Your Guide To Using Amazon’s Sidewalk Network For The Internet Of Things

As the Internet of Things became a mainstream reality, it raised an interesting point about connectivity. We quickly learned it wasn’t ideal to have every light bulb, toaster, and kettle buzz…

The Modern WWW, Or: Where Do We Want To Go From Here?

From the early days of ARPANET until the dawn of the World Wide Web (WWW), the internet was primarily the domain of researchers, teachers and students, with hobbyists running their own BBS servers …

Cat Skull For Internet Connection Divination

[Emily Velasco] has an internet provider that provides sub-par connectivity. Instead of repeatedly refreshing a browser tab to test if the network is up, [Emily] decided to create an internet statu…

Archiving The Entirety Of DPReview Before It’s Gone

Despite the popular adage about everything on the internet being there forever, every day pages of information and sometimes entire websites are lost to the sands of time. With the imminent shutdow…

The ARPANET Of Things And CMU’s History Of Networked Soda Machines

When the computer science department of Carnegie Mellon University expanded in the 1970s, this created a massive issue for certain individuals who now found that they had to walk quite a distance t…

End Of An Automation Era As Twitter Closes Its Doors To Free API Access

Over the last few months since Elon Musk bought Twitter there has been a lot of comment and reaction, but not much with relevance to Hackaday readers. Today though that has changed, with an announc…

Punycodes Explained

When you’re restricted to ASCII, how can you represent more complex things like emojis or non-Latin characters? One answer is Punycode, which is a way to represent Unicode characters in ASCII…

The GitHub Silverware Drawer Dilemma, Or: Finding Active Repository Forks

An fortunate reality of GitHub and similar sites is that projects that are abandoned by the maintainer are often continued by someone else who forked the project. Unfortunately, the ease of forking…

Virtual Yule Log Brings Old Tradition To The Web

Yule Log broadcasts are a bit of an American tradition, though similar content has also been broadcast around the world. They consist of a video of a log burning in a fireplace, ideally merrily so,…

Local IOT Cat Treat Dispenser

[MostElectronics], like many of us, loves cats, and so wanted to make an internet connected treat dispenser for their most beloved. The result is an ingenious 3D printed mechanism connected to a Ra…

Moved Off Twitter? Make Your ESP32 Toot

Since Twitter was officially taken over by Elon Musk a few days ago, there’s been significant staff cuts, a stream of questionable decisions, and uncertainty about the social media platform&#…

Say No To Obsolescence, Wire Up Your House With Fiber

These days, if you wire your house with anything less than gigabit, you might end up throttling your Internet connection. If you wired things up using two pairs per device back in 100BASE-T days, h…

Slap This Big Red Button For An Instant Social Media Detox

Dangerous machines, like ones that can quickly reduce you to a fine red mist or a smoking cinder, tend to have a Big Red Button™ to immediately stop whatever the threat is. Well, if a more dangerou…

Bufferbloat, The Internet, And How To Fix It

There’s a dreaded disease that’s plagued Internet Service Providers for years. OK, there’s probably several diseases, but today we’re talking about bufferbloat. What it is, …

A Simple Streaming Radio Receiver

For those interested in a career in broadcast radio there aren’t many routes into the business. Student radio, pirate radio, and hospital radio usually feature somewhere near the start of any…

SSH Is Magic, But Tunnels Are Even Better

Once upon a time, I was doing on-site support for a hardware install at a hotel a few years ago. The remote tech’s remote desktop software didn’t want to play with my Linux laptop, so h…

Know Which Way The Wind Blows, Whether Weather Boosts Your Mood

As a quantified-self experiment, [Ayan] has tracked several daily habits and moods for a couple of years and discovered some insights. Too much coffee is followed by anxiety while listening to musi…

Classic Multimeter Tells You If Your WiFi’s Working

Debugging network issues isn’t easy; many a sysadmin has spent hours trying to figure out which of the many links between client and server is misbehaving. Having a few clear pointers helps: …

Gaming Twitter’s Trending Algorithm To Make A Point

If you have ever taken to Twitter to gauge the zeitgeist, you’ll have noticed that among the trending hashtags related to major events of the day there are sometimes outliers of minority inte…

Casually Chirping Into The World Of LoRaWAN

While wireless communications are unquestionably useful in projects, common wireless protocols such as WiFi and Bluetooth peter out after only a number of meters, which is annoying when your projec…