Ham Radio In The Internet Age

Even if you are relatively young, you can probably think back on what TV was like when you were a kid and then realize that TV today is completely different. Most people watch on-demand. Saturday m…

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’…

Will You Need Ad Block For Your Car?

The modern web has become difficult to navigate without ad blocking software. Ford now has a patent that would bring the ads we hate to your vehicle’s infotainment system. [via PCMag] Ford ha…

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 …

Design And The Golden Rule

You often learn the golden rule or some variation of it as early as kindergarten. There are several ways to phrase it, but you most often hear: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto …

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 …

Assessing The Energy Efficiency Of Programming Languages

Programming languages are generally defined as a more human-friendly way to program computers than using raw machine code. Within the realm of these languages there is a wide range of how close the…

Is That Antenna Allowed? The Real Deal On The FCCs OTARD Rule

The Hackaday comments section is generally a lively place. At its best, it’s an endless wellspring of the combined engineering wisdom of millions of readers which serves to advance the state …

Ask Hackaday: How Can We Leverage Tech For Education?

If you’re like us, you’ve studied the mathematician [Euler], but all you really remember is that you pronounce his name like “oiler” and not much else. [Welch Labs], on the …

Better Living Through Hackery

Hackaday’s own [Arya Voronova] has been on a multi-year kick to make technology more personal by making it herself, and has just now started writing about it. Her main point rings especially true i…

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 …

Ask Hackaday: Is Shortwave On Life Support?

Between World War II and Y2K, shortwave listening was quite an education. With a simple receiver, you could listen to the world. Some of it, of course, was entertainment, and much of it was propaga…

Do Your Research

We were talking about a sweet hack this week, wherein [Alex] busts the encryption for his IP web cam firmware so that he can modify it later. He got a number of lucky breaks, including getting root…

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…

Hack All The Things, Get All The Schematics

When I was growing up, about 4 or 5 years old, I had an unorthodox favourite type of reading material: service manuals for my dad’s audio equipment. This got to the point that I kept asking m…

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…

The Book That Could Have Killed Me

It is funny how sometimes things you think are bad turn out to be good in retrospect. Like many of us, when I was a kid, I was fascinated by science of all kinds. As I got older, I focused a bit mo…

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…

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 …