday Tip Line? Fat chance!

So there’s good “cloud” and there’s bad “cloud”. Good cloud is open cloud. Good cloud invites you to play, to innovate, and to come up with the right solutions for yourself. Good cloud gives you access to your data. Good cloud is hackable cloud. Let’s see more of that.

Ham Radio Needs To Embrace The Hacker Community Now More Than Ever

As many a radio amateur will tell you, ham radio is a hobby with as many facets as there are radio amateurs. It should be an exciting and dynamic place to be, but as those who venture forth into it sometimes sadly find out, it can be anything but. Tightly-knit communities whose interests lie in using $1,000 stations to chase DX (long-distance contacts), an advancing age profile, and a curious fascination of many amateurs with disaster communications. It’s something [Robert V. Bolton, KJ7NZL] has sounded off about in an open letter to the amateur radio community entitled “Ham Radio Needs To Embrace The Hacker Community Now More Than Ever“.

In it he laments that the influx in particular of those for whom disaster preparedness is the reason for getting a licence is to blame for amateur radio losing its spark, and he proposes that the hobby should respond by broadening its appeal in the direction of the hacker community. The emphasis should move from emergency communications, he says, and instead topics such as software defined radio and digital modes should be brought to the fore. Finally he talks about setting up hacker specific amateur radio discussion channels, to provide a space in which the talk is tailored to our community.

Given our experience of the amateur radio community we’d be bound to agree with him. The hobby offers unrivalled opportunity for analogue, mixed-signal, digital, and software tinkering in the finest tradition of the path set by the early radio amateurs around a hundred years ago, yet it sometimes seems to have lost its way for people like us. It’s something put into words a few years ago by our colleague Dan Maloney, and if you’re following [KJ7NZL]’s path you could do worse than read Dan’s long-running $50 ham series from the start.

Via Hacker News.

Header image: Unknown author, Public domain.

Recreating Lord Nikon’s Laptop From Hackers

The outlandish computers from 1995’s Hackers are easily one of the most memorable elements of the iconic cult classic. In the film, each machine is customized to reflect the individual hacker that operates it, and feature everything from spray painted camouflage paint schemes to themed boot animations based on the owner’s personal iconography. But what might not be so obvious is that the real-life props took a considerable amount of hardware hacking before they were ready for their big-screen debut.

A group of dedicated Hackers fans have created a website to document, and ideally recreate, all the custom work that went into the various pieces of tech featured in the film. As explained by [Nandemoguy], the group’s latest triumph is a screen-accurate build of Lord Nikon’s laptop. The final product not only looks just like the machine used in the film, but thanks to the internal Raspberry Pi, is far more powerful than the original computer would have been.

Unless you’re on the team over at HackersCurator.com, you might not know that the laptops in the film were handmade chimeras that combined the external cases of various PCs with (usually) the internals of an Apple Powerbook 180c. Why the prop masters of the film would have gone through so much trouble to create the character’s computers is not immediately clear, but if we had to guess, presumably it was due to the requirements of the over-the-top graphical interfaces that are featured so heavily in the film.

At any rate, the replica created by [Nandemoguy] is built in much the same way. At least for the parts you can see on the outside, anyway. He goes through the considerable case modifications required to replace the original keyboard on the Toshiba Satellite T1850 with a Powerbook keyboard, which as you might have guessed, has been converted into a USB HID device with a Teensy microcontroller. He even cuts the ports off the back of the Mac’s motherboard and glues them in place around the backside of the machine. But everything else, including the LCD, is all new hardware. After all, who really wants to go through all that trouble just to have a fancy Powerbook 180c in 2019?

Even if you weren’t a fan of Hackers, the level of detail and effort put into this build it absolutely phenomenal. It’s interesting to see the parallels between this replica and the burgeoning cyberdeck scene; it seems like with a Teensy, a Raspberry Pi, and enough Bondo, anything can be turned into a functional computer.

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