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102 Articles

Ask Hackaday: Using CoPilot? Are You Entertained?

April 1, 2026 by 38 Comments

There’s a great debate these days about what the current crop of AI chatbots should and shouldn’t do for you. We aren’t wise enough to know the answer, but we were interested in hearing what is, apparently, Microsoft’s take on it. Looking at their terms of service for Copilot, we read in the original bold:

Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.

While that’s good advice, we are pretty sure we’ve seen people use LLMs, including Copilot, for decidedly non-entertaining tasks. But, at least for now, if you are using Copilot for non-entertainment purposes, you are violating the terms of service.

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Inside Project Silica, Now On Bakeware

February 27, 2026 by 35 Comments

You see it all the time in science fiction: the heroes find old data, read it, and learn how to save the day. But how realistic is that? Forget aliens. Could you read a stack of punch cards or a 9-track tape right now? Probably not, and those are just a handful of decades in the past. Fast forward a few centuries, and punch cards will decay, and tapes will lose their coating. More modern storage is just as bad. It simply isn’t made to last for thousands of years. Microsoft has Project Silica, which aims to store data in quartz glass with a potential lifetime of many thousands of years.

As you might expect, this is a write-once technology. Lasers write the data, and polarization-sensitive microscopes read it back. Electromagnetic fields don’t matter. You can’t accidentally change the data while reading. A square glass platter the size of a DVD can hold about 7 TB of data.

While the program is not a new one, they’ve recently published results using ordinary borosilicate glass (like your Pyrex baking dish is made from) as a storage medium. They say writing is also more efficient, and reading now requires only one camera instead of the three in the original system. The paper identifies birefringent voxel writing, phase voxels, and more.

Obviously, this isn’t for the casual project. But we have to wonder if hackers could do something similar with lower densities, for example. Unlike other methods we’ve seen, no DNA is involved.

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Hackaday Links: February 8, 2026

February 8, 2026 by 8 Comments

We start this week with a bit of a good news/bad news situation. On February 6th, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was shut down after 25 years of operation. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the RHIC was the only operating particle collider in the United States, and along with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was one of only two heavy-ion colliders in existence.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that the RHIC is going dark so that the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) can take its place. Planned for activation in the mid-2030s, the EIC will occupy the same tunnel as the RHIC and reuse much of the same hardware. As the name implies, it will be used to collide electrons.

Switching gears (no pun intended) to the world of self-driving cars, Waymo’s chief safety officer, Dr. Mauricio Peña, made a surprising admission this week during a U.S. Senate hearing. When asked what his company’s vehicles do when they are presented with a situation that their on-board systems can’t resolve, Dr. Peña explained that they would contact a human “remote assistance operator.” He further clarified that these individuals, located both in the US and the Philippines, don’t literally drive the car remotely. Still, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts questioned not only the company’s transparency on the issue of remote assistance, but the idea that individuals overseas could be making decisions on how vehicles should operate on US roadways.

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Whipping Up A Quick Adapter To Hack The Xbox 360

January 30, 2026 by 2 Comments

[Androxilogin] had a problem. An Xbox 360 Slim had shown up in the post, but failed to give much more than a beep when turned on. Disassembly revealed some missing components, but replacing them failed to breathe life into the beleaguered console. Deeper repair was needed, and that would require a special adapter which [Androxilogin] was able to whip up from scratch.

When it comes to the Corona models of the Xbox 360, it’s often necessary to use something called a “post-fix adapter” to do certain diagnostic and repair tasks. These adapters consist of a bracket which wraps around the CPU, and probes the solder ball for the POST_OUT signal which is otherwise difficult to access on the motherboard itself. Adapters are readily available online, and are usually manufactured as a PCB with a protruding contact to make a connection.

For [Androxilogin], though, time was short. Rather than wait for adapters to ship, it was quicker to whip up a custom piece to do the same job. This was achieved with a 3D print which was able to clamp around the CPU, while snugly holding a piece of tinned 30 AWG wire to poke the critical point beneath the chip. After a couple of attempts to get the sizing just right, [Androxilogin] was able to make the necessary connection which enabled installing Xell Loader on to the machine to bring it back to life.

If you’re eager to make your own post-fix adapter, files are available on Printables, with more details over on Reddit to boot. While the Xbox 360 is starting to suffer some awkward symptoms of age. we nevertheless still see a steady stream of hacks come in for this vintage machine. If you’re tackling your own retro console mods, be sure to notify the tipsline.

This Unlikely Microsoft Prediction Might Just Hit The Mark

January 25, 2026 by 108 Comments

It’s fair to say that there are many people in our community who just love to dunk on Microsoft Windows. It’s an easy win, after all, the dominant player in the PC operating system market has a long history of dunking on free software, and let’s face it, today’s Windows doesn’t offer a good experience. But what might the future hold? [Mason] has an unexpected prediction: that Microsoft will eventually move towards offering a Windows-themed Linux distro instead of a descendant of today’s Windows.

The very idea is sure to cause mirth, but on a little sober reflection, it’s not such a crazy one. Windows 11 is slow and unfriendly, and increasingly it’s losing the position once enjoyed by its ancestors. The desktop (or laptop) PC is no longer the default computing experience, and what to do about that must be a big headache for the Redmond company. Even gaming, once a stronghold for Windows, is being lost to competitors such as Valve’s Steam OS, so it wouldn’t be outlandish for them to wonder whether the old embrace-and-extend strategy could be tried on the Linux desktop.

We do not possess a working crystal ball here at Hackaday, so we’ll hold off hailing a Microsoft desktop Linux. But we have to admit it’s not an impossible future, having seen Apple reinvent their OS in the past using BSD, and even Microsoft bring out a cloud Linux distro. If you can’t wait, you’ll have to make do with a Windows skin, WINE, and the .NET runtime on your current Linux box.

2025: As The Hardware World Turns

January 5, 2026 by 30 Comments

If you’re reading this, that means you’ve successfully made it through 2025! Allow us to be the first to congratulate you — that’s another twelve months of skills learned, projects started, and hacks….hacked. The average Hackaday reader has a thirst for knowledge and an insatiable appetite for new challenges, so we know you’re already eager to take on everything 2026 has to offer.

But before we step too far into the unknown, we’ve found that it helps to take a moment and reflect on where we’ve been. You know how the saying goes: those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That whole impending doom bit obviously has a negative connotation, but we like to think the axiom applies for both the lows and highs in life. Sure you should avoid making the same mistake twice, but why not have another go at the stuff that worked? In fact, why not try to make it even better this time?

As such, it’s become a Hackaday tradition to rewind the clock and take a look at some of the most noteworthy stories and trends of the previous year, as seen from our rather unique viewpoint in the maker and hacker world. With a little luck, reviewing the lessons of 2025 can help us prosper in 2026 and beyond.

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FPGA Dev Kit Unofficially Brings MSX Standard Back

January 3, 2026 by 15 Comments

In the 1980s there were an incredible number of personal computers of all shapes, sizes, and operating system types, and there was very little interoperability. Unlike today’s Windows-Mac duopoly, this era was much more of a free-for-all but that didn’t mean companies like Microsoft weren’t trying to clean up all of this mess. In 1983 they introduced the MSX standard for computers, hoping to coalesce users around a single design. Eventually it became very successful in Japan and saw some use in a few other places but is now relegated to the dustbin of history, but a new FPGA kit unofficially supports this standard.

The kit is called the OneChip Book and, unlike most FPGA kits, includes essentially everything needed to get it up and running including screen, keyboard, and I/O all in a pre-built laptop case. At its core it’s just that: and FPGA kit. But its original intent was to recreate this old 80s computer standard with modern hardware. The only problem is they never asked for permission, and their plans were quickly quashed. The development kit is still available, though, and [electricadventures] goes through the steps to get this computer set up to emulate this unofficially-supported retro spec. He’s also able to get original MSX cartridges running on it when everything is said and done.

Although MSX is relatively unknown in North America and Western Europe, it remains a fairly popular platform for retro computing enthusiasts in much of the rest of the world. We’ve seen a few similar projects related to this computer standard like this MSX-inspired cyberdeck design, but also others that bring new hardware to this old platform.

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