Tool Embodiment And The Dead Trackball

April 18, 2026 by Elliot Williams 42 Comments

There is a currently ongoing debate in the neuropsychology world about how we relate to the tools that we use. The theory of “tool embodiment” says that when we use some tools frequently enough, our brain recognizes them similarly to how it recognizes our own hands, for instance. There is evidence and counter-evidence from experiments with prosthetics, trash-grabber arms, and rubber dummy arms, just to name a few. It’s fair to say the jury is still out.

All I know is that today my trackball broke, and using a normal gaming mouse to edit the podcast was torture. It would be an exaggeration to say that I felt like I’d lost a hand, but I have so much motor memory apparently built up in my use of the trackball that switching over to another tool to undertake the exact same series of hundreds of small audio edits – mostly compensating for the audio delay across continents, but also silencing coughs and background noises – took an extra hour.

Anyone who has switched from one keyboard to another, or heck even from emacs to vim, knows what I experienced. My body just knows how to flick my wrist to make the cursor on the screen move over to the beginning of that “umm”. It’s not like I don’t conceptually know how to use a mouse either, and it does exactly the same job. But the mouse wasn’t my tool for this application. And saying that out loud makes it almost sound like I’m bordering on embodying my trackball.

I probably should have taken the trackball apart and replaced the bad tact switch on the left-click – that would have taken maybe twenty minutes – but I completely underestimated how integral the tool had become to the work. Anyway, as I write this, tomorrow is Saturday and I’ll have time to fix it. But today, I learned something pretty neat about myself in the process, even if I don’t think my single datapoint is going to rock the academic psych world.

What’s Your Favorite Kind Of Hack?

April 11, 2026 by Elliot Williams 32 Comments

Talking with [Tom Nardi] on the podcast this week, he mentioned his favorite kind of hack: the community-developed open-source firmware that can be flashed into a commercial product that has crappy firmware, thus saving it. The example, just for the record, is the CrossPoint open e-book reader firmware that turns a mediocre cheap e-book into something that you can do anything you want with. Very nice!

And that got me thinking about “kinds of hacks” in general. Do we have a classification scheme for the hacks that we see here on Hackaday? For instance, the obvious precursor to many of Tom’s favorite hacks is the breaking-into-the-locked-firmware hack, where a device that didn’t want you loading your own firmware on it is convinced to let you do so. Junk-hacking is probably also a category of its own, where instead of finding your prey on AliExpress, you find it on eBay, or in the alleyway. And the save-it-from-the-landfill repair and renovation hacks are close relatives.

The doing-too-much-with-too-little hacks are maybe my personal favorite. I just love to see when someone manages to get DOOM running in Linux on a computer made with only 8-pin microcontrollers. Because of the nature of the game, these often also include a handful of abusing-a-component-to-do-something-it’s-not-meant-to-do hacks. Heck, we even had a challenge for just exactly those kind of hacks.

Then there are fine-art-hacks, where the aesthetic outcome is as important as the technical, or games-hacks where fun is the end result.

What other broad categories of hacks are we missing? And which are your favorite?

Re-Learning How To Run

April 5, 2026 by Elliot Williams 48 Comments

As I write this, four astronauts are on their way around the moon for the first time in 50 years. A lot us have asked ourselves just exactly why you’d send people out that far when the environment is so hostile and we have increasingly competent robots that could do the jobs in their place. If anything, that’s even more true now than it was back in the day of the Apollo program, when the remote operations capability was a lot more constrained. But having people, potentially in the near future, on the lunar surface remains qualitatively different.

I was recently re-watching some of the footage from Apollo 16 when the astronauts were driving around in the Lunar Roving Vehicle, and the discussions that they’re having about the lunar geology that they can see for the first time with their own eyes is very convincing. Having people in situ tightens the loop of “hey, that’s interesting”, “let’s take a closer look”, and “I wonder what that means” in a way that minutes or hours of transmission time, and sterile observation of photos on a computer monitor just break. In comparison, our Mars rovers move excruciatingly slowly, the data comes back through a very thin pipe, and it takes months or years to analyze.

Of course, there is danger to human life; it’s a lot more expensive to get people safely to, and importantly back from, the moon than it would be with a disposable robot. Comparison with the Mars rovers is also unfair because travel to Mars is another scale entirely. Even if it does make sense to send humans for exploration on the moon, it may not make sense to do the same on the red planet, in the near future or ever. Given all that, I’m stoked that we can see through the robots eyes, but if all else were equal, I’m sure that we’d learn more from human explorers.

While in a lot of ways the Artemis I and now the Artemis II missions are underwhelming in comparison to the many “firsts” of Apollo, I absolutely appreciate them for what they are: a shakedown trial of a set of technologies and practices that we used to grasp, but which have atrophied over the last five decades. If a new generation of scientists is to put feet onto regolith, we need to learn to walk before they can run, or rover. In that spirit, I’ll be crossing my fingers for the future of manned spaceflight over the next week and a half.

For Art’s Sake

March 28, 2026 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

Hackers can be a strange folk. Our idea of beauty, for instance, can be rather odd. This week, Hackaday saw a few projects that were not just functional – the aesthetics were the goal. I don’t think we’ll be taking over the fine art world any time soon, but I’m absolutely convinced that the same muse that guides the hand that holds the paintbrush sometimes also guides the hand holding the soldering iron.

Take “circuit sculpture”, for instance. Heck, we even give it an art-inspired name that classifies it correctly. This week’s project that got me thinking about the aesthetics of hand-bent wire circuits was this marvelous clock build, but the works of Mohit Bhoite or Kelly Heaton are also absolute must-sees in this category.

Outside of the Hackaday orbit, one of my all-time favorite artists in this genre was Peter Vogel, who made complex audience-reactive sound sculptures that looked as good as they sound.

Is a wireframe animated moving jellyfish art? It was certainly intended to be beautiful, and I personally find it so. Watch some of the video clips attached to the project to get a better sense of it.

In the sculpture world, there is a sub-genre of kinetic art pieces where the work itself is secondary to the beauty of the motions that the pieces pull off. Think ballet, but mechanical. Perhaps my absolute favorite of these artists is Arthur Ganson. If you haven’t seen his work before, check out “Thinking Chair” for the beauty of movement, but don’t miss “Machine with Concrete” if you’re feeling more conceptual.

If you’re willing to buy an insane geartrain as art, what about these 3D printed wire strippers? Is this “art”? It’s clear that they were designed with real intent and attention to the aesthetics of the final form, and am I wrong for finding the way they move literally beautiful?

What’s your favorite offbeat hacker artform?

The Unreasonable Power Density Of Lithium-Ion

March 21, 2026 by Elliot Williams 68 Comments

We’re all used to it by now, but I’d just like to reflect on how insanely power-packed lithium ion batteries are, and everything that’s afforded us. I’m trying to think of a gadget, a hobby, or nearly anything in my house that’s not touched by the battery chemistry.

I’m looking at my portable wireless keyboard in front of me, with a LiPo pack inside. Oddly enough, I’m charging it with a LiPo-based power bank, simply because the cable to the nearest USB-C adapter is too short. A gaming console, cell phone, and a DSLR camera are all within arms reach and powered with lithium.

It’s not just consumer stuff either. I fly FPV quads and airplanes for fun when I can, and of course those are made entirely possible by the combination of smaller brushless DC motors and their drivers, and the high-power-density LiPo packs that power them. For field recharging, I have a huge self-made LiIon pack that can keep them all in the air all day. These days, LiPo and LiIon tech is the heart of hacker projects big and small. Heck, we even powered this year’s Hackaday Supercon badge with a LiPo that allowed it to run all weekend on a charge for many folks, where in the past swapping out AAs during the event was commonplace.

The application that still blows my mind is that we recently got a solar installation on our roof, which means a huge LiFePO battery in the basement. And while it’s one thing to power noisy little quads on the battery tech, it somehow seems another to power our entire house, for multiple hours per day, from a battery. Granted it’s not a couple of AAA cells in a little black plastic box, but it’s simply amazing to run a washing machine, the fridge, the stove, and even the heating off of what amounts to a battery pack.

Of course, I’m aware of the costs of producing the cells, both in terms of money and the environmental damage. It’s not a free lunch, and I’m looking forward to both cleaner and cheaper energy storage chemistries in the future. But for now, I’m still in awe of the many options that lithium-based battery chemistry has brought us. May your pillows remain non-spicy!

What Is A Computer?

March 14, 2026 by Elliot Williams 36 Comments

On the podcast, [Tom] and I were talking about the new generation of smartphones which are, at least in terms of RAM and CPU speed, on par with a decent laptop computer. If so, why not just add on a screen, keyboard, and mouse and use it as your daily driver? That was the question posed by [ETA Prime] in a video essay and attempt to do so.

Our consensus was that it’s the Android operating system holding it back. Some of the applications you might want to run just aren’t there, and on the open side of the world, even more are missing. Is the platform usable if you can’t get the software you need to get your work done?

But that’s just the computer-as-a-tool side of the equation. The other thing a computer is, at least to many of our kind of folk, is a playground. It’s a machine for experimenting with, and for having fun just messing around. Android has become way too polished to have fun, and recent changes on the Google side of things actively prevent you from installing arbitrary software. The hardware is similarly too slimmed-down to allow for experimentation.

Looking back, these have been the same stumbling blocks for the last decade. In 2018, I was wondering aloud why we as a community don’t hack on cell phones, and the answer then was the same as it is now – the software is not friendly to our kind. You can write phone apps, and I have tried to do so, but it’s just not fun.

The polar opposites of the smartphone-as-computer are no strangers in our community. I’m thinking of the Linux single-board computers, or even something like a Steam Deck, all of which are significantly less powerful spec-wise than a flagship cell phone, but which are in many ways much more suitable for hacking. Why? Because they make it easy to do the things that we like to do. They’re designed to be fun computers, and so we use them.

So for me, a smartphone isn’t a computer, but oddly enough it’s not because of the hardware. It’s because what I want out of a computer is more than Turing completeness. What I want is the fun and the freedom of computering.

Choice, Control, And Interruption

March 7, 2026 by Elliot Williams 47 Comments

We were talking about [Maya Posch]’s rant on smartphones, “The Curse of the Everything Device”. Maya’s main point is that because the smartphone, or computer, can do everything, it’s hard for a person to focus down and do one thing without getting distracted, checking their whatever feed, or getting an important push notification about the Oscars. She was suggesting tying your hands to the mast by using a device that can only accommodate the one function, like a dedicated writing tool or word processor.

[Kristina Panos] compared the all-singing, all-dancing black rectangle to an everything-device of old: the all-in-one stereo receiver with built-in tape player, record player, and not just FM, but also AM radio receiver. The point being, the hi-fi device also does a whole lot of things but isn’t similarly cursed. The tape player never interrupts your listening to the AM radio station. When the record is over, it doesn’t swap over to FM. Your agency is required.

Similarly, it’s probably not intrinsically problematic that the smartphone has a camera, a web browser, text messages, and heck even a telephone built in. It’s how they interact with each other and the user, each vying for user attention, and interrupting with popups and alarms. It’s maybe a simple matter of software! (Says the hardware guy.)

Where would a distraction-free, but fully featured, phone begin? With the operating system? It would be perverse to limit you to one app at a time, or to make switching between them more cumbersome. How about turning off notifications, and relying on changing context only when you think about it? Maybe that’s a middle ground. How do you cope with the endless distractions offered to you by your smartphone? By your main computer?