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95 Articles

Building A Wireless Fingerprint Authorization Device

July 3, 2026 by 13 Comments

Once upon a time, there was a bit of a fad for fingerprint authentication in laptops and desktop computers. It has long since faded, but [superdog] wanted just such a device for Linux and Mac machines. Thus, it was time to build one.

[superdog] designed the device, nicknamed immurok, as a tool for people who use external keyboards, and do lots of terminal work on Mac and Linux machines. Repeat password requests can interrupt one’s flow when hustling at the keys, so immurok was designed to ease this pain.

The device is based on a WCH CH592F microcontroller, which comes with Bluetooth connectivity out of the box. This allows immurok to connect wirelessly to the machine of your choice, advertising itself as a standard Bluetooth HID keyboard device. Fingerprint-wise, scanning is done with an R559S capacitive sensor, which verifies the match locally so there’s no transmitting biometric data anywhere. On the computer side, Linux is setup to use a CLI/TUI app plus PAM integration to handle authorization for system logins and sudo in the terminal. On the Mac platform, it’s used with a menu bar app, with PAM integration for admin prompts. There’s also a separate helper path for using it with the lock screen.

If you’re sick of entering your password all the time and wish unlocking your PC was more like unlocking your phone, this might be the project for you. We’ve seen similar projects before, too. If you’re whipping up fun gear for biometric auth, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.

Recreating One Of The First Hackintoshes

March 30, 2026 by 22 Comments

Apple’s Intel era was a boon for many, especially for software developers who were able to bring their software to the platform much more easily than in the PowerPC era. Macs at the time were even able to run Windows fairly easily, which was unheard of. A niche benefit to few was that it made it much easier to build Hackintosh-style computers, which were built from hardware not explicitly sanctioned by Apple but could be tricked into running OSX nonetheless. Although the Hackintosh scene exploded during this era, it actually goes back much farther and [This Does Not Compute] has put together one of the earliest examples going all the way back to the 1980s.

The build began with a Macintosh SE which had the original motherboard swapped out for one with a CPU accelerator card installed. This left the original motherboard free, and rather than accumulate spare parts [This Does Not Compute] decided to use it to investigate the Hackintosh scene of the late 80s. There were a few publications put out at the time that documented how to get this done, so following those as guides he got to work. The only original Apple part needed for this era was a motherboard, which at the time could be found used for a bargain price. The rest of the parts could be made from PC components, which can also be found for lower prices than most Mac hardware. The cases at the time would be literally hacked together as well, but in the end a working Mac would come out of the process at a very reasonable cost.

[This Does Not Compute]’s case isn’t scrounged from 80s parts bins, though. He’s using a special beige filament to print a case with the appropriate color aesthetic for a computer of this era. There are also some modern parts that make this style computer a little easier to use in today’s world like a card that lets the Mac output a VGA signal, an SD card reader, and a much less clunky power supply than the original would have had. He’s using an original floppy disk drive though, so not everything needs to be modernized. But, with these classic Macintosh computers, modernization can go to whatever extreme suits your needs.

Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!

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A Novelty Clock Makes The Best Tiny Mac Yet

February 16, 2026 by 8 Comments

We’re lucky enough in 2026 to have cheap single-board computers fast enough to emulate machines from the 1990s, touching on the 32-bit era. We’ve seen a few projects as a result, emulating the Apple Macs of the 68000 era, but even with the best 3D printing, they can disappoint when it comes to the case. So when [This Does Not Compute] saw a novelty alarm clock using a very well-modelled mini replica of an early Mac, putting a Mac emulator in it was the obvious way to go.

The project uses a Raspberry Pi with a small colour LCD.  The video below the break takes us through the process of gutting it and mounting the Pi and display on a custom 3D-printed bracket. In an unexpected touch, parts of the original LCD are used to give the curved corners, which owners of an original Mac will remember. It may have a little further to go in that its fake floppy drive is begging to be converted to an SD card slot, and it has a now-unused brightness dial. But we’d say it’s one of the best little Mac emulators we’ve seen so far, if perhaps not the smallest.

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5K IMac Turned Into 5K Display

February 4, 2026 by 12 Comments

While Apple weren’t the first to invent high-DPI displays or to put them into consumer electronics, they did popularize them fairly effectively with the Retina displays in the early 2010s and made a huge number of them in the following years. The computers they’re attached to are getting up there in age, though, and although these displays are still functional it isn’t quite as straightforward to use them outside of their Apple-approved use. [David] demonstrates one way of getting this done by turning a 5k iMac into an external monitor.

The first attempt at getting a usable monitor from the old iMac was something called a Luna Display, but this didn’t have a satisfying latency. Instead, [David] turned to replacing the LCD driver board with a model called the R1811. This one had a number of problems including uneven backlighting, so he tried a second, less expensive board called the T18. This one only has 8-bit color instead of the 10-bit supported by the R1811 but [David] couldn’t personally tell the difference, and since it solved the other issues with the R1811 he went with this one. After mounting the new driver board and routing all of the wires, he also replaced the webcam with an external Logitech model and upgraded the speakers as well.

Even when counting the costs for both driver boards, the bill for this conversion comes in well under the cost of a new monitor of comparable quality from Apple, a company less concerned about innovation these days than overcharging their (admittedly willing) customers. For just a bit of effort, though, these older iMacs and other similar Apple machines with 5k displays can be repurposed to something relatively modern and still usable. Others have done similar projects and funded the upgrades by selling off the old parts.

Mac System 7 On A G4? Why Not!

December 5, 2025 by 13 Comments

Over the many years Apple Computer have been in operation, they have made a success of nearly-seamlessly transitioning multiple times between both operating systems and their underlying architecture. There have been many overlapping versions, but there’s always a point at which a certain OS won’t run on newer hardware. Now [Jubadub] has pushed one of those a little further than Apple intended, by persuading classic Mac System 7 to run on a G4.

System 7 was the OS your Mac would have run some time in the mid ’90s, whether it was a later 68000 machine or a first-gen PowerMac. In its day it gave Windows 3.x and even 95 a run for their money, but it relied on an older Mac ROM architecture than the one found on a G4. The hack here lies in leaked ROMS, hidden backwards compatibility, and an unreleased but preserved System 7 version originally designed for the ’90s Mac clone programme axed by Steve Jobs.  It’s not perfect, but they achieved the impossible.

As to why, it seems there’s a significant amount of software that needs 7 to run, something mirrored in the non-Mac retrocomputing world. Even this hack isn’t the most surprising System 7 one we’ve seen recently, as an example someone even made a version for x86 machines.

Thumbnail Image Art: Apple PowerMac G4 by baku13, CC BY-SA 3.0

Jellybean Mac Hides Modern PC

May 7, 2025 by 19 Comments

The iMac G3 is an absolute icon of industrial design, as (or perhaps more) era-defining than the Mac Classic before it. In the modern day, if your old iMac even boots, well, you can’t do much with it. [Rick Norcross] got a hold of a dead (hopefully irreparable) specimen, and stuffed a modern PC inside of it.

From the outside, it’s suprizingly hard to tell. Of course the CRT had to go, replaced with a 15″ ELO panel that fits well after being de-bezeled. (If its resolution is only 1024 x 768, well, it’s also only 15″, and that pixel density matches the case.) An M-ATX motherboard squeezes right in, above a modular PSU. Cooling comes from a 140 mm case fan placed under the original handle. Of course you can’t have an old Mac without a startup chime, and [Rick] obliges by including an Adafruit FX board wired to the internal speakers, set to chime on power-up while the PC components are booting.

These sorts of mods have proven controversial in the past– certainly there’s good reason to want to preserve aging hardware–but perhaps with this generation of iMac it won’t raise the same ire as when someone guts a Mac Classic. We’ve seen the same treatment given to a G4 iMac, but somehow the lamp doesn’t quite have the same place in our hearts as the redoubtable jellybean.

38C3: Towards An Open WiFi MAC Stack On ESP32

December 28, 2024 by 15 Comments

At the 38th Chaos Communications Congress, [Frostie314159] and [Jasper Devreker] gave us a nice update on their project to write an open-source WiFi stack for the ESP32. If you’re interested in the ESP32 or WiFi in general, they’ve also got a nice deep dive into how that all works.

On the ESP32, there’s a radio, demodulator, and a media access controller (MAC) that takes care of the lowest-level, timing-critical bits of the WiFi protocol. The firmware that drives the MAC hardware is a licensed blob, and while the API or this blob is well documented — that’s how we all write software that uses WiFi after all — it’s limited in what it lets us do. If the MAC driver firmware were more flexible, we could do a lot more with the WiFi, from AirDrop clones to custom mesh modes.

The talk starts with [Jasper] detailing how he reverse engineered a lot of Espressif’s MAC firmware. It involved Ghidra, a Faraday cage, and a lucky find of the function names in the blob. [Frostie] then got to work writing the MAC driver that he calls Ferris-on-Air. Right now, it’s limited to normal old station mode, but it’s definite proof that this line of work can bear fruit.

This is clearly work in progress — they’ve only been at this for about a year now — but we’ll be keeping our eyes on it. The promise of the ESP32, and its related family of chips, being useful as a more general purpose WiFi hacking tool is huge.