Ask Hackaday: Learn Assembly First, Last, Or Never?

A few days ago, I ran into an online post where someone pointed out the book “Learn to Program with Assembly” and asked if anyone had ever learned assembly language as a first programmi…

ITER Dreams And The Practical Reality Of Making Nuclear Fusion Work On Earth

Doing something for the first time is tough. Yet to replicate the nuclear fusion process that powers the very stars, and do it right here on Earth in a controlled and sustained fashion is decidedly…

Podcast Feedback: Be Careful What You Ask For

I had one of those experiences yesterday that seem so common these days: the arrival of a mystery Amazon package. You know the kind — you get a shipping notice from UPS with the faux-excited …

Open Source And Giving Back

3D printing YouTuber [Thomas Sanladerer] made a fairly contentious claim in a video about the state of open source hardware and software: namely that it’s not viable “anymore”. You can watch his vi…

Ask Hackaday: The Turing Test Is Dead: Long Live The Turing Test!

Alan Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence that no longer works. The idea was to have people communicate over a terminal, with another real person and with a computer. If the computer is …

Iran’s Military Quantum Claim: It’s Only 99.4% Ridiculous

When Iran recently announced a quantum processing algorithm (Google translation) that would help its military to detect water surface disturbances, the instant response from Western media was one o…

What Do You Want In A Programming Assistant?

The Propellerheads released a song in 1998 entitled “History Repeating.” If you don’t know it, the lyrics include: “They say the next big thing is here. That the revolution&…

They Used To Be A Big Shot, Now Eagle Is No More

There once was a time when to make a PCB in our community was to use CadSoft EAGLE, a PCB design package which neatly filled the entry level of that category with a free version for non-commercial …

Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here?

Last week I penned a cheesy fake relationship breakup letter to Ubuntu, my Linux distribution of choice for the last 15 years or so. It had well and truly delivered on its promise of a painless Lin…

ADV aka Amandha Dawn Vollmer - One of the BEST Covid Rants Ever!

Not sure if you seen this one but its a great rant...

Why Did The Home Assistant Future Not Quite Work The Way It Was Supposed To?

The future, as seen in the popular culture of half a century or more ago, was usually depicted as quite rosy. Technology would have rendered every possible convenience at our fingertips, and we&#82…

Software Driving Hardware

We were talking about [Christopher Barnatt]’s very insightful analysis of what the future holds for the Raspberry Pi single board computers on the Podcast. On the one hand, they’re becoming such co…

Farewell American Computer Magazines

I grew up in a small town with a small library. The next town over had what I thought at the time was a big library, but it was actually more like my town had a tiny library, and the next one over …

Ask Hackaday: What’s Your “Tactical Tool” Threshold?

With few exceptions, every field has a pretty modest set of tools that would be considered the minimum for getting most jobs done. A carpenter can make do with tools that would fit in a smallish ba…

All Your Robots Are Belong To Us: You Just Rent Them

Monthly bills. Everyone has them. Except if you go far enough back, not everyone had them. After all, you might live in a home your family has owned for generations. You might be able to produce al…

Hack Simple

Here at Hackaday, we definitely love to celebrate the hard hacks: the insane feats of reverse engineering, the physics-defying flights of fancy, or the abuse of cutting edge technology. But today I…

Dear Ubuntu…

Dear Ubuntu, I hope this letter finds you well. I want to start by saying that our time together has been one of creativity and entertainment, a time in which you gave me the tools to develop a new…

How Far Can An EULA Go?

We read this news with mixed glee and horror: a company called Telly is giving TVs away, for the low price of having to live with an always-on advertisement bar and some pretty stringent terms and …

A Literate Assembly Language

A recent edition of [Babbage’s] The Chip Letter discusses the obscurity of assembly language. He points out, and I think correctly, that assembly language is more often read than written, yet…

The New Hotness

If there’s one good thing to be said about the chip shortage of 2020-2023 (and counting!) it’s that a number of us were forced out of our ruts, and pushed to explore parts that we never would have …