Hackaday Links: December 15, 2024

It looks like we won’t have Cruise to kick around in this space anymore with the news that General Motors is pulling the plug on its woe-beset robotaxi project. Cruise, which GM acquired in 2…

Hackaday Links: December 8, 2024

For some reason, we never tire of stories highlighting critical infrastructure that’s running outdated software, and all the better if it’s running on outdated hardware. So when we lear…

Hackaday Links: November 24, 2024

We received belated word this week of the passage of Ward Christensen, who died unexpectedly back in October at the age of 78. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, that’s understandable, be…

Hackaday Links: November 17, 2024

A couple of weeks back, we covered an interesting method for prototyping PCBs using a modified CNC mill to 3D print solder onto a blank FR4 substrate. The video showing this process generated a lot…

Hackaday Links: November 11, 2024

Fair warning, while the first item this week has no obvious connection to hacking, when 43 Rhesus monkeys escape from a lab, it’s just something that needs to be discussed. The tiny primates …

Hackaday Links: November 3, 2024

“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?” Perhaps not anymore, if this Ig Nobel-worthy analysis of the infinite monkey theorem is to be believed. For the uninitiated, the …

Hackaday Links: October 27, 2024

Problem solved? If the problem is supplying enough lithium to build batteries for all the electric vehicles that will be needed by 2030, then a new lithium deposit in Arkansas might be a resounding…

Hackaday Links: October 20, 2024

When all else fails, there’s radio. Hurricane Helene’s path of destruction through Appalachia stripped away every shred of modern infrastructure in some areas, leaving millions of resid…

Hackaday Links: October 13, 2024

So far, food for astronauts hasn’t exactly been haute cuisine. Freeze-dried cereal cubes, squeezable tubes filled with what amounts to baby food, and meals reconstituted with water from a fue…

Hackaday Links: October 6, 2024

Remember that time a giant cylindrical aquarium in a Berlin hotel bar catastrophically failed and left thousands of fish homeless? We sure do, and further recall that at the time, we were very curi…

Hackaday Links: September 29, 2024

There was movement in the “AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act” last week, with the bill advancing out of the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee and heading to a full f…

Hackaday Links: September 22, 2024

Thanks a lot, Elon. Or maybe not, depending on how this report that China used Starlink signals to detect low-observable targets pans out. There aren’t a lot of details, and we couldn’t…

Hackaday Links: September 15, 2024

A quick look around at any coffee shop, city sidewalk, or sadly, even at a traffic light will tell you that people are on their phones a lot. But exactly how much is that? For Americans in 2023, it…

Hackaday Links: September 8, 2024

OK, sit down, everyone — we don’t want you falling over and hurting yourself when you learn the news that actually yes, your phone has been listening to your conversations all along. Sh…

Hackaday Links: September 1, 2024

Why is it always a helium leak? It seems whenever there’s a scrubbed launch or a narrowly averted disaster, space exploration just can’t get past the problems of helium plumbing. We&#82…

Hackaday Links: August 25, 2024

The Sun has been remarkably active lately, so much so that it might have set a new sunspot record. According to the sun watchers at the Space Weather Prediction Center, on August 8, the Solar Dynam…

Hackaday Links: August 18, 2024

They’re back! The San Francisco autonomous vehicle hijinks, that is, as Waymo’s fleet of driverless cars recently took up the fun new hobby of honking their horns in the wee hours of th…

Hackaday Links: August 11, 2024

“Please say it wasn’t a regex, please say it wasn’t a regex; aww, crap, it was a regex!” That seems to be the conclusion now that Crowdstrike has released a full root-cause …

Hackaday Links: August 4, 2024

Good news, bad news for Sun watchers this week, as our star launched a solar flare even bigger than the one back in May that gave us an amazing display of aurora that dipped down into pretty low la…

Hackaday Links: July 28, 2024

What is this dystopia coming to when one of the world’s largest tech companies can’t find a way to sufficiently monetize a nearly endless stream of personal data coming from its army of…