Hackaday Hacked!

Well, that was “fun”. Last week, we wrote a newsletter post about the state of Hackaday’s comments. We get good ones and bad ones, and almost all the time, we leave you all up to your own devices. …

If You Can’t Say Anything Nice

You know what your mom would say, right? This week, we got an above average number of useless negative comments. A project was described as looking like a “turd” – for the record I love the hacker’…

Where Is The End Of DIY?

Al and I were talking on the podcast about Dan Maloney’s recent piece on how lead and silver are refined and about the possibility of anyone fully understanding a modern cellphone. This lead to Al …

What’s The Deal With AI Art?

A couple weeks ago, we had a kerfuffle here on Hackaday: A writer put out a piece with AI-generated headline art. It was, honestly, pretty good, but it was also subject to all of the usual horrors …

Against Elitism

A while back we got an anonymous complaint that Hackaday was “elitist”, and that got me thinking. We do write up the hacks that we find the coolest, and that could lead to a preponderance of gonzo …

Always Something New Under The Sun

Some of the entries we got into the Tiny Games Contest have been really mind-blowing. Just as you think you’ve seen it all, for instance, alnwlsn comes along and mills the DIP-package ATtiny84 and …

Fun And Failure

My sister is a beekeeper, or maybe a meta-beekeper. She ends up making more money by breeding and selling new queen bees to other beekeepers than she does by selling honey, but that doesn’t mean th…

Your Data In The Cloud

I try not to go off on security rants in the newsletter, but this week I’m unable to hold back. An apparent breach of a data aggregator has resulted in a monster dataset of US, UK, and Canadi…

How About Privacy and Hackability?

Many smart electric meters in the US use the 900 MHz band to broadcast their usage out to meter readers as they walk the neighborhood. [Jeff Sandberg] used an RTL-SDR dongle and some software to in…

Hacker Olympics

The opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics is going on today. It’s an over-the-top presentation meant to draw people into sport. And for the next few weeks, we’ll be seeing people from all across …

It’s Not Unsual To Love Hacking

Most of what we do here at Hackaday is look out for cool projects and then write them up so that you all know about them. Nothing is better than being really stoked about a clever hack and then bei…

Halfway Between Inspiration And Engineering

We see a lot of hacks where the path to success is pretty obvious, if maybe strewn with all sorts of complications, land-mines, and time-sinks. Then we get other hacks that are just totally out-of-…

Danger Is My Middle Name

Last week, [Al Williams] wrote up a his experience with a book that provided almost too much detailed information on how to build a DIY x-ray machine for his (then) young soul to bear. He almost ha…

Thanks For The Great Comments!

Every once in a while, there’s a Hackaday article where the comments are hands-down the best part of a post. This happened this week with Al Williams’ Ask Hackaday: How Do You Make Front Panels?. I…

Giant Brains, Or Machines That Think

Last week, I stumbled on a marvelous book: “Giant Brains; or, Machines That Think” by Edmund Callis Berkeley. What’s really fun about it is the way it sounds like it could be written just this year…

Happy Birthday, Tetris!

Porting DOOM to everything that’s even vaguely Turing complete is a sport for the advanced hacker. But if you are just getting started, or want to focus more on the physical build of your project, …

Sometimes It’s Not The Solution

Watching a video about a scratch-built ultra-precise switch for metrology last week reminded me that it’s not always the projects that are the most elegant solutions that I enjoy reading about the …

About Right

I really enjoyed reading Anne Ogborn’s piece on making simple DIY measurement devices for physical quantities like force, power, and torque. It is full of food for thought, if you’re building somet…

Institutional Memory, On Paper

Our own Dan Maloney has been on a Voyager kick for the past couple of years. Voyager, the space probe. As a long-term project, he has been trying to figure out the computer systems on board. He got…

Tool-Building Mammals

It’s often said of us humans that we’re the only “tool-using mammals”. While not exclusive to the hacker community, a bunch of us are also “tool-building mammals” when we have the need or get the f…