This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up across the universe to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so. In Hackaday news, OMG Supercon is almost here! And we just revealed the badge! In other news, we’ve still […]
Dial-up modems had a distinctive sound when connecting, with the glittering, screeching song becoming a familiar melody to those jumping online in the early days of the Internet. Modern digital connections don’t really have an analog to this, by virtue of being entirely digital. And yet, [Nick Bild] decided to make WiFi audible in a […]
This week, a US federal court has ruled that NSO Group is no longer allowed to use Pegasus spyware against users of WhatsApp. And for their trouble, NSO was also fined $4 million. It’s unclear how much this ruling will actually change NSO’s behavior, as it intentionally stopped short of applying to foreign governments. There […]
We would have enjoyed [Harishankar’s] tear down of a robot vacuum cleaner, even if it didn’t have a savage twist at the end. Turns out, the company deliberately bricked his smart vacuum. Like many of us, [Harishankar] is suspicious of devices beaming data back to their makers. He noted a new vacuum cleaner was pinging […]
Back in 2016, we took you to a collection of slightly dilapidated prefabricated huts in the English Home Counties, and showed you a computer. The place was the National Museum of Computing, next to the famous Bletchley Park codebreaking museum, and the machine was their reconstruction of Colossus, the world’s first fully electronic digital computer. […]
If there’s any one benefit to having a cat as a pet instead of a dog, it’s that they’re a bit more independent and able to care for themselves for many days without human intervention. The only thing that’s really needed is a way to make sure they get food and water at regular intervals, […]
Turns out that training on Twitch quotes doesn’t make an LLM a math genius. (Credit: Codeically, YouTube) The reason why large language models are called ‘large’ is not because of how smart they are, but as a factor of their sheer size in bytes. At billions of parameters at four bytes each, they pose a […]
There was a time, long ago, when passenger vehicles used to be much simpler than they are today. There were many downsides of this era, safety chief among them, but there were some perks as well. They were in general cheaper to own and maintain, and plenty could be worked on with simple tools. There’s […]
[kcraske] had a simple plan for their clock build. They wanted a digital clock that was inspired by the appearance of an analog one, and they only wanted to use basic logic, with no microprocessors involved. Ultimately, they achieved just that. Where today you might build a clock based around a microcontroller and a real-time […]
One of the hardest parts of a project — assuming it makes it that far — is finishing it up in an aesthetically pleasing manner. As they say, the devil is in the details, wearing Prada. Apparently the devil also has an excellent manicure, because [Tamas Feher] has come up with a way to introduce […]